Caleb Durbin has become one of the clearest symbols of how fast things have changed for the Boston Red Sox.
Boston’s surge from the bottom of the American League to the edge of near-certain playoff contention has come with a few wild individual arcs, and Durbin’s is right near the top. The third baseman got to Boston after a Milwaukee Brewers debut that had him in the National League Rookie of the Year finalist conversation, but the bat didn’t come around right away.
It took more than two months before he really found it, and once he did, the numbers moved in a hurry. His slash line climbed from .190/.250/.307 on June 16 to .251/.322/.408 by August 6.
That rise lined up almost perfectly with the Red Sox taking off as a team. Boston swept the New York Yankees in four games from June 25-28, then ripped off a 15-game winning streak starting July 3, and kept rolling long enough to go 35-5 in a 40-game stretch.
Now the picture looks different. Over his last 15 games, as of September 4, Durbin is hitting .188/.316/.188, and while the walk rate has given him something to hang onto, the overall production has slipped back toward the early-season version of himself. During that same span, the Red Sox beat the Arizona Diamondbacks, San Francisco Giants and Miami Marlins in series play, but they also dropped games to the Yankees and Seattle Mariners and have lost six of their last nine.
That downturn has made Durbin’s importance even easier to see. When he was driving the offense during Boston’s big run, the whole team looked like it had another gear.
As he’s cooled off, the Red Sox have cooled with him. There have been other factors, too - some rough pitching and the start of an injured list stint for Willson Contreras among them - but the timing of Durbin’s rise and fall stands out.
Even in the middle of the slump, Durbin hasn’t disappeared completely. His defense has stayed strong all season, and he’s continued to provide elite fielding while the bat has gone quiet.
Slumps happen over a long baseball season, and Durbin is far from the only Red Sox hitter to go through one. Contreras and Wilyer Abreu have both had their rough patches, along with plenty of others. But Boston’s recent pattern makes the point hard to miss: the Red Sox seem to go as Durbin goes.
The encouraging sign is that he’s still finding ways to reach base. He has six walks in his last seven games, after needing 18 games earlier in the season to get to that same total. The question now is whether this is just a cold stretch or whether the league has started to adjust to the changes he made at the plate.
Either way, Boston needs the version of Durbin that helped fuel its run. With the playoff chase tightening, the Red Sox need him at his best.
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