3 Reasons Red Sox Need to Fire Alex Cora

There’s a saying in baseball that every manager is hired to be fired. Even the best managers outlive their usefulness after a while, and they’re often the first to lose their jobs when things go south. After all, it’s a lot easier to fire a manager than it is to rebuild an entire team or front office.

Unfortunately, it appears the Red Sox have reached that point with Alex Cora. We’re now five years removed from his 2018 World Series title, and the club’s underwhelming results lately under his watch suggest it’s time to move on.

Here are three reasons why Boston should fire Cora.

3 Reasons the Red Sox Should Fire Alex Cora

1. Declining Results

When Cora first took as Red Sox manager in 2018, he could do no wrong. The team raced to 108 wins during the regular season (a franchise record) before storming through the playoffs, capping off their charmed season with a World Series title and a duck boat parade.

Since then, however, things have slowly started to go sour for Cora and the organization. The team slipped to 84 wins and missed the postseason in 2019, then Cora was suspended for the 2020 campaign due to his role in the 2017 Astros’ sign-stealing scandal (evidence of cheating was also found during Cora’s 2018 season with Boston).

The Red Sox “parted ways” with Cora prior to the 2020 season, but re-hired him for 2021 once his suspension ended. Cora rewarded them with 92 wins and a playoff berth, but things started going wrong during the second half and have never really improved. Since July 29, 2021, the Sox have been four games below .500 during the regular season. They finished last in the AL East in 2022 and are last again in 2023.

It’s now been more than two calendar years of bad baseball for Boston under Cora, which has been defined by an endless string of mental lapses and defensive/baserunning miscues. At various times, the Red Sox have lacked focus, determination and hustle under Cora, requiring him to discipline players and shoulder the blame for their poor performance.

Whatever Cora’s doing to fix these preventable errors clearly isn’t working, so it’s time to find someone new who can get through to these guys.

2. Bad Decision-Making

In 2018, Cora pushed all the right buttons. When your team wins 119 games including the playoffs, you must be doing something right.

Since then, however, Cora’s decision-making has often come under scrutiny. He pushed his starting pitchers hard during that 2018 title run, using David Price, Chris Sale and Nate Eovaldi in relief on their scheduled bullpen days. This win-at-all-costs mentality succeeded in 2018, but backfired spectacularly in 2019 when they ended up getting hurt, likely due to overuse.

Cora has tended to run relief pitchers into the ground as well, notably Matt Barnes in 2021 and John Schreiber in 2022. Bullpen management is always easy to nitpick, and that’s been especially true of Cora.

His handling of position players has also raised questions. He’s been much more cautious with them for some reason (perhaps because he was a position player himself), often sticking to their scheduled rest days and keeping them out of the lineup for important games. He’s also played players out of position (remember Bobby Dalbec at shortstop?) far too frequently and has tended to give too much leash to struggling players like Andrew Benintendi in 2019, Jarren Duran in 2022 and Enrique Hernandez this year.

While Cora hasn’t always had the best players to work with thanks to Chaim Bloom’s poor roster construction, Cora isn’t without fault for sometimes asking too much of his players and not putting them in the best position to succeed.

3. Roster Turnover

Cora’s job description has changed immensely during his time with the Red Sox. When he was hired in 2018, his job was to win a World Series with a loaded roster, and he did exactly that.

Since then, however, the organization’s goals have changed. Boston hasn’t been seriously attempting to win a championship since 2019. During Bloom’s tenure, his mission has been to build up the farm system and compete for a Wild Card if everything breaks right at the major-league level.

In that sense, Cora isn’t really the right man for the job anymore. He wants to win now, not break young guys in and babysit prospects. That takes a different type of manager with a different type of skill set, whereas Cora is better suited for managing veteran players.

The problem is, there’s virtually no one left who won with Cora in 2018. Thanks to roster turnover and the departure of so much talent under Bloom, Rafael Devers and Chris Sale are the only holdovers from the 2018 champions. Most of the current roster arrived more recently and has no experience of winning a title with Cora, so they have less reason to play hard for him and trust him.

For whatever reason, Cora just can’t seem to motivate his players the same way he did in 2018. He’s often seemed checked out at times as well, as he’s clearly dissatisfied with the direction of the organization and his lack of available resources.

At the end of the day, Bloom and Cora want different things. Cora wants to win now, and Bloom wants to win later. When that happens, it’s usually a sign that it’s time to break up.

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