Is Boston Red Sox Key Offseason Acquisition Starting to Figure Things Out?
After being one of baseball's worst hitters to start the season, is the 2025 NL Rookie of the Year finalist starting to put the pieces back together at the plate?
Video Transcript
What's up everyone?
Zach Coe here for Roundtable.
Wanted to take a minute to talk about one of the Red Sox hottest hitters, and it is just as we all suspected, third baseman Caleb Durbin.
Durbin is hitting ,333, .357, .630 with a ,987 OPS in the month of June, launching his first two home runs off of real pitchers of the season, while leading all qualified Red Sox hitters with a 168 WRC plus.
The recent surge, of course, comes in the wake of him being one of the worst qualified hitters, not only on the Red Sox, but in the entire sport through the first two months of the season.
The 26-year-old third baseman has been seen in multiple social media videos working with private hitting coaches, most notably a Thursday afternoon video working with reigning AL MVP Aaron Judge's personal hitting coach.
Durbin talked to WEEI's Rob Bradford on the Baseball Isn't Boring podcast about the changes he's looking to make, discussing how he wants to stay inside the baseball longer and how adjusting his bat path can help that.
It's a really interesting conversation.
It's linked below, only about 10 minutes.
If you want to get inside the mind of a struggling baseball player, I highly recommend that.
But that adjustment has already appeared to pay massive dividends for Durbin.
He's hitting the ball much harder to start the month than he had in the first two months of the season.
In his first 182 plate appearances in 2026, he had only a 28.8% hard hit rate with just three barreled balls.
While in his first 28 appearances in June, he has a 44% hard hit rate, already barreling two balls.
What's most encouraging about Durbin's recent hot stretch is that his BABIP, or batting average on balls in play, is slightly higher than the league average of .300, sitting at .308, meaning that this recent stretch isn't the result of some good batted ball luck.
Unfortunately for the Red Sox, Durbin getting hot is coming just as the rest of the offense is slowing down.
According to Jared Carrabas of the Section 10 podcast, since May 28th, Durbin is hitting .341 with a 984 OPS, while the rest of the Red Sox are hitting just .229 with a 640 OPS combined, as the team has fallen 12 games under 500 in June for the first time since 1997.
Red Sox will look to break out of this funk that they're in when they welcome the Texas Rangers for a three-game set, which gets underway on Friday night at Fenway Park.
Sonny Gray takes the mound opposite Jack Leiter for Texas.
First pitch from Fenway set for 7:10 PM
