Jarren Duran turned an 11th-inning at-bat in Miami into the origin story of the Boston Red Sox’ entire season, and it wasn’t even his walk-off. His actual walk-off against the Yankees already happened, back in June, in Boston.
This one came on the road, in the top of the inning, with the score tied 3-3 and Duran sitting 0-for-4 with two strikeouts to his name, per the Boston Globe.
He turned around Cade Gibson’s 80.4 mph sweeper anyway and put it 412 feet into right-center at 105 mph, and a tie game at loanDepot Park was suddenly a 7-3 Red Sox win. MLB.com had him walking up to the plate with two hits in his previous twelve at-bats. Two hits. Then his second career grand slam, in the worst spot Miami could have put him.
“I feel like we’ve been in these situations so many times,” Duran said afterward, “it just kind of becomes normal to come up in a situation like that.” He also admitted the calm was mostly for show: “Just trying to get a good pitch to hit. It was stressful, to be honest.”
Stressed and still delivering is the whole Red Sox season in one sentence.
The stat that should worry the rest of the American League is sitting in one tweet.
https://x.com/ESPNInsights/status/2092450917605851558
Seventeen RBI in the ninth inning or later, most in the sport, from a guy the front office was reportedly willing to trade during the slump. Try explaining that sequence to someone who only checks the standings once a month.
Because the standings are the actual story here. On June 24, this team was 32-46, fourteen games under .500, the worst record in the American League. As of last night they’re 73-59, a season-high fourteen games over, winners of five straight and nine of their last eleven.
That’s a 28-game swing in a little over two months, and my grandmother, a woman with zero patience for the Red Sox and very specific opinions about the Yankees’ batting order, texted me about it unprompted. When she’s paying attention, everyone’s paying attention.
Boston trails the Yankees by a game and a half for the top AL wild-card spot now, which is not a sentence I expected to type in June. Mickey Gasper hit two home runs in the same game last night and it barely made the recap. That’s what this stretch has become — multi-homer nights and the dugout outburst with Willson Contreras last month all just folding into the bigger story.
None of it erases the guy who went 0-for-4 with two strikeouts before that at-bat, or the team that was fielding trade calls in July. One swing against a last-place pitching staff in extras doesn’t rewrite an entire season by itself.
But it’s the swing everyone’s going to remember. Not the walk-off. The one on the road, in the 11th, off a name most fans had never heard before last night, that turned a tie game into a legend in progress.
