The Jarren Duran of 2022 might have compounded his mistakes on Tuesday.
The 26-year-old began the game with two strikeouts at the plate, chasing a low changeup in the first as he and Rafael Devers made up the meat of a home run sandwich, bookended by Justin Turner before Devers and Triston Casas after Duran in a big first inning for the Red Sox.
He then worked a nine-pitch at-bat, but Luis Castillo fooled him again, getting him swinging on a back-foot slider in the third as it appeared the Boston bats had gone silent.
The next inning, he sold out for a diving catch in an effort to end the top of the fourth and get Nick Pivetta out of a tight spot. Duran failed to come up with the grab as the ball dribbled past him, allowing Teoscar Hernández to leg a two-out triple that scored two runs. In the next at-bat, Taylor Trammell immediately raked the second pitch, hooking a 109.1 mph, 376-foot, two-run homer around Pesky's Pole to tie the game at four apiece.
"It was a tough play, but you know, I gotta make that play for Nicky [Pivetta]," Duran said. "I mean, [Kyle Hudson] has been talking about like, we need to make plays for our pitchers in tough, crucial moments, and that was a play I could have picked him up on. But I had [Alex Verdugo] and everybody told me that, 'Hey, man, like that's a tough play. Like I'd rather you go after that 100 percent every time. Like, don't be scared. You got to play aggressive.' So it was nice knowing they had my back."
Alex Cora said, "He’s trying to make a baseball play, right? Trying to get that ball. It is what it is. I’d rather have that than lack of effort."
The Duran of last year might have crumbled. He is, after all, the same speedy outfielder that misplayed and quit on what wound up being an inside-the-park grand slam in a 28-5 home loss to the Toronto Blue Jays last summer and the same player that couldn't gain any traction at the plate.
Instead, Duran responded, as he has throughout the entirety of the 2023 campaign so far, putting last season behind him.
The center fielder stepped into the box in the fifth inning an croaked the first pitch he saw, a slider hanging over the plate, for a booming 109.2 mph, 417-foot, two-run shot into the bullpen. It cracked the game open to make it 8-4 for Boston, and it would have been a home run in every park except Oracle in San Francisco.
Respect Jarren Duran pic.twitter.com/LSbp0Yd2gl
— Dillard Barnhart (@BarnHasSpoken2) May 17, 2023
"I punched out the first two at-bats, and I was like, 'Gotta flush it,'" Duran said. "I think just pick up my boys, and just think about the guys. Like, it's not all about me. So like when I missed that play, I was like, 'Alright, well, Nicky P's gonna punch the next guy, and we're gonna get out of this and we're gonna go score runs.' You know, just thinking about my teammates and just trying to do the best I can do for them."
He added a single and his seventh stolen base of the season in the seventh before catching the final out of the game as he raced back toward the warning track.
It was a bounceback in a season full of them.
"He’s in a great place," Cora said. "He’s going to strikeout, he’s going to make mistakes, but overall his game has been a plus everywhere, running the bases, hitting the baseball and playing good defense.”
After struggling in his first few stints in the majors in 2021 and 2022 – batting .221/.283/.363 last season – Duran has turned it around. He's slashing .351/.406/.585 with an OPS of .991. After a minus-0.7 WAR in both 2021 and 2022, he's sitting at 1.1 so far this season. He's matched his stolen base total from last year in less than half the games.
“He’s a game-changer,” Justin Turner said. “He’s got power. He’s got speed. He uses the whole field and plays great defense in center. It’s good to see him having success, hitting the ball all over the place and running the bases like he is.”
Duran was open about his struggles last season, calling it a "rollercoaster" last September in an interview with MassLive, saying he was "taking things too seriously and trying to make everybody happy when at the end of the day, you can only make yourself happy." In August he said he would “kind of just tear myself up internally and get pretty depressed and stuff like that. I find it hard to reach out to people because I don’t want to bother other people with my problems. I kind of just build it up inside myself, which obviously makes everything a lot worse.”
The youngster has made it a point to turn the page on 2022.
"It's a whole different year," Duran said. "You know, I don't really want to think about the negatives from last year. But now I think just going off of this year, and I'm in a positive mindset. I don't really want to take a step back. Just keep moving forward and keep staying positive.
"I know last year I struggled with trusting approach [at the plate] because I didn't have trust in myself. So knowing that I'm sticking with the approach this year, it's working and I'm having good at-bats and stuff like that, it's kind of helping me take a step forward and just keep staying positive and keep doing my thing."
Cora said, "It's great [to see him respond] just for everything that's talked about, right? He's been very open about it. You care about him not only on the field but off the field. It's good. He went to Puerto Rico in the middle of the pandemic, just to keep working on his craft. We were able to connect, and I'm very proud of him. Very proud."