Red Sox slugger Jarren Duran’s big All-Star moment comes with a forever link to Ted Williams

ARLINGTON, Texas — When the president of the Baseball Hall of Fame asks a player for an item, he’s ready with a follow-up question: Have you ever been to Cooperstown?

Lots of them say yes, from their days in youth tournaments. And when they do, they get another question, as Jarren Duran did late Tuesday night.

“I always ask guys how many homers they hit, because they always remember,” said Josh Rawitch, the Hall’s president since 2021. “And he said he hit 16. I said, ‘Sixteen?’ And he said, ‘Well, it was a small field.’”

Rawitch collected Duran’s American League jersey — number 16, in fact — to help the museum tell the story of the 2024 All-Star Game. Duran, the center fielder for the Boston Red Sox, smashed a go-ahead two-run homer in the fifth inning to lift the AL past the National League, 5-3, at Globe Life Field.

For that, Duran earned a crystal bat as the Ted Williams All-Star Game MVP. He’s the second Boston player to win the award since the league named it for Williams in 2002, the year he died. (The other was J.D. Drew at Yankee Stadium in 2008.)

Duran is 27 years old, the same age as Williams in 1946, when he also hit an All-Star home run and then led the Red Sox to the AL pennant. By then, Williams had already hit .406 in a season, won a Triple Crown and lost three years of his career during World War II.

Linking yourself to Teddy Ballgame is a lot to process.

“I mean, after Ted Williams, the Red Sox — that’s an honor,” Duran said. “Who else would I want to try and follow in the footsteps of besides a guy like that, who is not just a great baseball player but a great human being? That guy was awesome, and I’m honored to be able to have his award.”

Duran’s homer came on his first All-Star swing, as a mid-game replacement for the New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge. With two outs and the Baltimore Orioles’ Anthony Santander on first, Duran took a strike from the Cincinnati Reds’ Hunter Greene on a fastball down the middle at 96 miles an hour. That was the plan.

“I knew he threw really hard so I was just praying he would throw me a first-pitch fastball so I could see how hard it was,” Duran said. “After that, I was hoping to get a pitch up. He happened to leave a pitch up.”

The next pitch was up, all right, a splitter with no bite that drifted in at 86 miles an hour. Duran, a left-handed hitter, drove it 413 feet into the seats above the right-field bullpen. The Cooperstown All-Star Village couldn’t contain a young Duran, and now the MLB All-Star venue couldn’t, either.

“I thought it was gonna be a double or a triple or something, because that’s basically what he does,” said Duran’s father, Octavio, who watched from the first-base stands as part of his son’s eight-person cheering section.

“And then after his swing, I just realized when he has that certain swing, he looks at the ball like, ‘OK, I hit it hard enough, it’s gonna go out.’”

Duran’s cool bat flip gave it away: this was a no-doubter, and a relief to his mother, Dena.

“I was nervous when he played travel ball,” she said. “It’s not really any different, just a bigger stage. You still feel the same.”

But those nerves go away when the ball flies so far, right?

“Oh, yeah,” she said, laughing. “It’s like, ‘Thank you, God, my prayers worked today!’”

Duran grew up in Southern California, playing football, basketball and baseball for a well-rounded athletic experience. He reveled in football as a linebacker and free safety — “He loved to hit,” Octavio said — but gravitated to baseball for the longer career expectancy. His confidence came early.

“I put him in tournaments or camps, and kids would win trophies and he’d say, ‘Dad, don’t worry about it. I’ll win the big one’ — and sure enough, he won the MVP award when he played travel ball and stuff like that,” Octavio Duran said. “He never ceases to amaze me, the things he does.”

The Red Sox took Duran in the seventh round out of Long Beach State in 2018, and he made the Futures Game the next year. Soon he was a consensus top-100 prospect, but largely struggled in his first two seasons before a breakout 2023 that ended with toe surgery in August.

This year, Duran has hit .284/.342/.477, with an AL-best 27 doubles, an MLB-high 10 triples and 10 home runs. He’s fourth in the league in extra-base hits — trailing only Judge, Gunnar Henderson and Bobby Witt Jr. — and with 22 steals in 26 tries, he embodies the spirit of the surprising Red Sox.

After consecutive last-place finishes and a tentative, low-budget offseason, Boston reached the All-Star break at 53-42, holding the third wild-card spot in the AL playoff field.

“We just have a lot of young guys, man, that love to play the game,” Duran said. “We play every game hard. We run out ground balls, we put pressure on the defense, we’re staying together and we’ve got each other’s backs. I know we get beat up sometimes, but the way we come back and fight back is a huge thing. That’s awesome out of a young team.”

The Red Sox are still searching for a national identity; their best player, Rafael Devers, keeps a low profile and skipped the All-Star Game to rest a sore shoulder. The most identifiable Red Sox figure in the AL dugout Tuesday was surely David Ortiz, the retired slugger working for Fox.

Ortiz is one of 13 Red Sox players to hit an All-Star homer before Tuesday. It’s a list heavy in Hall of Famers and other boldface names.

Duran now stands with them. He called his All-Star experience surreal, but he earned it with his first-half performance. Then he confirmed his new status with the swing of the night.

“I’m just very thankful,” Duran said. “It’s hard to put into words. It won’t hit me until I try to go to sleep tonight. Who knows if I’ll be able to sleep tonight?”

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(Top photo of Jarren Duran: Maddie Malhotra / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images)