Dem
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GOP
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Those who follow baseball know that it has a very particular culture that, to a fairly substantial extent, embodies a very midcentury ideal of masculinity. This is famously expressed in the famous "unwritten rules" of baseball, which demand, among other things, that a player should not show another player up. Any player who violates this expectation can expect to have a baseball thrown at him, or maybe even to find himself in the middle of some fisticuffs.
We say this as prelude to a story that definitely runs against the hypermasculine grain of Major League Baseball. It involves Jarren Duran of the Red Sox, who is 28 and is in his fifth year in the majors. For his first three seasons, he struggled to put it all together, and was a league-average player or worse. Then, last year, he caught fire. He led the league in both doubles and triples, got on base at a .342 clip, played steady defense, and was in the running for MVP honors. In a different year, perhaps one where the Yankees' Aaron Judge doesn't hit 58 home runs, maybe Duran wins the thing.
Last year, Netflix decided to produce a documentary covering a year in the life of the Red Sox. This is a pretty well-established approach to baseball "deep dives"; some readers will know Jim Bouton's book Ball Four, which basically created the sub-genre. Anyhow, the Netflix series, released this week, is titled The Clubhouse: A Year With the Red Sox. And given Duran's production last year, he is naturally a key figure in the story.
In the first three episodes, when Duran shows up, he talks about baseball, including some of his less-than-noble moments on the field (he once shouted a homophobic slur at a fan, for example). But when reporters fired up their preview copies of the fourth episode, they were in for a bit of a surprise. Duran told the story of how, in 2022, as he struggled to hold on in the Majors, he got depressed: "I couldn't deal with telling myself how much I sucked every [expletive] day. Like I was already hearing it from fans and, like, what they say to me. It's like, I haven't told myself 10 times worse than that in the mirror. That was, like, a really tough time for me." And so, he continues: "I got to the point where I was sitting in my room; I had my rifle and I had a bullet and I pulled the trigger and the gun clicked but nothing happened... I took it as a sign of, like, all right, I might have to be here for a reason. So that's when I started to look myself in the mirror. After the gun didn't go off, I was, like, 'All right, well like, do I wanna be here or do I not wanna be here?'"
Duran decided to share his story because he felt that baseball fans who were/are in a dark place could benefit from it. Under the best of circumstances, that is not an easy truth to share. In Major League Baseball, which is very much about conformity and toughness, it took a spine of steel. To the league's credit, commissioner Rob Manfred and Red Sox Manager Alex Cora have both said how much they admire Duran's courage, and have emphasized he will always have their full support, anytime he should need it. Those two men, like Duran himself, have some not-so-great moments in their pasts. But here, we commend the trio. And, of course, we will take this opportunity to remind readers that if anyone needs help, 988 (the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline) is there 24/7.
Have a good weekend, all! (Z)