Red Sox prospect Jarren Duran produces more excitement with 440-foot homer

At the dawn of the minor league season last week, Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom said that top outfield prospect Jarren Duran would show him how soon he could be ready for a major-league call-up by how well he performed over the course of the Triple-A season.

It’s just nine games in, but Duran is already starting to knock on the door with some exciting performances in Worcester that certainly have to be garnering Bloom’s attention.

Two days after homering twice in front of Bloom in the WooSox’ opener at Polar Park, Duran continued his power surge with a moonshot in Worcester’s 7-4 win over Syracuse on Thursday night, a 440-foot blast over the right-field wall that the center fielder took a moment to admire before rounding the bases.

“Felt pretty good,” Duran said modestly afterward.

Duran hits a 95 mph fastball 440' pic.twitter.com/F7NC4NHceC

— Red Sox Stats (@redsoxstats) May 14, 2021

That might be understating how he’s performed over the last week. After starting his Triple-A career hitless in his first three games, Duran is 11-for-24 with four homers in his last six, a product he said of not doing too much at the plate.

Whatever it is, the results are coming. And he’s showing that the newfound power he showcased at the alternate site in Pawtucket last year, when the minor league season was cancelled due to COVID-19, is no fluke, as he’s translated it loudly into real competition.

Thursday’s blast was a sign of how far he’s come with his power, as he turned on an inside 95 mph fastball for the no-doubt homer.

“I just think that I’m able to get to that pitch now, because before it was kind of like a struggle for me to get to the inside pitch and now I have a different path,” Duran said. “So it’s more clean and fluid to get to those pitches. …

“It still feels like I’m working. Some days I feel good on the inside, some days I don’t feel good. It’s a daily battle. It’s just baseball, working on your swing every day. But yeah, it does feel better.”

Though fans may clamor for a call-up sooner than later, Bloom will be practicing patience with the 24-year-old Duran as he continues to put in that work. Though his highlight-reel homers will certainly generate excitement, the Red Sox don’t want to overreact. And they want to see him continue developing with his outfield defense.

“I think we’re gonna learn a lot,” Bloom said on May 4. “We want to make sure we don’t try to learn too much from a really small sample but just having him go through the ups and downs of the season and playing every day and doing it with the various ways that we have to track his performance. We’re gonna learn a lot pretty quickly but at the end of the day, it’s up to the player. Every confidence that Jarren is going to go out there and knock that door down but he’ll tell us when he’s ready.”

Duran’s time is certainly coming. The spotlight is firmly on him, even if the 2018 seventh-round pick who has blossomed into one of the Red Sox’ top prospects isn’t totally comfortable with the attention yet.

“I kind of like being a non-prospect, because people don’t expect a lot out of you,” Duran said. “Not being a prospect to start, you just work your butt off as much as you can and then things come your way with hard work. I just worked hard, did the right things, played hard, do what I need to do and things go your way.”

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2SGJ7zk