Baseball's Second-Best Watch

It's Jarren Duran.

A few years ago I was pushing an idea for a new award, the Most Watchable Award. This would be the player you’re most likely to turn on a game to see—storyline, expectations—and who is most likely to actually deliver—performance, novelty, aesthetics.

As we reach Game 81 of this season, I’ve been imagining what my Most Watchable ballot would look like right now were I to actually organize a vote. Juan Soto would be first on my ballot. Jarren Duran would be second.

I’ll assume you know how good Duran has gotten (he is, for instance, fifth in the majors in WAR this year) and maybe even how interesting he is (he is, for instance, the subject of an article headlined Baseball’s Second-Best Watch), but he’s definitely slipping through the cracks of broader public awareness. In the All-Star balloting update released last week, he was 19th among AL outfielders. He had two-thirds as many votes as Tyler Freeman. He was way behind Mauricio Dubón.

So I spent a week (June 18th through June 24th, six games) watching him extremely closely—every time he touched a ball, every pitch he spent batting or on base. By sheer chance, it turned out to be a great week to do so: He hit .464, stole three bases, homered twice, robbed a game-tying home run in the ninth inning, had the walk-off hit in a different game. And he’s so interesting that very little of that even appears in my report! Let me try to explain Jarren Duran.

5. He’s Fast. 
Duran has a 95th percentile sprint speed this year. There are different types of fast. Duran isn’t long and loose like Elly De La Cruz, or impossibly smooth like Trea Turner. He runs violently, his spikes leaving tractor trails in the dirt. He leans hard into turns. He looks almost gyroscopic, like something Batman would drive on ice. To me, at least.

He came into this season working on his running mechanics. “I’m just working on my legs and staying in a straight line, because everybody knows I run like a lizard,” he said. “You know how track runners run? They have that clean form. I’m just kind of working on that.”

I don’t know. Still looks like a lizard to me, but he’s very fast, and more than practically any player in baseball, he uses it. The league goes first-to-third on 32 percent of singles; Duran this year has gone first-to-third on 73 percent of singles. He leads the league in triples—he’s on pace to hit 20, which would be a major-league first since 2007—and he leads the league in doubles and he is sixth in stolen bases. He is second in Baseball Reference’s Extra Bases Taken, which are bases advanced on passed balls, wild pitches and fly outs. As to the last of those, here he is scoring the go-ahead run on a sacrifice fly this week: 

That’s the sixth-shallowest sacrifice fly in the majors this year. Of the five that were shallower, two were caught by fielders who had their backs to the infield, one by a fielder who was falling into the stands, and one by a fielder in a headlong dive. So this is the year’s second-shallowest (by a foot) sacrifice fly hit to a fielder squared up and ready to throw.

Just how unexpected was Duran scoring on this play? The left fielder, Stuart Fairchild, seemed so surprised Duran was actually going that he barely bothered to throw. Fairchild’s average throw is 85 mph, his hardest throw this year was 95 mph, but, apparently stunned into submission by Duran’s attempt, he threw a 79 mph quack toward third base. Look at what a wimpy throw home. Like he thought Duran was bluffing, maybe. Duran did that to him.

4. He’s Chaos. 
I’m not saying he’s chaotic, because he generally plays under control. But he often tries to introduce chaos into the game.

What happened there? Technically, nothing happened. Duran was on first base at the start of the play and he was on first base at the end of it. From our angle, we’re all the batter David Hamilton, going “huh?” But off-screen, after the pitch was caught, Duran suddenly bluffed as though he were going to take off for second. With a teammate on third, he was trying to confuse the defense: Was he going to go? Could he draw backpick throw from the catcher? Could he get anybody to do anything? The catcher gets briefly flustered, but the moment passes.

“He just plays a different game from everybody,” Red Sox broadcaster Kevin Youkilis says after this play. “You see him taking off, but, like, where is he gonna go?? But I would have wanted to see it!¹”

And sometimes the chaos works. A couple weeks ago Duran tapped a grounder back to the pitcher, who threw the ball away. Duran ended up on third. The opposing team thought he might not have touched first, so, before the next pitch, the pitcher stepped off and threw to first base to make the appeal. You’ve seen this one a million times; pitcher steps off, throws to the base the runner might have missed, umpire signals “safe” and play continues from there. What you’ve never, ever seen is what Duran did: He stole home on the appeal throw! Outrageous. 

On top of it all, the pitcher threw the ball away. 

“I call him Captain Chaos,” the Red Sox broadcaster Will Middlebrooks told NESN.com. “He’s just flying around the basepaths because he makes people panic with his speed.”

3. He Fields
If you knew Jarren Duran’s name at all two years ago, it might have been for a sequence of nightmarish defensive performances. One came when he lost a flyball in the lights, it landed directly behind him, and then instead of chasing it he watched it bounce around while the runner scored on an inside-the-park home run. (It’s the first play in a video titled “55 seconds of Jarren Duran missing fly balls in center field.”) A couple weeks after that, he missed three flies in a game and ended up yelling back and forth with jeering Kansas City fans. “He just shut down, had a total melt down,” Youkilis recalled in a Red Sox broadcast this week. “It was so hard to watch.” 

Now Duran is one of the best defensive outfielders in the game. He’s second among outfielders in Defensive Runs Saved this year. One game last week, he didn’t get to touch a ball all game, until the ninth inning. Then he robbed a potential game-tying home run, just over the yellow line. His routes aren’t great but his reactions are. A former second baseman, his arm isn’t super strong but his release is super quick.

My favorite play he made this week was on a ball Vladimir Guerrero Jr. hit off the center field wall. The carom wasn’t true, so Duran had to barehand it. He turned and threw to second so quickly his teammates weren’t on the bag, probably assuming it would be an uncontested double. 

 Had they been on second base, I think they would have had Guerrero out. 

2. He Slugs .625 On Pop-Ups To The Third Baseman.