Article: What It Takes for Jarren Duran To Hit Into a Double Play

[Davy Andrews]

Jarren Duran has a gift for avoiding double plays, even when he hits a double-play ball. How does he do it?

If you watched yesterday’s 5-2 loss to the Yankees, you surely noticed that Jarren Durran grounded into two back-breaking double plays, the second of which strangled a potential rally in the crib and ended the game. A GIDP is normally a rare occurrence for the fleet-footed and left-handed-swinging star, but it may be even less common than you realize. In fact, coming into Sunday’s game, just four of Duran’s 475 batted balls had ended up in double plays. That works out to 0.84%, and of the 381 players who have hit at least 100 balls in play this season, it ranked 362nd. Even after grounding into two double plays yesterday, he still ranks 326th, with a 1.3% rate.

We can get even more granular by limiting ourselves to double play situations. Durran has been up with a runner on first and fewer than two outs 127 times. He's now grounded into a double play 4.7% of the time. Of the 182 players who have been in that situation at least 100 times, that ranks 134th. Until yesterday's double-double, he was down near the very, very bottom with a 3.1% rate than ranked 162nd. But what I'm really interested in is how Durran avoids double plays. It's not necessarily that he doesn't hit many double plays. It's what he does when he hits one.

Let's look at what happens when the batter hits a groundball in a double-play situation. Poor Kris Bryant has hit six such grounders, and he’s been doubled up every single time. Duran is at the other end of the spectrum. Coming into Sunday’s game, he had hit 32 groundballs in that situation, so his four double plays represented a 12.5% double play rate. This season, there have been 155 players who have hit at least 25 such balls, and that 12.5% mark ranks 144th. Duran really is unusually good at avoiding double plays, even when he hits a double-play ball.

Knowing that, if you didn’t watch Sunday’s game, you might be wondering what it actually takes to double Duran up. If you did watch the game, then you know the answer already: It takes an absolute rocket with laser-guided precision. Here’s the first double play in the top of the seventh inning, with the Sox still only down 4-2.

The ball was absolutely scorched, leaving Duran’s bat at 111.9 mph. That makes it the 12th-hardest grounder of the season to end up as a double play. The play was extremely close, but only because Gleyber Torres supplied such a wide toss that Anthony Volpe had to execute a pirouette before firing to first base. Even the speedy Duran would have been out by a few steps if Volpe had received anything resembling a clean feed. Here’s the ninth-inning double play ball.

This ball was crushed at 105.8 mph. That’s not at the very top of the list, but among the 3,000 or so double plays this season, it ranks around 200th, putting it in the seventh percentile. Not only were both of these balls blasted, they were also hit directly at a fielder. That’s what it takes to double up Duran: a surgical strike.

Duran’s bat speed, average exit velocity, and hard-hit rate all rank in the 70th percentile or better. Those are great numbers, but it means that when it comes to hitting the ball hard, he’s still looking up from below at roughly a quarter of the league. However, if we just look at double play balls, Duran catapults right to the top of a somewhat dubious leaderboard. Duran now has six GIDP this season. Five of them qualify as hard-hit and three were hit above 100 mph (with one at 99.9 for good measure). In all, they average 100.7 mph. Only two players have a higher average exit velocity on double play balls: Giancarlo Stanton at 102.6 mph and Pedro Pagés at 101.1. The funny thing is that Stanton and Pagés are at the top of the leaderboard for completely different reasons than Duran.

At this point in his career, the 34-year-old Stanton is not so much slow as he is stationary. He’s glacially slow, in the sense that if you were to put Giancarlo Stanton and a glacier in a footrace, one-on-one, Stanton would somehow find a way to finish third. It doesn’t take a hard-hit ball to double him up; there’s no kind of ball on which you couldn’t double him up. He’s at the top simply because he’s physically incapable of swinging or hitting the ball at anything but max effort. Of course all his double-play balls are hard-hit. That’s the only way he knows how to hit a baseball. Anytime you put together a leaderboard for murdering baseballs, you’ll find his name at the top. He is Giancarlo Stanton, the world leader in turning spheres into oblate spheroids.

Pagés, on the other hand, is purely a fluke. How’s this for a backhanded compliment: the St. Louis catcher is a little bit faster than Stanton. Unlike Duran, it doesn’t take a hard-hit ball to double him up. Unlike Stanton, he’s not an exit velocity demigod. He hasn’t played too much, and when he has, he hasn’t hit the ball particularly hard. Here’s how he finds himself in second place: Of his 10 hardest-hit balls of the year, three have ended up as double plays. He also grounded into double plays on his 21st- and 36th-hardest hit balls of the season. That is some truly miserable luck. I don’t know what he did to anger the baseball gods, but he’s going to need to make things right in a hurry.

So that’s the company Duran’s keeping. Stanton is at the top of the list based on an inability to hit the baseball at anything other than warp speed, and Pagés is there because the universe hates him. Duran, on the other hand, is there because his game features such a perfect combination of speed and power that his double-play balls don’t just need to be tailor-made, they need a couple rounds of alterations too. Here are the four double play balls he’d hit before yesterday’s game.

These four look eerily like the two from Sunday, right down to the fact that two of them came in the same game, on August 25 against the Diamondbacks. The two against the Rockies were separated by an enormous two days). All six balls were hit hard directly at a middle infielder, and that middle infielder was stationed very close to second base. In four of them, the shortstop kept the ball himself and stepped on the bag before firing to first. What does it take to double up Jarren Duran? A lot.

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[Brock Beauchamp]

Quote

He’s glacially slow, in the sense that if were you put Giancarlo Stanton and a glacier in a footrace, one-on-one, Stanton would somehow find a way to finish third.

This sentence made my morning.