This past season, Red Sox outfielder Jarren Duran became the ninth player in AL history to pace that league in both doubles and triples – a feat that had last coronated a campaign in 1970, when Twins outfielder César Tovar did it (the others, going backward: Zoilo Versalles in 1965, Joe Vosmik in 1935, Charlie Gehringer in 1929, Bobby Veach in 1919 and Ty Cobb in 1917, 1911 and 1908). While Duran’s double-dip may have been uncommon, the representation of a Red Sox batter leading the league in two-base hits was anything but, as 23 Bostonian predecessors had either topped the Junior Circuit outright or had shared a crown; those 24 are the second highest tally for any franchise since the AL came to be in 1901.
As part of his league-leading 48 two-base hits in 2024, 29 of them – 60.4% – came within the confines of Fenway Park. As with his league leadership, Duran’s percentage (which was the second highest in the Majors among all players with at least 40 doubles on the season) comfortably nests within one of the most dependable couplings produced over the decades: a lot of doubles and Fenway Park.
On Saturday, April 20, 1912, Boston hosted its very first game at Fenway – a 7-6 victory over New York that witnessed five doubles for the home team (including one from its superstar center fielder, Tris Speaker). By season’s end, Boston had both a pennant and more two-base hits than any other franchise had garnered since the AL and NL started sharing the main stage in 1901. The 269 Boston collected that season would never be topped during the rest of the deadball era and to this day, the Red Sox own 10 of the 19 highest single-season team tallies for two-base hits. Fenway Park has been a central figure in the baseball galaxy for 113 seasons now, and regardless of the era or the men calling it home, has served as a most welcome environment for those batters rejoicing in the art of accumulating two bases on a single swing.
Duran’s recent entry into this long-standing relationship is the spur for a deeper dive into some of the players whose totals in the category have received an extra boost from the eye-catching configurations at the Fens. Let’s start with career numbers and revel in the names.
Since 1901, AL-NL history claims 297 players who can boast of at least 350 doubles: a list headed by Speaker and his 792. Of those 297, the first seven on the “highest percentage of career doubles coming at home” played a significant portion of their career with the Red Sox (Speaker, by far, is the biggest stretcher of my “significant” designation).
1901-2024: Highest Percentage of Doubles Coming at Home (min. 350 career Doubles):
| Player | Career Doubles | % of Total From Home Games | % of Games with Boston |
| Bobby Doerr | 381 | 64.5 | 100 |
| Wade Boggs | 578 | 62.6 | 67 |
| Ted Williams | 525 | 60.8 | 100 |
| David Ortiz | 632 | 60.4 | 81 |
| Dustin Pedroia | 394 | 60.4 | 100 |
| Tris Speaker | 792 | 59.1 | 38 |
| Carl Yastrzemski | 646 | 59.1 | 100 |
Closely below that top seven, five other players with notable stints repping the Red Sox appear:
~Dwight Evans (96% of career games with Red Sox) is tied for the ninth highest percentage;
~Fred Lynn (42%) and Nomar Garciaparra (67%) are tied for the 18th highest percentage;
~Carlton Fisk (43%) owns the 21st highest percentage;
~Jim Rice (100%) is tied for the 24th highest percentage.
In this accounting, the top-25 is made up of 12 names who are instantly and heavily attached to the Red Sox. Duran, who has played his entire four-year career with the club, has had 57.6% of his doubles come at home (a figure that would be the 12th highest in the calculation above). Duran’s teammate, Rafael Devers, can state that 57.3% of his 255 career doubles have come at home. Ahh, Fenway.
On September 17, 1931, Boston hosted Cleveland for a doubleheader at Fenway Park, a late-season tilt made memorable by Red Sox outfielder Earl Webb. Webb produced a double in each of the contests, first tying and then surpassing George Burns’ Major League record of 64 two-base hits. Webb would finish the campaign with 67 – a figure that remains unsurpassed to this day.
Considering the terrain that’s been mapped so far, it shouldn’t shock that a Red Sox batsman would hold the single-season mark in the category. Surprisingly, though, that preeminent season didn’t see Webb utilize Fenway in a heavily unbalanced manner, as only 58% of his two-base knocks came at home. That number would shine among the highs for a career, but for a single year, it doesn’t crack a top-200 list.
In AL-NL history since 1901, more than 900 players have amassed at least 40 doubles in a season, with a mere 25 of them seeing at least 70.0% of those two-base hits come at home. While a Red Sox presence is not as voluminous nor as starkly concentrated at the very top, there is enough Beantown flavor to give Fenway another fist bump: 10 of the 25 members of this collection hit the twin high marks with Fenway as their home ballpark.
| Player | Year | % of Total From Home Games | Overall Rank |
| Wade Boggs | 1983 | 77.3 | 3rd |
| Bill Wambsganss | 1924 | 73.2 | t-6th |
| Wade Boggs | 1989 | 72.5 | t-8th |
| Andrew Benintendi | 2019 | 72.5 | t-8th |
| Fred Lynn | 1979 | 71.4 | t-12th |
| Mookie Betts | 2016 | 71.4 | t-12th |
| David Ortiz | 2016 | 70.8 | t-17th |
| Adrián González* | 2012 | 70.2 | t-22nd |
| Billy Werber | 1934 | 70.0 | t-24th |
| Wade Boggs | 1987 | 70.0 | t-24th |
*I’m including González even though he didn’t play a full season with the Red Sox (123 with Boston and 36 with Los Angeles).
Of the 57 active players with at least 200 career doubles, Alex Bregman has seen the fifth lowest percentage of his career two-base hits come at home. Bregman, of course, is now a member of the Red Sox after spending his first nine campaigns in Houston. The two-time All-Star already has one doubles-title on his shelf, with 51 in 2018 (that year, Boston’s Betts was tied for second with 47) – what might the new home digs put into play? Could the newest Bostonian strut toward being the franchise’s 25th doubles king, could the dramatic alteration in home dimensions lift Bregman from one extreme to the other? It’ll be a fun storyline to watch in 2025, a bit of an extra buzz when taking in a game at Fenway Park, the place where doubles dominate.
Thanks to Baseball Reference and its extraordinary research database, Stathead, for help in assembling this piece.
Roger Schlueter
As Sr. Editorial Director for Major League Baseball Productions from 2004-2015, Roger served as a hub for hundreds of hours of films, series, documentaries and features: as researcher, fact-checker, script doctor, and developer of ideas. The years at MLB Production gave him the ideal platform to pursue what galvanized him the most – the idea that so much of what takes place on the field during the MLB regular and postseason (and is forever beautifully condensed into a box score) has connections to what has come before. Unearthing and celebrating these webs allows baseball to thrive, for the present can come alive and also reignite the past.