Jarren Duran is hitting .197 for a team fighting for a wild-card spot, and he spent Thursday night yelling at Willson Contreras, the best hitter on the roster, for making the correct baseball decision.
Top of the sixth in West Sacramento, game tied 3-3, one out, runners on second and third. Duran hit a shallow fly to left. Contreras held at third, the obvious call against an arm like that.
Duran jogged back toward the dugout with one hand thrown up, still yelling once he got inside it. Will Flemming wasn’t buying it on the WEEI broadcast: “That is ridiculous. That is such a tired act, Lenny.” His partner Lenny DiNardo agreed — Contreras would’ve been out by ten feet.
Nobody had to correct Contreras for missing a read here. He made the correct read at third, and the guy losing his mind about it is currently sitting on the worst qualified batting average in Red Sox history: .197 across 100 games, 124 strikeouts, an OPS+ of 68 that wouldn’t cut it for a September call-up.
Duran picked a strange day to start supervising other people’s baseball IQ.
Contreras, meanwhile, is having the best offensive season on the team by a wide margin. He’s on pace for something like 37 homers and 111 RBI, sitting in the 99th percentile in batting run value across all of baseball. Two innings after getting screamed at for playing it safe, he hit the go-ahead homer, back-to-back with Wilyer Abreu, to win the game outright.
This isn’t even the first dugout scene Contreras has been part of this year. Go back to the last time Contreras was in the middle of a dugout controversy and he was the one getting wronged, not doing the yelling. Duran’s outburst at Willson Contreras flipped that script. Contreras was the one getting shown up on Thursday, for being correct, and the video makes it worse:
https://twitter.com/tylermilliken_/status/2083028678389162443
Watch it once and you’ll see why the broadcast turned on him before the inning was over.
I watch more Red Sox baseball than any self-respecting Yankees fan should, and even I felt for Contreras on this one. Nobody on that roster has done more to keep Boston afloat this year, and his reward was getting shown up by the same guy who authored Duran’s walk-off a month ago and looked like a folk hero doing it.
That guy’s nowhere to be found lately.
Duran downplayed it after the game, said nothing happened. Interim manager Chad Tracy backed him up, said Duran was just mad at himself in the moment. Maybe that’s technically true, and Contreras just happened to be standing in the blast radius. It doesn’t change how it read on a national broadcast, and with the trade deadline math getting less patient with a .197 bat by the day, picking public fights over correct decisions is not the vibe a guy in Duran’s spot wants to be putting out.
Contreras held at third because he wasn’t getting thrown out by ten feet. Duran’s hitting .197.
One of those two men has earned the right to be upset about something today, and it isn’t the one who was yelling.
