After spending the first half of the season looking for a leadoff hitter, the Boston Red Sox may have finally settled on someone. It’s the guy who has hit leadoff more than anyone else on the roster.

Kiké Hernández is getting a second chance, and he’s making the most of it.

All season long, Alex Cora has been saying that he believed Hernández was a perfect fit in the leadoff spot for Boston. Yet the numbers didn’t back up the manager’s assertion. Hernández was only hitting .230 with a .671 OPS at the end of April. While the Red Sox offense has been mashing all season, they’ve been doing it largely without production from the top of the order.

Cora was forced to try others in the spot. None of them fit the bill. Then, on the final Sunday of the Yankees series in late June, the manager put Hernández back at the top spot. He led off the game with a home run off Yankees ace Gerrit Cole. He led off with a homer again the next night. And again three days later.

That made Hernández the first player in Red Sox history to hit three leadoff homers in a five-game span. That sparked the team during its eight-game winning streak, and fired up Hernández, who is hitting .367 since returning to the leadoff spot.

“If he gets on a hot streak, he rocks and rolls for a period,” Red Sox hitting coach Tim Hyers said last week. “I think he’s found comfort in his swing, and you also see a couple of walks in there. So he’s getting his pitch to swing at and not expanding as much. He’s been doing a great job. Probably, when he went down in the order, it probably relaxed him a little bit and then he’s taken off after that.”

Hernández has also been the centerpiece of an outfield that has shocked the world with its defense. The narrative coming into the season was that Sox fans would sorely miss Mookie Betts, Jackie Bradley Jr. and Andrew Benintendi tracking down fly balls. Fans were prepared for the worst.

Instead, this outfield — Hernández, Alex Verdugo and Hunter Renfroe — has been one of the best in baseball. Maybe the best. Red Sox outfielders have 26 assists this season, by far the most in the majors. They are second in the American League in Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating (two metrics used to measure outfield fielding).

“They’re playing elite defense,” Cora said of his outfield.

That defense was on display over the weekend in Oakland. In consecutive games Red Sox outfielders threw out the potential winning run at the plate in extra innings. Hernández did it Friday night after driving in the go-ahead run in the top half of the 10th.

As surprising as the defense has been, the fact that Hernández has settled in as the leadoff hitter after his early-season struggles might be even more shocking. The conventional wisdom was that the Red Sox would have to find a leadoff hitter at the trade deadline. Instead, he was right there all along.

With a hot bat at the top of the lineup the Sox offense could be even more dangerous in the second half of the season. Even with the recent surge, the Sox have the third-worst OPS from the leadoff spot in the American League. Yet they have scored the second-most runs.

Getting even more production from this lineup would be surprising. Then again, it has been one of the most surprising seasons in recent Red Sox history. And Hernández is surprising all of us by reclaiming his spot at the top of it all.

Tom Caron is a studio host for Red Sox broadcasts on NESN.

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