The time is now for Duran
Bloom explains why the Red Sox waited to call him up
If the Red Sox lose the American League East by a game or two, it’ll be easy to look back and wonder what they could’ve done differently.
Waiting until July 15 to call up their most MLB-ready prospect to play a position the team could’ve used some help at could be one of those decisions we point to.
But Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom has displayed a tremendous amount of patience, patience we haven’t seen on Jersey Street since Ben Cherington was running the club. And it wasn’t until now that Bloom decided it was time to inject the first-place Red Sox with two of the organization’s top prospects: Jarren Duran and Tanner Houck.
Bloom spoke to the Herald by phone on Thursday to explain why he felt the timing was right.
“I could see the basis of all different opinions on when the right time is for him to help us,” Bloom said. “As strongly as we felt about his upside, We also felt it was important for him to go out, test himself against the highest level of minor league competition and see how he did as that competition got a chance to adjust to him and vice versa. We saw early in the year he was striking out more than he was recently. And seeing steady progress on that front and also steady progress defensively really helped make this decision for us.”
Of course, Duran has shown well all year. He was a standout during the Caribbean Series over the winter, had a strong spring training with the big league club, dominated at Triple-A Worcester from the start of the season until his call-up and earned glowing reviews after his short stint with Team USA during the Olympic qualifying games.
Asked why now was the right time, Bloom said, “There’s not one thing you can point to. I can’t sit here and tell you we can reduce this to a perfect science. I think it’s a combination of a number of things. Some of it is the subjective opinions of the people who are around him every day.
Some of it are the things we can track, both offensively and defensively. Some of it is seeing him display his ability against competition that has had a chance to adjust to him.
“I’ve seen him play some of the same Triple-A clubs multiple times where they’ve had a chance to adjust to him and he’s had a chance to adjust to them. It strengthened our conviction that he could have an impact at the next level.”
At the big league level, there was an argument to be made the Sox could’ve used him.
The two outfield additions they made in the offseason, Hunter Renfroe and Kiké Hernandez, are two players who have made a career out of hitting left-handed pitching, but struggled against right-handers. The splits are once again proving true this season.
Duran hits left-handed and could’ve been a natural complement to either player in the outfield.
But Bloom has taken the longgame approach.
“When you start making moves out of team needs that aren’t necessarily driven by the player’s own development, you can get into trouble that way,” he said. “The big leagues are really hard, but even as excited as we are for Jarren to come up, there’s no guarantee that he’s going to have an impact right off the bat. We have to be prepared as we are for any young player for there to be peaks and valleys.
“The more you shortcut a proper development path, the more chance there is that the player is not going to progress as you hoped. Then you might set the player back and the organization back, potentially for a long period of time.”
While Duran has dominated this year, Bloom made the point that he had struggled at Double-A in 2019, hitting .250 with a .634 OPS in 82 games.
“It was a tougher decision because we’re talking about a player that has made so much progress at the alternate site, at winter ball, working on his own, but still, coming into this year had not played any Triple-A baseball, and had not decisively conquered the Double-A level,” he said. “So that made this a much tougher decision.”
Bloom said he relied a lot on manager Alex Cora’s opinion.
“Alex knows what’s going on very well, he has a tremendous feel for the game and is a tremendous evaluator of players,” he said. “And ultimately, he’s going to be the one who, day to day, is going to be deploying these guys. So he needs to be part of this process.”
Bloom prioritized the long game instead of going all-in for the present.
Starting tonight, Duran will be the new everyday center fielder for the Red Sox.