The Boston Red Sox just rode a 15-game winning streak that tied the franchise record set back in 1946, and the front office is reportedly still willing to trade Jarren Duran before Monday’s deadline.
As a Yankees fan, watching a good team try to eat one of its own like this might be the funniest thing I see all week.
The part that gets lost is timing. This willingness to move Duran didn’t start with Thursday’s outburst at Willson Contreras. A league executive questioning whether he’s even worth the headache anymore reads like a front office that already made up its mind on the numbers, and the outburst just gave everybody a reason to say it out loud.
Boston’s best month in eighty years, and they’re still ready to move on from him.
The Red Sox were 37-48 before the run started, functionally dead in the AL East race, then ripped off fifteen straight and climbed back into wild-card position. That’s a team playing better baseball than anyone projected back in May.
Two days ago, Duran made news for yelling toward third-base coach Chad Epperson and Contreras over a fly ball that Epperson correctly held Contreras on, then boiling over once he got back inside the dugout, helmet into a pipe, water sprayed down the bench. That part’s already been covered here. What’s new is what came out after it.
Per a CBS Sports trade deadline notebook, the front office is willing to deal Duran before the August 3 deadline, streak and all. He’s hitting .195, the worst qualified batting average in the sport, with a .589 OPS that isn’t much better, and a rival executive summed up the calculus about as bluntly as it gets: “Is he really worth the headache anymore?”
That’s not a fan venting on a message board. That’s a rival executive willing to say it to a national reporter, tying the strikeouts and the tantrum together in one sentence.
The video everyone’s replaying is Jomboy’s breakdown of the play itself:
https://twitter.com/JomboyMedia/status/2083066155724411319
Watch it and the actual baseball barely matters. Tyler Soderstrom’s arm makes holding Contreras at third the obvious call, and Duran turned a boring, correct decision into a full scene.
I’ve sat through plenty of bad Yankees stretches, but I don’t remember a front office ever this willing to sell right after a run like that. The math behind Boston’s deadline calculus clearly shifted once the wins piled up, just not enough to save the guy hitting .195. My sister’s already sending screenshots from the family group chat.
It’s an especially strange turn given Duran was the same guy who beat the Yankees with a walk-off a few weeks back. That version of him looked like the face of the offense. This version can’t find his timing and picked a fight with the best hitter on the roster over a read he got right.
None of that makes trading him a clean call, to be fair. Duran still runs and covers ground in the outfield that this roster would miss in October, and front offices have talked themselves into worse regrets than moving a former All-Star in the middle of a playoff race.
But if Boston actually pulls the trigger this soon after the best streak this franchise has produced since Truman was in office, the real story stops being about baseball. It becomes about a clubhouse that can’t stand itself even while it’s winning, and I plan to enjoy every second of it.
