Red Sox WC Game 2 notes: Duran isn't an outfielder, the checking out of Bello and Whitlock, immobilized Eaton, the lethality of double plays, bad fundamentals, and what Boston needs in Game 3

Thursday 10/2/25

A tough loss for the Red Sox last night, which was in large part of their own making. They still have a chance to advance to the Division Round by beating the Yankees today in the deciding third game of their Wild Card series, so we'll see.

I've written often in these pages throughout the baseball season how the way the Red Sox play the game--with their shoddy fundamentals--was apt to either stop them from getting anywhere, or be their undoing if they did. The Yankees made some key plays, and they were big in their victory. But if the Sox had played a cleaner game, with less blundering and mental errors, they would have won and the 2025 Bronx Bombers would be no more.

Brayan Bello got the start. Someone had asked me about him earlier in the day, and I said he's never put it together mentally. Bello is a head case. When things start going less well for him, he loses it. His comportment changes. He loses focus, he starts thinking about things out of his control--a teammate making an error--and screws up things in his control because he's not all there.

Sports psychologists are for the Brayan Bellos of the world (he's too pig-headed, though; Bello practically celebrates this idea of how "scream-y" he is; check him out in The Clubhouse docu-series, for instance). Not that a sports psychologist can make you a gritty, hardened, cold-blooded, ultra-focused clutch performer. Bello will never be close to that. I think you saw his best this season--a multi-month stretch in the summer where he was solid. You can't count on Bello when it matters. You can't count on him even to keep his focus and make sure his emotions don't get the best of him.

Alex Cora's thing in the postseason is to manage over aggressively. It's like he gets off on it. I think he's a bad manager and a dangerous postseason manager. He easily could have blown the 2018 run, and the only reason he didn't is that a bunch of journeyman and platoon players picked the Red Sox up. It wasn't their stars either. People seemed oblivious to what was happening at the time and it's not as if they've become more clued in now.

Having said that, I thought Cora absolutely did the right thing in yanking Bello when he did, before Bello created a four or five run hole, which he would have. Cora has lost patience with him. You saw it in Bello's last regular season start. When Cora took him out, the announcers were surprised, I wasn't, and I felt that much better about the game. I told someone then that this game would go right down to the wire. It was going to be one of those Red Sox-Yankees games, with someone who narrowly won and someone who narrowly lost.

Then we have Jarren Duran. His failure to catch a routine soft liner to left was the single biggest play of the game. It probably determined the winner and the loser. I'm going to be frank: Duran isn't an outfielder. He's awful out there. He's too much of a head case--and I can't believe I'm saying this--for the outfield, never mind the big moment.

I know--he says he's depressed. There's this Jarren Duran cult--of women, mostly, because he's so cute and cuddly wuddly and people are unstable and have these unhealthy parasocial fantasy-based crushes and connections--that says he can't be criticized or else you'll make him suicidal like you're a murderer, but if that's the case, he's in the wrong line of work. These guys get paid a fortune to play a child's game. It's not important in the grand scheme of anything. It's important to a significant degree to those without a clue of what really matters.

Duran is a defensive disaster, and he's now an almost guaranteed out at the plate. He's almost certainly going to strike out, too. He won't even put the ball in play. He is also fake in this kind of performative with himself way, which is a strange way, I grant. It's not fake in the Chris Sale fake tough guy way.

Thus, Duran wants to show Duran that he's running as hard as anyone ever, and he's going to dive so that Duran knows he gave it his all. After the latest instance of outfield butchery for him--which amazingly wasn't even scored an error, as big an official scoring joke as I've seen in some time--people were talking about how he essentially blocked his line of sight by getting his glove between his face and the ball, which is true.

But you know what was at least as bad? The route he took to the ball. Jarren Duran cannot track a fly ball or a liner. He cannot do it. He's gotten no better at it and he was dreadful to begin. He uses his speed to make catches on ball not right at him. He needs that speed because he was going the wrong way and the speed allows him to correct his error before it's too late.

Most "great" Duran catches are routine plays that simpletons who don't understand such things think require that Duran greatness. Baseball people are also similarly and easily duped. That this guy was a Gold Glove finalist last year tells you a lot about the current state of the Gold Glove award. It's always been a flawed award. Someone would win it and then he'd win it three more times, like that was just part of the deal, the same as a president getting his four years. Then he'd be removed from office and another guy came in for a bunch of years. Look, for instance, at the catching Gold Glove winners in the 1970s and 1980s. It's a lazily voted and lazily awarded award.

The Red Sox also hit into three double plays. What are your chances of winning a low-scoring playoff game when you hit into three double plays? If you had to guess? I'd put it at 12%. A double play can be like losing an inning. They're killers. You'd obviously much rather have the batter strike out or pop up. I feel like people have never recognized how important double players are in baseball--not hitting into them and getting them. They're baseball's version of football's turnovers. Bill Mazeroski is arguably the best defensive player at any position in the history of the game. Why? Because when the Pittsburgh Pirates put him out there at second base, double plays happened.

Then we have Ceddanne Rafaela's attempt to bunt with runners on first and second and no outs, with him popping it up. He looked like he'd never done this before. You might as well have had Dave Kingman trying to lay one down. But you know what? I've found video of Kingman doing just that, and he was pretty good at it. A player like this--speed guy, who goes into long slumps where he gives you next to nothing and stands little chance of getting a hit--should be able to bunt. If he can't, he shouldn't be bunting. His technique was terrible. The bat needs to be out front, not behind the plate, if you will, which is where Rafaela's bat was.

Then you have the sequence where Yankees second baseman Jazz Chisholm made a great diving stop of a grounder up the middle. He then risked a throw to first base, where the runner was safe and the ball got away from the first baseman. Nate Eton--won of the faster Red Sox players--had rounded third on the play, where third base coach Kyle Hudson held him up when Eaton could have scored easily. Huge play in that game.

You cannot screw up your job like this in a close playoff contest. You can't be making these mistakes. If the Red Sox hadn't made just one of these mistakes, you very well could have had a different outcome.

Then there's Garrett Whitlock. That was disappointing. You were counting on this guy to be a lock down late inning stalwart, and he was a puddle. I thought he checked out mentally as things went less well for him. He didn't seem engaged to me. He was petulant, mopey. It was like he thought, "That didn't go how I wanted it to, doesn't matter now," when there were still important pitches to be made.

Chisholm was the difference in the game for the Yankees. Him and not making the mistakes the Red Sox did. That defensive play was huge. He saved that run by knocking down the ball (well, with the help of the Eaton/Hudson blunder). Eaton obviously would have walked home if the ball reached the outfield. And then went from first to home on a single--which should have been a double--to right, with textbook base running on display and a perfect head-first slide. He sat in Game 1 and he looked to me like a player playing angry--in the good way--with something to prove.

Payton Tolle faced a batter, and let me tell you, this guy makes me nervous. He can throw one thing: a fastball. There's no secondary stuff. Will there ever be? I have no reason right now to think so. But I know you can't throw just a fastball unless you have an all-timer fastball and you're only going an inning at a time and be successful in the big leagues. He didn't give anything up, but I mention this now because there's a good chance he'll be counted on tonight.

Whitlock won't be available. Seems like a big deal. I'd have Crochet available--I'm serious--but I know they won't. But I'd have him available for a batter if they really need it. You have a rookie pitching. The Gialito injury has a role here. I believe Gialito knew he was hurt, and kept pitching anyway--withholding information--so that he could reach an incentive in his contract. I think his attempt to get that money is what ended his season.

Had Gialito been healthy, this would look different, but I don't think it's awful that the Red Sox have Connelly Early starting for them tonight. Red Sox fans are like, "He needs to give us seven" because of how bad they think the bullpen is depleted, but it's not as bad as all that.

Here's what I think: You're going to need to score six runs tonight to win. A recipe: Early gives you four innings and surrenders three runs, the bullpen "holds" the Yankees to a couple other runs, and get a big hit or two--like a three-run bomb to that short porch. Watch it be a 2-1 game, but that's not what I'm expecting.

The Red Sox need to score more than they've been scoring. (There were a couple times last night--once with the bases loaded, and then on the final at-bat of the game--when it looked for a second or two like the ball might leave the yard for the Sox, but contact was made too close to the end of the bat.) This shapes up to be a leaky kind of game, pitching-wise, with the lead going back and forth. The Sox have been reliant on Story and Bregman. They need something from someone else. The big hit from the unexpected party. Otherwise, they're going home and we'll see them again in February at spring training, and that game last night will be a huge reason why.

But hey--you have one more, so last night is moot for the purposes of today. The Red Sox have not lost a postseason series to the Yankees since 2003, and I'd like to see that streak keep going (indefinitely, ideally). Criticisms of the Sox' play aside, these have been two highly entertaining, exciting games. And that, in and of itself, is pretty cool. It's good to have the Red Sox back in October. For me, there's nothing better in all of sports and it isn't close. And I want it to keep going. Don't give us half a week--give us a run, give us a pennant, give us a World Series victory!

By the by: It takes some doing for me to stay up for these games, because come the morrow--what any normal person calls the night still--guess who's getting up at the same time regardless? (And now tonight there's an 8:08 start! Madness!) I'd much rather do that knowing the Sox are playing on.