‘The Clubhouse: A Year with the Boston Red Sox’ begins streaming on Netflix Tuesday, April 8
A new Netflix documentary series that follows the Boston Red Sox throughout the 2024 Major League Baseball season is shining a new light on players’ mental health.
In the eight-episode The Clubhouse: A Year with The Red Sox, outfielder Jarren Duran opens up on camera about his lifelong struggles with his mental health. Duran, 28, broke out for the Red Sox with an All-Star worthy season last year, but he struggled mightily as a rookie in 2022 and said a series of high-profile errors he made amid a highly critical fan and media environment in Boston left him struggling to the point that he “didn’t even want to be here anymore.”
When director Greg Whiteley asked Duran to clarify whether he meant with the Red Sox or “here on planet Earth,” Duran said, “Probably both. Yeah. Probably both. That was a really tough time for me.”
Duran then admitted that during the 2022 season he once attempted to shoot himself, “but nothing happened.”
“To this day, I think God just didn’t let me take my own life because I seriously don’t know why it didn’t go off,” he said. “But I took it as a sign that, ‘Alright, I might have to be here for a reason,’ so that’s when I started to look at myself in the mirror [differently].”
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Duran’s high expectations for himself and struggles with his self-esteem are documenteed throughout the eight-episode series. The series’ filmmaker Whiteley tells PEOPLE in an interview that he felt Duran wanted to share his story in the series to display struggles they believe other athletes do experience but don’t acknowledge publicly.
“Jarren, to his credit, is absolutely fearless. He really is somebody that is a champion of open and honest dialogue,” Whiteley, an Emmy winner for his work on Cheer and Last Chance U, says. “He is, I think by nature, a kind of shy person, but he’s very principled and he felt strongly — he had indicated to me that there may be others. He’s sure that there are others that struggled in some of the same ways that he did, and he wanted them to know that they weren’t alone.”
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In The Clubhouse, audiences follow Duran as he earned his first All-Star game appearance. The series highlights how Red Sox players, coaching staff and front office executives balance personal life with the lengthy 162-game MLB regular season that takes front and center stage between April and September each year.
“If he felt that by telling his story, it might help others not feel the same kind of loneliness that he felt then he was, he wanted to do it,” Whiteley says of Duran’s willingness to open up for the documentary crew. “I think if you were to get to know Jarren, none of those sentiments would surprise you, and his willingness to share them wouldn’t surprise you either. His heart is firmly in the right place.”
The Clubhouse: A Year with the Boston Red Sox begins streaming on Netflix Tuesday, April 8.