The Boston Red Sox re-introduced Alex Cora as the manager of the team on Tuesday on the field at Fenway Park. Cora apologized for putting the club in a tough spot after he cheated with the Houston Astros in 2017. He gave a very interesting response when he was asked by a reporter on the Zoom call why he didn’t decide to bring the same cheating methods he used in Houston over to Boston in 2018.
For people who watched his reply to the reporter at the press conference, it sounded like he wasn’t too prepared for it. “I didn’t feel like we needed to do something like that honestly,” he said about the 2018 Red Sox. “I know people will not believe me in that sense, why not bringing it here if it was that effective. I don’t know. I just decided in that offseason to not bring it here.”
It’s a relief for Red Sox fans to hear that he believed in his players on the 2018 team so much that he didn’t need to cheat, but it also sounds insulting to the Astros. He obviously believed that the 2017 Astros weren’t good enough to win straight up, so he made up a process using cameras so they could see the catcher’s signs and cheat.
The Red Sox, according to Cora, made it known that they didn’t want cheating to be involved in their dugout. “The organization was very loud and clear about the whole sign-stealing stuff and what happened before with the organization and other organizations,” Cora said. “They walked me through it in the meetings in spring training with MLB. When I talked to them, it was like, ‘Wow, I better not even try to do something like that.’”
Cora knows this will be his very last shot at being a manager in baseball, and so he can’t afford to screw it up. “If I fail at this, I’m out of the game.” Some people think he should have never got a second chance, but he is back in Boston and ready to lead the Red Sox yet again.
(Photo courtesy of Frank Franklin II/ AP)
