How Not to Boost Merch Sales

 

Only Boston, man. Nowhere else in the country can a guy drop a homophobic slur only for his jersey sales to rise rather than fall. 

The Jarren Duran thing has sort of clouded over a lot of the other Red Sox activity this week, solely because the Sox were kind of threading the middle of the line for a while anyhow. Like, getting Danny Jansen helped, the James Paxton thing went about as well as you'd expect, as did the Luis Garcia thing. They're not chasing 2nd at this rate, and the Royals and Twins are pretty confidently holding onto the nearest wild card spots. So when nothing's really going on one way or another, the team's best player telling an Astros fan to shut up in the most offensive way possible is gonna field some attention. 

And like...there's worse insults for Astros fans. 'Astros fan' is pretty damning already. You could call them posers, bandwagoners, people that abet cheating, stuff like that. You don't have to evoke slurs or anything. Hell, you wanna get back at rude fans, hit a home run! That'll shut 'em up. But Jarren Duran just went for it, and suffered with a suspension for a couple games. I don't think there's gonna be a long lasting stigma against him, and Liam Hendriks is already jumping in to go 'hey, he didn't mean it'. And considering that he's probably gonna be their star for a while, Duran might just need to do some damage control and hope it blows over.

But this causing his jersey sales to skyrocket is...appalling. When players get PED suspensions or abuse suspensions the jersey sales usually go down because people don't want to associate with players who do that. But...this means the inverse is true in this case. Which is...wild. Especially coming from Boston sports fans, who any visiting black outfielder will tell you aren't the best judges of character. So I'm...struggling to relate to the moral judgment that prompted this trend. But I'm not a Boston sports fan, and I'm not a very hateful person.

The Sox themselves are at least trying to let their gameplay speak for themselves, and they still have Wilyer Abreu, Rafael Devers, Ceddanne Rafaela and Tanner Houck working on excellent seasons. I'm also just impressed that Kenley Jansen has stuck around long enough to become a well regarded perennial closing option in Boston. Obviously he's gonna be best remembered for his Dodgers seasons, but he's been strong for the Sox, and 51 of his 442 career saves have come in Boston. There are shortcomings to this Sox team, which is why they're not in the race as firmly as they'd like to be, but they have a lot more to work with than people previously thought.

The Sox have the opportunity to ensure this team outlasts the Duran thing. It remains to be seen whether they have the team to do so.

Coming Tonight: Many people thought his career was basically cooked after a rough year in San Francisco last year. But really, all he needed were the right circumstances. It's just...wild to me that this team, of all teams, were the right circumstances for him.