Fitting Jarren Duran Into the Red Sox Outfield Puzzle

Jarren Duran enjoyed a breakout season in 2024, making the AL All-Star team, receiving down-ballot support in the MVP voting, and leading the league in several key categories while ranking fifth with 6.8 WAR. Though he remained an above-average player last year, his season didn’t go quite so well, and as the 2026 campaign dawns, his role is among the many questions the Red Sox face this spring.

At a time when the Red Sox are trying to figure out their primary infield alignment — Will newly acquired Caleb Durbin play second or third? Will Marcelo Mayer man the other spot from the start, or begin the year in the minors after an injury-shortened rookie season? — they’re also sorting through their outfield options. The situation is more or less the same as it’s been since last June, when Roman Anthony, the no. 2 prospect on our preseason Top 100 Prospects list, was called up to squeeze into an outfield capably manned by Duran, Ceddanne Rafaela, and Wilyer Abreu, with platoon assistance for the last of those from Rob Refsnyder. The trade deadline came and went without either Abreu or Duran being moved despite numerous rumors, and injuries to Abreu, Refsnyder and then Anthony (who suffered a season-ending oblique strain in early September) simplified manager Alex Cora’s juggling, though not for the betterment of the team. Boston won 89 games and claimed a Wild Card spot, but without Anthony and enough healthy starting pitchers, the Red Sox were bounced out of the first round by the Yankees.

Refsnyder departed for the Mariners in free agency, but the other four outfielders are back and healthy. The Red Sox also have an expensive platoon designated hitter, Masataka Yoshida, further crowding the picture, and last year’s Opening Day second baseman Kristian Campbell — who entered the 2025 season seventh on our Top 100 and inked an eight-year, $60 million extension just a week into his big league career — is working out in center field, as well. Having too many good players isn’t a bad problem to have, but it can become one when questions about playing time, contract statuses, and trade rumors get relentless.

Which brings us back to Duran, who’s 29 and has two more years of arbitration eligibility remaining. As noted, he’s coming off a good-not-great campaign, having slipped from .285/.342/.492 (131 wRC+) with 21 home runs and 34 stolen bases in 2024 to .256/.332/.442 (111 wRC+) with 16 homers and 24 steals in ’25. His 3.9 WAR still led the team’s position players last season, but his performance didn’t turn heads as it did the year before.

“I’m always disappointed in myself,” Duran said last week when asked about how he viewed last season in contrast to his great 2024. He may not have meant it as such, but the harsh self-assessment offered an uncomfortable reminder of his previous mental health struggles and his tendency to be overly hard on himself. “I always feel like I don’t do the best that I can do. I feel like I let the fans down sometimes, or my teammates. It’s a new year, so you just have to flush it and go out there and do my thing.”

Looking more closely at 2025, Duran was particularly inconsistent from month to month, with a red-hot July papering over some subpar stretches, including three months in which he finished with a wRC+ in the 87–91 range.

Here’s how his production looked in rolling graph form:

That sizable peak stretch ran from July 9 to August 12, but Duran didn’t approach that level thereafter. All told, he hit for just a 103 wRC+ in the first half, compared to a 124 wRC+ in the second, albeit with his midsummer power surge dissipating to the point where he had a lower slugging percentage over the final two months (.396) than the first two (.414).

Duran’s fall-off wasn’t due to injuries; he played in 157 games, down from 160 the year before, but aside from a scratch in a February Grapefruit League game due to calf soreness, I couldn’t find any report of even a minor ailment. Yet, of the players with at least 600 plate appearances in both 2024 and ’25, he lost more value than all but one:

Some of Duran’s decline was due to his offense — which I’ll dive into below — but some owed to his defense, not only in terms of lesser metrics, but also positioning. In 2024, he spent 57% of his innings in center field, but in ’25, that share dropped to 14.4%, with nearly all of the balance in left field. While he was a Gold Glove finalist in center in 2024, the Red Sox believe they have an even better man for the middle pasture in the 25-year-old Rafaela. In 2024, when Trevor Story was sidelined by a shoulder injury, the Red Sox used Rafaela at shortstop for 82 games, making room for Duran in center, but Rafaela dialed back to 24 games in the infield last year (all at second, after Campbell was demoted to Triple-A Worcester) and ended up winning a Gold Glove. Bumped to left field, Duran went from excellent metrics at two positions to a rather mixed bag:

Based on Statcast’s components under the hood, Duran’s arm improved from 2 runs above average to 4 above average, but that was more than offset by his decline in range, from 9 runs above average to 2 below. The DRS components show a decline in the value of his throwing (from 9 runs to 6), but an even bigger decline in range (from 23 runs to 9). We’re talking about two sets of partial-season samples while calling Fenway Park — with an outfield that’s anything but cookie-cutter — home, so none of this need be taken as gospel, but suffice it to say Duran wasn’t as good as he’d been before.

“Playing left is tough,” Duran said last week. “Weird angles. Especially playing at Fenway. It’s the hardest left field in the big leagues. I’ll just continue to play out there, get reps and shag during BP. That is going to help me. We all know repetition is going to help me get better.”

Turning back to Duran’s offense, a big part of his decline was his struggle against left-handed pitching:

In 2023, his first season with more than 58 major league games, Duran hit for a 122 wRC+ overall while largely being protected from lefties; he started just seven times against southpaws and took 13.5% of his plate appearances against them, managing a league-average performance in that small sample. Upgraded to full-time duty in 2024, he hit well enough against lefties to justify his spot in the lineup given the caliber of his defense, but last year, he stopped walking against lefties, struck out more, and didn’t offset that with enough power or enough defense to be particularly helpful.

As in 2024, Duran scuffled against fastballs and breaking pitches from lefties. Less obvious — as in, not something you’d pick up from the platoon splits — is that he suddenly struggled against breaking stuff from righties, as well.

I generally prefer to analyze individual pitch types — separating four-seamers from sinkers, curveballs from sliders, and so on — but these aggregations clarified some trends. Lefties fed Duran more breaking balls, against which he’s been particularly prone to whiffing, but he also came up empty much more often against fastballs from same-siders; his production against both classes fell relative to 2024. Against righties, he absolutely collapsed against breaking balls, dropping 236 points in slugging percentage and somehow even more than that in xSLG while also whiffing more often.

All of this led to Duran’s strikeout rate increasing from 21.8% to 24.3%. Looking at his track record going back to 2021, when he first debuted (he played 91 major league games between that year and the next), it’s his 2024 rate that’s out of line; his career mark is 24.5%. A deeper dig into the data supports the conclusion that last year he tried to hit for more power, whether consciously or not. He swung harder, used his fast swing more often, swung and missed more often, intercepted the ball further in front of the plate when he made contact, and had similar squared-up and blast rates as in 2024. Though he hit the ball harder — and to his pull side, in the air — when he did make contact, it ended up making him a less productive player. Here’s the bat-tracking, pull rate, and swinging-strike comparison:

And here’s the contact data:

Duran’s average and maximum exit velocities, launch angle, barrel and hard-hit rates all set career highs; for that matter, so did his pull rate, fly ball rate (25.1%), and pulled air rate. Yet the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

A big reason for that is Fenway Park itself. Thanks to the Green Monster, no ballpark rewards lefties going to the opposite field more often. Over the past five seasons, lefties going oppo in Fenway have hit .403 and slugged .641, the highest marks of any permanent ballpark (counting Sacramento’s Sutter Health Park and Tampa’s George Steinbrenner Field but not the special-event parks, such as the one for the London Series). Lefties pulling the ball in Fenway hit .332 and slugged .624, not only lower than when they went oppo, but also rates that respectively rank 28th and 30th out of 32 ballparks.

Long story short, Duran got away from what made him successful in 2024, and what worked especially well in Fenway. Now he has the dual challenges of recovering his lost production and carving out time in an outfield, and on a roster, where he’s the only principal player not signed beyond 2026. Anthony, Rafaela, and Campbell are on long-term extensions, and even Yoshida — who was limited to 55 games and an 88 wRC+ last year after undergoing offseason labrum repair in his right shoulder — is signed through 2027, at $18 million per year. Abreu, now 26 years old and poised to be arbitration-eligible for the first time, hit .247/.317/.469 (110 wRC+) in 115 games while pairing with Refsnyder in a platoon; though he missed 45 games due to oblique and calf strains, Abreu won his second consecutive Gold Glove. With Boston making noise about Abreu facing more lefties in 2026 and offering him an extension (which he rebuffed), the team appears more committed to him — the younger and less expensive player — than to Duran.

Thus, the thinking is that with Rafaela in center and Abreu in right on a more or less full-time basis, Duran and Anthony will share left field and DH duties, which seems like a waste of a good glove either way. “Well, I would be the fastest DH in the league, so that’s a start,” Duran quipped while adding, “Wherever [Cora] and the front office need me, I’m going to do my best job.” Duran could also lose time against lefties, though his most natural platoon partner in a DH capacity, lefty-masher Romy Gonzalez, won’t be ready for Opening Day due to a shoulder injury.

It all adds up to a puzzle for Cora to fit together, and an unenviable situation for Duran. We’ll see if he makes the most of it.