If it seems weird that the Sox would do this merely to save $125,000 — which is the difference between the $8 million option and the $7.875 million they’ll pay him if he hits his incentives — I agree! That is weird! What is going on here!
The big question, of course, is what this deal means vis a vis a potential trade of Jarren Duan. The fact is, I don’t think it means much, except that a little bit of cost certainty could theoretically help move trade negotiations along.
But I still have to wonder, what is going on here? A few potential things:
1) Duran is under team control through 2028, which also makes him arbitration eligible in 2027 and 2028. So with three years of control, lowering his base salary this year also lowers how much it grows in future years. In other words, the Red Sox didn’t just save $125,000, they probably saved a little over a million by doing this over the three years.
2) There were performance enhancers in the old $8 million contract based on MVP votes. Specifically, the option would have gone to $9 million if he finished among the top 20 in MVP voting. It seems very unlikely Duran would have gotten that, but he did rank 17th in fWAR among position players so it’s not totally impossible.
3) Duran’s camp likely agreed to this new contract because with a $3.75 million base salary to work from in 2025, he almost certainly would have gotten dusted in an arb hearing as getting back to that $8 million number would have required more than doubling his base salary, and that just isn’t likely based on the season he had in 2025. (While there are some figures out there projecting Duran could have gotten over $8 million million in an arb hearing, those sources have tended to overestimate things in the past).
4) If you want to read more into things, there was also reportedly a clause in the old contract that stipulated that, if Duran was traded, the 2026 option would be eliminated and the receiving team would have to negotiate a new contract with him, just like the Red Sox just did, or else go through the arbitration process. But — and granted, we haven’t read the contract language — it’s highly likely that the option would only be voided if he was traded before it was picked up. Once the option is picked up, it ceases to be an option and is just his new contract. And since the Sox had to either pick up or decline the option within five days of the World Series, it doesn’t seem that it would have been all that relevant to trade talks.
So what we’re probably talking about here is the Sox just lowering his base salary for future arbitration years.
