How Alex Cora wound up talking about Roberto Clemente while talking about Jarren Duran

New York Times

10-04-2025

BOSTON — Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora had plenty of time to craft an appropriate message after this week's news that star outfielder Jarren Duran is only three years removed from a suicide attempt. And yet Cora surprised a lot of people — including himself — when he put it out there that Duran deserves to receive baseball's prestigious Roberto Clemente Award.
Advertisement
'It popped into my head while I was talking,' Cora told me Wednesday afternoon, sitting in the first-base dugout at Fenway Park. 'I wasn't planning that. I was talking, I mentioned that (Duran) is saving lives with what he said, and it made me think of Roberto Clemente right then.'
Duran's disclosure about a suicide attempt is included in the fourth installment of 'The Clubhouse: A year with the Red Sox,' an eight-part Netflix documentary that was released this week. Cora, speaking at a Fenway Park news conference Monday afternoon, said, 'I truly believe that him opening up is going to help a lot of people. It takes a person with courage and being transparent and genuine to do that. I hope that's how we see it, right? He will impact others, and he's going to save lives with what he did on Netflix.'
And then Cora brought up the Clemente Award. 'He should win it, to be honest,' Cora said. 'Simply for what he said and what he's doing. He's saving lives, and we're very proud of him.'
"We're very proud of him… he's saving lives. He should be nominated for the Roberto Clemente award and should win it."
Alex Cora on Jarren Duran ❤️ pic.twitter.com/yA9f52bzkf
— NESN (@NESN) April 8, 2025
It's no surprise that Cora is extending his full support to Duran. Though it's tempting to play the back-in-the-day game and wonder how some grumpy manager would have responded then, none of that is relevant to this discussion. This is the third decade of the 21st century, and sensibilities are different. There isn't a manager in the game in 2025 who wouldn't have backed up a player who was brave enough to reveal his mental health struggles.
But what's remarkable about Cora's response is that the Boston manager brought up Clemente, the iconic Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder who was killed on December 31, 1972, while attempting to transport supplies to earthquake-ravaged Nicaragua. The overloaded plane crashed shortly after takeoff from Isla Verde International Airport in Puerto Rico.
Advertisement
Clemente was as well-known for his charity work and his humanitarian efforts as his baseball prowess, and it's in that spirit that the Roberto Clemente Award was established in 1973 and is presented annually to the player 'who best represents the game of baseball through extraordinary character, community involvement, philanthropy and positive contributions, both on and off the field.'
Just as Clemente was born and raised in Puerto Rico, so, too, was Cora.
'I never saw him play … but I saw him play (on videos),' said Cora, who was born nearly three years after Clemente died. 'I see the swing. I see the defense. But I also see the person. And that's what we remember.'
Cora said his late father, José Manuel Cora, a broadcaster on Puerto Rico Winter League games, conducted some baseball clinics with Clemente. He later helped set up Little League baseball in Caguas, Puerto Rico, where Alex and his older brother, Joey, also a future big-leaguer, grew up.
'When we talk about Roberto Clemente, when we talk about him to my kids, to my daughter, they know, yeah, he got 3,000 hits,' Cora said. 'They know his No. 21. And they know he played for the Pirates. But they also know he was as giving a person you'd ever meet. This guy was on top of the world, sports-wise, and something happened in Nicaragua, and he jumped on that plane and decided to help.
'That's what he means to us,' Cora said.
And all that began percolating inside Cora's head when he was talking with the media about Duran.
'I was just talking, and it happened organically,' Cora said.
As reported by The Athletic's Jen McCaffrey, Samaritans, Inc., a Boston-based suicide prevention service, has had a spike in texts to 'Hey Sam,' a text line for people 25 and under. (The text line is 439-726.)
'And then you start thinking about what Jarren has been through, and the thing I can keep coming back to since I found out (about the suicide attempt), and that it was going to become public, is that he's going to be saving lives,' Cora said. 'You see the numbers. Right away, they're talking about teenagers calling and looking for help since Jarren did what he did.'
In 2022, when the Red Sox were in Pittsburgh to play the Pirates, Cora took his players to the Roberto Clemente Museum.
'The guy was, I always said, a Hall of Famer as a baseball player, (but) there has to be something bigger than the Hall of Fame up there,' Cora said that day, per MLB.com. 'And he's part of that.'
Advertisement
And so Cora again brought up Clemente the other day, this time in connection with Duran. I don't think he's doing any actual campaigning here. It just reaffirms how much the Clemente legacy means to the Boston manager. And it confirms just how much Duran means to the Red Sox.
If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.