NO MARATHON FOR CORA
The season is not a marathon for Alex Cora and five of his coaches with the Boston Red Sox, axed 27 games into the season for failing to sprint to a record ownership and front office deemed sufficient.
The narrative for the Red Sox season is now pinned to this plot turn no matter how the rest of the story plays out. But it’s a developing arc on other teams, too, in the way characters in an ensemble cast weave in and around each other to come to what in retrospect in November will seem like an inevitable conclusion.
It’s a Robert Altman movie of a baseball season and on Saturday John Henry, Sam Kennedy, and Craig Breslow delivered the first disruptive plot twist. The owner, president, and general manager, respectively (though they have more ridiculous actual titles) got on a plane to Baltimore where the Red Sox were in the midst of a series against the Orioles.
Alex Cora
He was part of Series winners with the Sox as a 2007 player and a 2018 manager.
Out were Cora, Pete Fatse (hitting coach), Dillon Lason (assistant hitting coach), Kyle Hudson, third base coach/outfielder instructor, Ramon Vazquez (bench coach), and Joe Cronin (hitting strategy coach). Jason Varitek – captain of the ‘04 Idiots who ended the championship drought – is being reassigned from his role as game-planning coordinator and run-prevention coach.
In come the Chads – Chad Tracy, manager at Triple-A Worcester since 2022, and Chad Epperson from Double-A Portland – joined by Collin Hetzler as hitting coach from Worcester.
It was a Saturday Night Massacre, with apologies to Woodstein. It was regime change in the clubhouse; maybe a diversionary tactic to preserve jobs among the quarter zippers.
As it happened, Cooper Boardman, who is the Voice of the WooSox – Boston's Triple-A affiliate in Worcester – was up sharing the booth with Will Flemming for the three game series in Baltimore. Boardman was able to offer insight into Tracy’s performance in the minors.
“I think everybody’s heads are still spinning,” Will said to start the game coverage. Pregame shows had dissected Kennedy and Breslow’s pressers from earlier in the day.
“Stunning is the word,” Boardman said. “Shocked is the word Trevor Story used.”
“It’s a big fulcrum in the career of Craig Breslow,” Will said. “He went all in with this move and it is on his shoulders to make sure it works.”
Others expressed the sentiment in more colorful terms.
Red Sox Nation Everyman and Baseball Is Not Boring entrepreneur Rob Bradford tweeted out a former player’s sentiment:
“It’s like shitting your pants and changing your shirt.”
Somebody, anonymously, figured it was Breslow who should be out.
A way with words
Sentiment and proxy subtweet provided by @bradfo
No matter the circumstances and no matter the consequences – whether the Red Sox take off and contend or slip into a lost season – this is an inflection point in the story of the season. It is for others to figure out if the change of manager and coaches cause the resurgence or the collapse. But the arc of this year’s season now has a clear demarcation, and it’s not just for the Red Sox.
This season’s larger story reflects this as well. Will the Mets, Phillies, or Astros – all stumbling in the early going – now be under pressure to act, forced to axe their managers? Might one of the owners and front office leaders for those teams think Alex Cora might be the perfect answer for their club?
It reflects the early theme, the high cost of dashed expectations. The Mets, the Red Sox, and the Phillies had fanbases who were told their teams were not just playoff worthy, but legitimate title contenders. In the short part of a long season that has not proved true, even as other very early surprises are in the process of returning to a mean – some even in tandem as this weekend’s Mariners sweep of the Cardinals seemed to reveal the true natures of both Seattle on the way up and the Cardinals falling back to expected performance levels.
But it’s never that easy. A story needs its twists. A narrative requires its turns.
That’s happened in Boston, where Breslow has taken his leap of faith on behalf of his own blief in his ability to construct a roster. (His and Kennedy’s talking points orbited this message: “We believe in the guys in this clubhouse” and insistence their action offered a “fresh start.”) Will Breslow prove to have wings to soar upon or will it be revealed he instead wears a parachute but he has not yet pulled the ripcord?