Red Sox Lose Red-Hot Adam Duvall to a Broken Wrist

No hitter in the majors has gotten off to a hotter start this season than Adam Duvall, who joined the Red Sox this past winter via free agency and is currently carrying a slugging percentage above 1.000. Unfortunately, the 34-year-old center fielder won’t be available to star in Small Sample Theater for awhile because on Sunday while diving for a ball, he fractured his left wrist.

Duvall injured himself attempting to catch a bloop off the bat of the Tigers’ Spencer Torkelson in the ninth inning of Sunday’s game. Charging in from center field, he slid and appeared to make the grab, but his glove hand hit the grass awkwardly as he rolled over, and the ball squirted loose. Torkelson was credited with a single, while Duvall came up clutching his wrist, the same one that he sprained last July 23 while playing for the Braves. That time, he jammed his wrist against the wall in pursuit of a Shohei Ohtani fly ball and needed season-ending surgery to repair a torn tendon sheath.

This time, Duvall was diagnosed with a distal radius fracture in his left wrist. Such injuries generally mean a loss of six to eight weeks, but the Red Sox haven’t announced a timeline. Duvall underwent additional testing to determine if he would need surgery to set the fracture or repair tissue damage, but manager Alex Cora told reporters after Monday’s loss to the Rays that he’ll avoid that.

Even without need for surgery, the injury has interrupted a promising start to the season for Duvall, who signed a one-year, $7 million deal with the Red Sox in late January. After bashing 38 homers, driving in an NL-high 113 runs, and winning a Gold Glove and a World Series ring while splitting his season between the Marlins and Braves in 2021, Duvall sank to 12 home runs and 36 RBIs last year; he dropped from a 103 wRC+ (.228/.281/.491) and 2.7 WAR to an 87 wRC+ (.213/.276/.401) and 1.0 WAR, playing in just 86 games. This year, he’s been unstoppable, highlighted by an April 1 game against the Orioles in which he collected a double, a triple, and two homers. He’s had two other three-hit games in which he collected multiple extra-base hits, one against the Orioles on April 2 and the other against the Tigers on Saturday.

Overall, Duvall has hit .455/.514/1.030, leading the majors in slugging percentage and wRC+ (318), sharing the AL leads in homers (four, tied with Rafael Devers, Wander Franco, Aaron Judge, and Luis Robert Jr.) and WAR (1.0, tied with Matt Chapman), and ranking second in the AL in batting average and third in on-base percentage. Those are all ridiculous numbers that have everything to do with their small sample size, but even so, it’s not that often you see a player with a four-digit slugging percentage for any substantial stretch. Last year, for example, 13 players had a total of 46 stretches (most of them overlapping) in which they slugged 1.030 or better over the course of an eight-game span with at least 35 PA (Duvall has 37). More than half of those players have won MVP awards in the recent past (Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, Paul Goldschmidt, Bryce Harper, Judge, Ohtani, and Mike Trout) and the rest (Yordan Alvarez, Bo Bichette, Rhys Hoskins, José Ramírez, Corey Seager, and Trevor Story) are no slouches either. Winding up in that kind of company, even fleetingly, is pretty impressive.

Duvall had been hitting the ball very hard. Though his 88.9 mph average exit velocity is unremarkable, his 25% barrel rate is absurd, more than double his career rate of 11.9%, and his 46.4% hard-hit rate is about seven points above his career mark. Mind you, this is only based on 28 batted balls, a little more than halfway to the 50 batted balls it takes for barrel rate to stabilize, so it’s not as though we can make any grand proclamations, but it’s a bummer that we’ll have to wait a couple of months to see the extent to which Duvall could improve upon his previous body of work.

That’s true as well for his strikeout rate. Duvall’s contact issues are no secret; in his three seasons with at least 502 plate appearances (enough to qualify for the batting title in a 162-game season), he’s struck out at least 160 times, with a high of 174 in 2021, and he owns a 28.3% career strikeout rate, the fifth-highest among active players with at least 3,000 PA. Yet thus far this season, he’s struck out just five times, for a 13.5% rate, that while walking 10.8% of the time; the former is less than half his career strikeout rate, the latter exactly double his career walk rate. Meanwhile, his 25.6% chase rate is about 10 points below his career norm, and his 6.6% swinging strike rate more than six points below his norm — notable data points that underscore his reduced strikeout rate:

Given that strikeout rates stabilize around 60 PA, we’re just rubbernecking at some interesting and probably unsustainable extremes, but any advance in this area would be a useful complement to Duvall’s combination of power and defensive prowess. Speaking of unsustainable, Duvall is hitting a remarkable .474/.524/.895 in the 19 PA in which he’s reached two strikes (all of the videos in the above reel are two-strike hits). Check out his two-strike heat map:

Anyway, now we and the Red Sox have to wait to see what Duvall does with this compelling start, that while hoping that the wrist injury doesn’t have any lingering effects on his swing. As to how the Red Sox (now 5-5) will handle things, they plan to cover center field using some combination of righties Rob Refsnyder and Enrique Hernández and lefty Raimel Tapia. The 32-year-old Refsnyder, who got the start on Monday night against Rays opener Jalen Beeks (followed by another lefty, Josh Fleming), enjoyed a nice little breakout last year with Boston, the sixth team of his eight-year major league odyssey; he hit .307/.384/.497 (146 wRC+) with six homers in 177 PA, though so far he’s just 3-for-15 with four walks to start the season. Hernández, who slumped to .222/.291/.338 (75 wRC+) last year after a strong 2021 performance with the Red Sox, has just three hits in 38 PA so far for a nearly-unfathomable .097/.263/.290 line. Tapia hit a thin .265/.292/.380 (90 wRC+) with the Blue Jays last year and owns a career 81 wRC+ even with this year’s 3-for-7 start off the bench. Here’s a look at this bunch’s platoon splits:

In Duvall’s absence, that group is going to take its lumps against righties, and if Hernández is playing center, the question becomes who’s manning shortstop given that he’s started nine out of the team’s 10 games there as Story recovers from UCL internal brace surgery. Yu Chang, who has the only other start there, hit .208/.289/.315 (78 wRC+) while spending time with four teams last year, and that wRC+ is three points above his career mark. The team has recalled righty-swinging infielder Bobby Dalbec from Triple-A Worcester to take Duvall’s roster spot, choosing him over lefty-swinging outfielder Jarren Duran because Cora expects the team to face a string of lefty starters:

Cora mentioned this postgame and it's actually nuts:

Probables upcoming:
Joey Wentz (L) (today)
Matthew Boyd (L)
Josh Fleming (L)
Shane McClanahan (L)
Zach Eflin (R)
Jeffrey Springs (L)
Patrick Sandoval (L)
Tyler Anderson (L)
Reid Detmers (L)
José Suarez (L)

— Red Sox Stats (@redsoxstats) April 8, 2023

Dalbec hit for a 151 wRC+ in 92 PA as a rookie in 2020, but the returns have diminished greatly since then, as you can probably surmise given that he began his age-28 season in Triple-A; last year, he batted just .215/.283/.369 (80 wRC+) while striking out in 33.4% of his 353 PA. Originally a third baseman whose path to regular playing time was blocked by Devers and then a first baseman serving as a bridge to Triston Casas, he’s been working to expand his defensive repertoire, playing a couple games at shortstop at Worcester this year after doing so three times (for a total of 14 innings) for the Red Sox in 2020-21. He’s not going to replace Hernández, let alone Story, but he does own a career 129 wRC+ in 331 PA against lefties, so he could provide some short-term help.

Thanks in no small part to Duvall, the Red Sox rank third in the AL in scoring (5.90 runs per game) and seventh in wRC+ (109), and while the center fielder was unlikely to continue his torrid pace, even his baseline production won’t be easily replaced. Already the Red Sox find themselves sharing the AL East basement with the Orioles, five games behind the sizzling Rays (10-0). So long as Duvall is out, their road to contention won’t be any easier.