Quick question, who was the Red Sox manager in the utterly forgettable 60-game season of the 2020 Covid-19 campaign? Answer: good old Ron Roenicke. Thankfully nobody was watching since the team was a wretched 24-36 as they didn't even pretend to try to win. Sadly, they couldn't even tank properly in the shortest regular season in MLB history and thus earn the No. 1 pick (it would have been a 1st in franchise history) in the 2021 MLB Draft. Well the pandemic is still here in a big way and despite having our Presidential Election on Tuesday, as I write this late on Friday night, the race still hasn't been officially called in favor of Joe Biden but it's getting mighty close my friends. Anywho, back to the Sox who did their classic Friday night news dump (bonus points for having the balls to do it during this national nightmare) this evening with the much-expected announcement that Alex Cora is back from purgatory to manage the team. He gets a two-year deal with a two-year club option for 2023 and 2024.
Alex picked a perfect time to get punished for cheating with the 2017 Astros (when he was their bench coach) by skipping out on this fake season. Boston had no choice but to fire him in January after all the sordid revelations (and most importantly for the Red Sox owners: bad publicity) came to light. The Red Sox and MLB in general have plenty of issues to get back to relevance since nobody under the age of 95 watches or cares about baseball even a little bit but for Boston, this was a most obvious quick fix. Let's be real, managers in MLB have very little to do with winning or losing, they are more like the figure heads of their franchises. They need to make sure the star players are happy and keep everyone else's spirits up while the nerds in the team's analytics departments give them lengthy print outs to closely follow in each game.
Look no further than the 2020 World Series for an example of how useless managers have become in baseball: Tampa Bay's Kevin Cash pulled ace Blake Snell in a must-win Game 6 way too early (because that's what the spreadsheets said to do) and the Dodgers ended up rallying to capture their first World Series title since 1988. Thanks dorks! Whatever happened to having a feel for the game? I guess that doesn't exist anymore or more likely, it's not a thing to the Sabermetics crowd. Oddly enough, the two managers that preceded Cora with the Red Sox also won World Series crowns in their first years in charge: Terry Francona in 2004 and John Farrell in 2013. Cora's 2018 was perfect as the team put up a franchise-record 108 wins in the regular season then they barely sweated en route to their fourth World Series title in 15 years.
Way back when, Boston used to be a brutal market to handle for managers and top Red Sox players alike but those days are long gone. I would argue that for most ages outside of senior citizens, the Sox have fallen to fourth-place in terms of popularity behind the Patriots, Celtics and yes even the Bruins. You can't expect Cora to turn things around right away unless the ownership group fortifies this terrible roster with some more talent-namely starting pitchers-but that would force owner John Henry to open up his wallet. After all, his second year was a complete flop as the Sox went 84-78 in 2019. Nope, Cora's biggest role for the time being is to bring positive attention back to the club (which would sound crazy to say years ago but it is 100% valid now) and also supporting the Latino players-Xavier Bogaerts, Rafael Devers, Eduardo Rodriguez, Christian Vazquez and J.D. Martinez who happen to still be most of their best players. At age 45 not to mention being a proud Puerto Rican, Cora by nature is able to relate so much better to modern players than the typical old white guy baseball lifer that happens to be a manager in MLB.
I'd like to think that baseball will learn from its myriad mistakes from this past doomed summer: letting teams stay at home and travel to road games while not utilizing a bubble until the postseason was a mind-numbingly stupid decision although not quite on par with allowing LA's third baseman Justin Turner to run around after Game 6 without a mask when he had tested positive for Coronavirus but I digress. For that reason, I doubt that fans will be allowed anytime soon back in Fenway Park assuming that it starts on a somewhat normal schedule. Speaking of which, can they please get rid of the 162-game regular season? Nobody besides ESPN's Tim Kurkjian needs that much baseball in their lives every year.
Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom's pick for manager had to be former Rays outfielder Sam Fuld (currently the Phillies' Director of Integrative Performance-whatever that means) as it apparently came down to Cora and Fuld after the original list of nine candidates had been whittled down to those two guys. Fuld has to be really smart since he graduated from Stanford so you know that Bloom was dying to geek out with him over a shared love of baseball analytics. Unfortunately for them, nobody except the most die-hard fans (which don't really exist anymore for this dying sport) knows who Fuld is or anything about him. Conversely, Cora brings instant name recognition both locally and nationally. I honestly doubt that many people even care that much about the cheating scandal anymore with what else has transpired in the worst year ever. After all, the Astros' manager at the time-A.J. Hinch-was fired by Houston then also suspended for this past season but he was hired just last week to be Detroit's manager. These guys have paid their penance and honestly, baseball more than any other sport has always been a game built on cheating in one form or another: sign-stealing, steroids, pine tar, corked bats, spit balls, etc. Not to get too cheesy here (it is baseball so come on!) but things couldn't be much worse both for our country and the Red Sox at the moment, however with any luck Biden and Cora are the perfect guys to start to turn things around and bring some positive energy back to their respective vitally important positions.
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