Article: Why Do the Projections Hate Jarren Duran?

[Amrit Brown]

Jarren Duran’s breakout 2024 season helped save the Sox from finishing the season below .500 for the third straight year. So what can we expect from him in 2025, and why do the projections expect so little?

Every year, Baseball Prospectus runs a series of articles highlighting the projections of its projection model, PECOTA, one for each team. And every year, that series is called PECOTA Hates Your Team. The joke is that fans of any team will be able to find a reason to complain about the projections. Projection models are inherently conservative. They typically produce numbers that regress toward the average performance of the player's career. Likewise, they analyze a player's historical performance, then compare it to similar players throughout baseball history in order to predict how a player will perform next year (or even over the entire rest of their career). And throughout baseball history, the one constant is regression to the mean. Players who suddenly have a breakout season tend to come back to earth, and players who suddenly perform terribly tend to bounce back. It's not that PECOTA hates Jarren Duran, it's just that players who break out the way Jarren Duran did in 2024 tend not to stay broken out.

Depending on your preferred version, Duran put up somewhere between 6.2 (Baseball Prospectus) and 8.7 WAR (Baseball Refernce). FanGraphs was in the middle with 6.7, but regardless of which version you care about, that's an MVP-candidate level of production. Here's where the major projection systems expect Duran to end up in 2025:

FGDC: 3.1
Steamer: 3.2
PECOTA: 3.2
ZiPS: 3.7

All four of them see Duran taking an enormous step back, with his WAR essentially cut in half. Our editor, Davy Andrews, pulled some historical data from FanGraphs. He found that since 1900, there have been 218 players in AL/NL history in Duran's situation: they put up less than 3.0 fWAR in one season, then put up more than 6.0 in the next season. In year three, those 218 players averaged 4.2 fWAR. Fewer than 8% of them were better in year three than they were in year two. Fewer than 22% were within 1.0 WAR of the total they put up in year two. More than 30% put up fewer than 3.0 WAR in year three. Just based on baseball history, we should expect Duran to have a higher than 30% chance of putting up fewer than 3.0 WAR! No wonder the projections hate him! History is very clear: players who put up the kind of season Duran just put up do not do it again.

That's just the historical part of the equation. The projection systems rely more on Duran's underlying numbers to predict his future performance. While not as significant as Duran’s performance last season, some of his struggles from 2021 to 2023 absolutely play a role in these projections. Let's start on offense. Duran put up a 120 wRC+ in 2023 and a 129 wRC+ in 2024, meaning that in those two seasons, he was 20% and 29% better than the average hitter, respectively. However, most projection systems see him dropping all the way to around 111. That big a dropoff seems pretty unlikely. Duran ran a career-best strikeout rate in 2024, and the projections systems understandably think it will regress to the mean a bit next season. However, Duran was also much more patient in 2024, running career lows in his swing rate both inside and outside the zone. Plate discipline stats tend to be sticky year over year, so it's possible that Duran will keep his chase rate down, which will help him do the same with his strikeout rate.

The biggest reason that Steamer projects a drop-off in offensive production from Duran is because they don’t believe in his power numbers from 2024. Coming into the 2024 season, Duran had a career .162 isolated slugging percentage, but he blew that out of the water with a .207 mark. The projection systems are doing what they do: they look at the last few years and weigh the more recent performance a bit more heavily, and thus have him right in between those two numbers, around .185. Is there any reason in the underlying numbers that makes us believe Duran might be capable of holding onto his slugging gains? In his first three seasons, Duran had little home run pop but in 2024 he hit 21. Over his career, his 162-game career pace is just 10. Duran put up a career-best average exit velocity, but his hard-hit rate was actually lower in 2024 than 2023,  as was 90th-percentile average exit velocity, which is one of the best measures of power. He also ran a much higher groundball rate. Seeing these underlying numbers, it's reasonable to expect Duran's power to step back a bit.

The most interesting part of Steamer's projection is the decrease they anticipate in Duran’s baserunning. His 8.4 Base Running Runs above average was a career-best and third-most in baseball, and he put up 7.2 in 2023. However, Steamer projects that number to drop to 2.1. This projection makes little sense, as Duran has 96th percentile sprint speed, stole 34 bags in 2024, and was caught just seven times. There is little reason to expect the serious decline in baserunning ability that Steamer projects.

According to the two leading defense metrics, Defensive Runs Saved and Fielding Runs Value, Duran’s defense got much, much better all of a sudden in 2024. Both metrics had him costing the Red Sox runs in 2023, but in 2024, they had him as one of the best outfielders in all of baseball. Projections are inherently suspicious of big jumps like that, so they still expect Duran to be a net negative next season. However, we should keep in mind that 2024 was Duran's first full big-league season, and he definitely had some growing pains during his first three seasons. All Red Sox fans remember the 2022 Raimel Tapia inside-the-park grand slam on a fly ball that Duran simply couldn’t find. The defensive lows for Duran have been downright nauseating, but it's possible that he has turned a defensive corner.

So what should we expect in 2025? We should probably expect a decrease in overall defensive value. He won’t lead MLB in assists as he did in 2024, because that's a somewhat fluky stat and because teams won’t run as often on him because of his 2024 success. However, we can also expect that he will maintain most of his improvements in range. According to Statcast, Duran's jumps in the outfield were slightly worse in 2024 than in 2023. However, he also had a faster sprint speed and arm strength in 2024 than in 2023. He's definitely not in the midst of any physical decline. Even if he comes down to earth some, Duran's not going to turn back into a bad defender. You just don't luck into numbers that say you're one of the best defenders in baseball. That does not, however, mean that he won’t be an above-average fielder in 2025.

Jarren Duran is a star, but now that we've run through everything, it does seem unlikely that he’ll repeat his 2024 numbers. He should continue to excel defensively and on the bases, but it would be unreasonable to just assume that he'll match his career high a second time. On offense, we probably should expect him to slug a bit less. Duran put up incredible numbers in 2024. According to Dan Szymborski's ZiPS projection model, Duran's 80th percentile projection for 2025 has him at just 5.7 fWAR, meaning that ZiPS gives Duran just a 20% chance of coming within one win of his 2024 mark. Surpassing a 6.7 WAR is a feat not many achieve. Because Duran saw improvements in many peripheral stats, I suspect that a 2025 decline won’t be to the scale of the Steamer projections. My guess? He'll sit somewhere a little above the previously mentioned average of 6.7. Duran is entering his age 28 season, part of the offensive prime of most players' careers, and he's as fast and strong as ever.

I’ll admit that I'm biased, but the numbers indicate Steamer's projection is too low. We'll have to play the season to see if I've got it right or if Steamer's weak(er) figures are more accurate.

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[moonslav59]

We have seen Duran struggle with his approach, stance and even defense, but to me, he has gone 1.5 years of playing very well- all around.

I could see him having a season with some slight regression, but to me the odds are he has an equal chance of further improvement, too.

Maybe these projections light a fire underneath him.

[harmony]

Last year Jarren Duran and Garrett Crochet experienced breakout seasons with 6.7 fWAR and 4.7 fWAR, respectively. FanGraphs now projects Duran and Crochet with 2025 WAR of 3.1 and 4.8, respectively.

https://www.fangraphs.com/players/jarren-duran/24617/stats?position=OF#dashboard

https://www.fangraphs.com/players/garrett-crochet/27463/stats?position=P#dashboard

It's curious that the projections have Duran regressing toward the mean but Crochet essentially repeating his 2024 production. The age difference of nearly three years could offer one explanation.

[dgalehouse]

Baseball is a game. A sport. In recent years it has been swamped with hundreds of statistics, metrics, analytics, etc. Data, data and more data. Who knows how much of it is accurate and how much is biased and/or unreliable. I take these projections with several grains of salt. 

[Old Red]

51 minutes ago, harmony said:

Last year Jarren Duran and Garrett Crochet experienced breakout seasons with 6.7 fWAR and 4.7 fWAR, respectively. FanGraphs now projects Duran and Crochet with 2025 WAR of 3.1 and 4.8, respectively.

https://www.fangraphs.com/players/jarren-duran/24617/stats?position=OF#dashboard

https://www.fangraphs.com/players/garrett-crochet/27463/stats?position=P#dashboard

It's curious that the projections have Duran regressing toward the mean but Crochet essentially repeating his 2024 production. The age difference of nearly three years could offer one explanation.

The only projections I care about right now for Crochet is making 35 starts, and 175+ innings pitched.

[moonslav59]

1 hour ago, harmony said:

Last year Jarren Duran and Garrett Crochet experienced breakout seasons with 6.7 fWAR and 4.7 fWAR, respectively. FanGraphs now projects Duran and Crochet with 2025 WAR of 3.1 and 4.8, respectively.

https://www.fangraphs.com/players/jarren-duran/24617/stats?position=OF#dashboard

https://www.fangraphs.com/players/garrett-crochet/27463/stats?position=P#dashboard

It's curious that the projections have Duran regressing toward the mean but Crochet essentially repeating his 2024 production. The age difference of nearly three years could offer one explanation.

I think they tend to look at recent 2-3 years numbers more than just the last season, but Duran trumps Crochet in that area.

Age should matter, but Duran is not past prime: he's actually at peak prime, now. There should not be regression projected due to his age. I can see projecting better from Crochet as he moves up towards primes, but other Sox player who are pre-prime didn't get the same treatment (see DHam and Abreu.)