Alex Cora-- what do we have here? Perhaps the best manager in baseball.
- Thread starter Stanley Steamer
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No, no ... False equivalency. McNamara was regularly subbing in Stapleton late in games when ahead for a hobbled Buckner. He didn't do it in game 6 for the same reason Grady didn't take Pedro out and Farrell abandoned a platoon of Nava/Gomes to just play Gomes in the post season: intangibles. Oy.
Do we know if the Sox are or are not doing this? I'd like to know for sure. Anyone have confirmation? If not, I want my money back.
It definitely shows. Meanwhile TB does and their players aren’t making near what ours are.
Fat and lazy rich ball players. Fun to root for!
Fwiw, the Athletic ran this article in February about the Red Sox trying a new approach to defensive drills.
https://theathletic.com/2404347/2021/02/23/inside-red-sox-defensive-laboratory/?source=user_shared_article
Inside the ‘laboratory’ the Red Sox are using to fix their infield defense
https://theathletic.com/2404347/2021/02/23/inside-red-sox-defensive-laboratory/?source=user_shared_article
If they don't run basic drills to stay sharp, I really do think Cora should be fired. I understand that on some days you gotta let them rest, say the day after late night travel, etc. But the gears gotta stay greased.
I think we're finding a theme with Cora's team: undisciplined. It might work with a group of stars all playing at peak levels like the 2018 team: just stay out of their way. But the laissez-faire bullshit ain't working otherwise and certainly not this year. And I don't mean he needs to be a hard ass Earl Weaver type. It just means staying disciplined, and keeping everyone focused and fundamentally sound. That is not this team and Cora should be accountable.
They really often play horrendous baseball, despite having a pretty substantial amount of talent. Great coaches get the most of their talent. Cora ain't doing that either.
I agree with Berg, there is no way he's fired - horrendous politics/PR/etc. But he should get some directives for the 2022 season, and if they're not met, then that's that ...
So, they are doing drills? ...Is this from spring training, or an on going practice? If the latter my last post is moot on that point ...(I don't get the Athletic)
The question is - if they don’t do drills now, will he implement it mid season? If he doesn’t, he doesn’t deserve to coach a MLB team.
The “lab” was implemented at the start of spring training. The article didn’t say if they would continue it during the regular season.
I'd be surprised if they're not doing some sort of daily defensive drills. Think about it, Chaim Bloom comes here from Tampa, where they do this daily and it seems to have a positive effect on their defensive play. You think he's not going to say to Cora, "We did this thing in Tampa for 15 (or whatever it is, 20, 30) minutes a day and it seems to have a positive effect on our defensive performance, but it's up to you whether or not you want to implement it."
And Alex Cora, who sat out a year because he helped devise a pitch signaling system in Houston trying to squeeze every competitive edge he could, and brought an element of it here (one albeit modified to be more in accordance with the present rules), effectively says to Bloom, "Nah, I've always been a roll the balls out type going back to my playing days, uninterested in extra work or finding small ways to increase the chances of winning, because why do that when you can just rely on your talent alone to overcome your opponent?"
Maybe I'm wrong and something like that is not part of their daily routine, but I would be surprised if that's the case.
It's not like we need to know the exact shape of what Cora is doing to know what the outcomes are.
This is not working. Whatever "this" is.
This is not working. Whatever "this" is.
I take the fact that Pete Abraham felt compelled to tweet about the Rays doing it as suggestive that it's not all that common around the league, in particular for the Red Sox. That tweet was from before Monday's game, so it's not like he was inspired by the shitshow of that game to focus on it. He saw something different and reported it as such.
Bingo. Pete sees (and suffers through) every game. There's no way what the Rays are doing is routine. And given he tweeted it during a dreadful 4 error game by the Sox, it's clear he was making a point.
The defensive lab stuff is hilarious because it clearly didn't work worth a damn. This is the worst defensive team I've ever seen.
Maybe he wont get fired because his boss understands that he, his boss, put together a flawed team that, if things went right enough, could nevertheless contend for a WC with better things on the horizon. Unfortunately, Cora has mismanaged them into contending for a WC. They are indeed substantially talented at some things, and they are substantially *not* talented at others.
No one has any idea how much "laissez-faire bullshit" is happening. Yet many assume it's lot, because of unwilingness to assign any blame at all to the players themselves. (As if players deserve "blame" for sucking at certain aspects of the game; but that's another discussion). Like the players and every other manager, Cora's far from perfect. But I'm guessing that if any of us has watched the first 140 games of some other teams' seasons we'd find that plenty of other managers suck more than Cora does.
You may well be right. And I actually think most Red Sox managers have been bad - liking Cora second best after Francona after 45 years of watching the Red Sox closely. Yes, the players deserve blame and roster construction, too. And Cora has his strengths. Though I think those strengths play well into a team that doesn't need a lot of guidance, like the 2018 team, and that's been sort of revealed this season.
There is certainly lots of conjecture here about laissez-faire stuff. I don't know for sure, but, like everyone else, looking at context clues and making a guess informed, again, by over 40 years of watching not just baseball but many sports. Well-coached teams in all sports seem to share some qualities: they know how to play defense, they are fundamentally sound, they play intelligently and minimize unforced errors, they play with consistent energy and focus, they put the whole ahead of individual glory, and they find creative solutions to problems.
I'm not sure any of these things are happening with the 2021 Red Sox. Indeed, it is a very flawed construction, and in some ways Scwarber's addition exacerbated perhaps the main achilles heal (D), albeit while lengthening the line up.
There is an element to watching sports and in making posts here: there are many things we can't know, and the internal reality is certainly more complex than what we see. But that doesn't mean we can't make reasonably insightful subjective observations. It seems a common trump card, in response to criticism: well, how you can you KNOW that? You can't ... but you can make informed guesses, and if evidence proves them wrong you say so.
I don't have it out for Cora, nor do I find him to be the cause of all their problems. I see him more critically now, then at the start of the season, and it is absolutely not arguable that the Red Sox are an undisciplined team: they are free swingers with no plate discipline (until Schwarber came along, though he really put that in relief with his mature disciplined at bats), they run the bases wildly and stupidly, they are terrible fielders who not only make physical errors, but also mental ones, and they have a poor capacity to execute some common fundamentals .....
So .... not sure where to go with that totality but to eye the coach, even if it's not all on him.
Devers and Dalbec are the error leaders. Everyone is worried about Verdugo's last couple outings. Two pre-arb guys and one arb-year player (who's also our MVP). So it's not about the money.
I'll definitely say, the defensive shortcomings are weird. I wouldn't call anyone lazy when in fact I have no idea how hard they work or not. But I would guess that they are lacking in the right mindset, be it lack of reps, or discomfort, or lack of confidence. Not sure. Every ML player has taken literally tens of thousands of reps in the field by now in his life. They know how to do this. But baseball psychology is such a huge part of the game, always. And Cora nailed that aspect in 2018.
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These strike me as little more than a series of well-worn bromides that are either meaningless or mean only what the individual speaker wants them to mean.
2018 was not the walk in the park that’s being portrayed. Cora managed his ass off with the pitching staff in the playoffs. The infield had a lot of moving parts, including releasing Hanley. Finally, there were many who were absolutely terrified of the MFY during the regular season.
got to give the manager some credit for the only 100 win season in my lifetime.
got to give the manager some credit for the only 100 win season in my lifetime.
He also had way better defensive players in general in those years. The Benintendi-Bradley-Betts outfield was one of the best defensive outfield trios in team history, and Moreland covered a ton of mistakes at first for Devers and Bogaerts. "Psychology" has very little to do with it.
Or the rotation completely imploded (2019) and the bullpen was a bunch of spare parts (2021).
That was the point really. If you attribute some kind of magical leadership plus to Cora's stewardship of the 2018 team, it's fair to ask why he deliberately withheld the same from the 2019 and 2021 teams.
There are things a manager can do to influence games by setting a tone and so forth, as well as implementing organization-wide philosophies for game approach (shifts/baserunning strategies) and there is certainly direct game management of players (starting/matchups/etc.) From what we've seen of Cora, he's not very good at the discernible stuff, like shifts/baserunning/roster-use/matchups/situational hitting, etc. He's not terrible at some things, but there's nothing that shows up in the numbers to indicate he's a good manager.
Well, apart from his magical 2018 motivational skills he hasn't decided to use since then.
I looked this up to understand your meaning better. What a vocabulary champ. I'm sorry that this is a wasteful and nerdy post but I had to stop to say something about the creative articulation here. This is why people read this board. Thanks for the vocab lesson.
Also I agree with your point here, lol
This seems too clever by half. Sometimes breaking down movements can be helpful if an athlete has a specific deficiency in a specific part of a movement. Often, breaking down a movement just breaks down a movement - you get good at each step in the process but then have trouble putting it all together.
I hope I'm not misunderstanding your post here (or the series of them leading up to this), but I think the speculation is that BECAUSE of the personnel that was on the 2018 team, Cora handled the situation perfectly.
His strange lax attitude in Spring Training for the '19 season and then stepping up his leadership skills during the "World Series Hangover" seemed to really tear the team apart for the first month, and then they found themselves battling uphill. Cora's personality worked with a bunch of very talented young and hungry players in '18 and then when they weren't hungry anymore, he never really stepped up his game to get some focus from basically the same crew in '19.
I suspect that this current core - and I really am laying the blame here almost equally on Vazquez, who, as a Catcher is supposed to be the defacto field captain... but his personal shortcomings haven't been corrected by Cora, and in fact just the opposite. There's been no apparent discipline of him from what I can tell. Plawecki has basically proven himself to be a more than capable starter this season but still only gets one start behind the dish.
I know there's things we're not privvy to but I can only speak to what I am able to read and observe. Which in essence is- the team is undisciplined and lacks focus. Vazquez, as the field captain is the stinking leader of that. Cora does nothing about it, which reinforces and buttresses that lack of discipline.
Well, some of my posts are mocking the idea Cora has a special sauce - praised when he applies it (2018) and praised when he withholds it "because Reasons" (2019, 2021.)
If you want my personal opinion, it's close to what you've laid out:
Cora got out of the team's way to the proper extent in 2018 - and good for him.
In 2019 he scuttled spring training and the team nose-dived out of the gate to Cora's many assurances "they would get there." Despite being in contention for a WC spot at the end of July, the team stumbled to a non-berth.
In 2020 he was banned from baseball for a year due to his key and central role in cheating for over a year with the Astros - giving the entire sport a black eye and tainting the Astro's WS victory.
In 2021 he was rehired by the Sox and seemed to do well enough until August when the team nose-dived again. He seemed unable to right the ship or motivate players, just like 2019. He presided over an 11 man COVID breakout, post vaccinations.
Unless the Sox make a good showing in the post-season, I don't know how they can stick with him.
It didn't hurt that our best players had some of their best career years...
Mookie - 186 OPS+ (second career best 148)
Xander - 135 OPS+ (slightly lower than his career best 138 in 2019)
JD Martinez - 173 OPS+ (second career best 168 in 2017)
Andrew Benintendi - 123 OPS+ (second career best 118 in 2016))
Steve Pearce - 141 OPS+ with the Sox (his career best was 157 in 2014)
Devers actually had a pretty bad year, I don't remember that at all.
But when you have a lot of your key players performing that well, it makes the managers life a lot easier.
Anyway - I don't know why this team slips into periods of time where they are so terrible. It's really wild.
2019 rotation: Sale 4.40 ERA before being shut down for TJ surgery; Eddie, stellar, 19-6, 3.81, Price 6-11, 4.40, Porcello 14-12 somehow with 5.52 ERA, Eovaldi 5.99 ERA. FIPs are slightly better but if that isn't imploding after a World Champion level performance...? I suppose my 2021 statement is an exaggeration based on the fact that the bullpen had been collectively performing well for a while but has suddenly turtled.
Let's not forget that Eovaldi missed half the year because of elbow surgery, then spent time in the bullpen working his way back. The 2019 rotation was a train wreck outside of ERod.
It's so strange to have that kind of variance in performance year to year. Some players sure, but for everyone to collectively shit the bed feels like a problem similar to the 2011 meltdown.
There might be a case to be made about the way those guys were used in the playoffs and it affecting them in the following season. Or the way they were handled in spring training got them off on bad footing.
Truth is probably that two of them were hurt (Sale and Eovaldi) and two of them were just cooked (Price and Porcello).
Fair points. This all started with a discussion about whether Cora did his job that year, and while I suppose that's debatable, I tend to believe the performance dropoffs had much more to say about that season than Cora's shtick not working anymore. But hey, we just saw Brad Stevens get kicked upstairs because his shtick stopped working, so I guess this is to coaching careers like death is to the rest of us.
To answer only the last, it's because they have a lot of players who aren't consistently good at more than one thing. And if they all happen to do badly at the same thing at the same time, you have terrible.
I don't think 2018, for example, had players who were even capable of defense this bad. So even in a defensive "slump," they were passable. Not this year. If they slip from their best, they're pretty bad.
And the starting pitchers this year are similar. ERod is a surprise and Eovaldi has generally been good, but nearly everyone has wide error bars (I doubt I'm using that right, but you get it). So the team has them, too. Hopefully the good error swing will outweigh the bad swing.
Earl Weaver or Terry Francona couldn't get this team to catch more balls or throw more strikes.
And what was the final result? I mean, you're saying they "imploded" so they must have had a starter performance that was at the very bottom of the league, right? So, what do the numbers say, regardless of the names anyone might prefer they be attached to?
https://www.baseball-reference.com/leagues/majors/2019-starter-pitching.shtml
Uh, what stat are you pointing at? Let's try quality starts. 17th, below average, sandwiched between Pittsburgh and Texas. Average game score, 16th, below average, sandwiched between the Brewers and Giants. Team record (I know, but still...) 50-50 in decisions by a starter, after going 68-38 in 2018. The link comes up with them listed fourth... alphabetically. Anyway, if there is a stat that suggests they followed up 2018 in some respectable way, please point me toward it.
They went from 3.99 runs against / game and a 3.75 ERA to 5.11 runs against / game and a 4.70 ERA. That’s a 28% increase in RA and 25% in ERA. How is that not an implosion?
That ‘19 team was undone by their embarrassing lack of depth. They gave 37 starts to Velazquez, Cashner, Weber, Johnson, Smith, Lakins, Chacin, Poyner, and Taylor and none of them were good. Porcello was mediocre and Eovaldi was mediocre and often hurt. What a weird team. Great lineup, and only one depth guy with a OPS+ over 80.
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You're right, because their starters were average, there's just no way they could have competed. Even though they did for more than half of the season
Starting to wonder if the implication we took from PeteAbe's tweet was correct...
View: https://twitter.com/IanMBrowne/status/1435771035333369859?s=19
View: https://twitter.com/IanMBrowne/status/1435771035333369859?s=19
2 key starting pitchers got hurt. Another key member (Price) was on and off the IL. Most teams could not withstand that level of injury among key starting pitchers, no matter their record at some random point in July.
Robles with a defense aided wide error bar (mostly in the right direction tonight) performance. There's about 8 solid consistent players and the rest are the proverbial box o chocolates.
Still better than last year, when nearly every pitcher was Anthrax Ripple.
Still better than last year, when nearly every pitcher was Anthrax Ripple.
Is he the best manager in baseball? Probably not, but you kind of have to factor in how many pre-season contenders are thrilled vs disappointed with their managers for context.
There is no question, the Giants, Rays, Brewers, Reds, and Mariners are happy with where they are even if we don't know the details of their in game tactics (aside from Cash who just kills it). The Sox are probably right after the Giants, Mariners and Reds in terms of expected results vs real.
Consequently you've got the disappointments ( Yankees, Padres, Mets, Twins, Angels, Indians, Nats, Phillies). You can argue that more was expected from the Braves, Jays and Dodgers, and that the White Sox and Astros aren't quite as dominant as expected.
Cora has had his fair share of head scratchers. I'd say more than Tito, and fewer than Farrell. Those get heightened when the team is doing poorly, but ignored when things go well depending on your built in opinion. But you really can't fault him for the huge defensive roster flaws or the arms whom his boss gave him to perform. These are not underperforming fielders or bullpen guys. They are pretty much who they are and are being put in positions they shouldn't be asked to excel in.
The bottom line is that they have more than held their own vs over .500 teams (45-42) and have earned their place in the standings with one of the least attractive contending rosters for much of the season. I think Cora as an actual manager is above average which just isn't ever going to be enough for this type of fan base for better or worse.
There is no question, the Giants, Rays, Brewers, Reds, and Mariners are happy with where they are even if we don't know the details of their in game tactics (aside from Cash who just kills it). The Sox are probably right after the Giants, Mariners and Reds in terms of expected results vs real.
Consequently you've got the disappointments ( Yankees, Padres, Mets, Twins, Angels, Indians, Nats, Phillies). You can argue that more was expected from the Braves, Jays and Dodgers, and that the White Sox and Astros aren't quite as dominant as expected.
Cora has had his fair share of head scratchers. I'd say more than Tito, and fewer than Farrell. Those get heightened when the team is doing poorly, but ignored when things go well depending on your built in opinion. But you really can't fault him for the huge defensive roster flaws or the arms whom his boss gave him to perform. These are not underperforming fielders or bullpen guys. They are pretty much who they are and are being put in positions they shouldn't be asked to excel in.
The bottom line is that they have more than held their own vs over .500 teams (45-42) and have earned their place in the standings with one of the least attractive contending rosters for much of the season. I think Cora as an actual manager is above average which just isn't ever going to be enough for this type of fan base for better or worse.
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My Mets fan friend asked me if I wanted to trade Cora for Rojas. Sometimes the grass isn't greener on the other side. Both New York managers Rojas and Boone are awful yet you and SJH both want Cora fired.
Because one of those teams is the direct competition. Writ larger, if Cora sucks, but 29 other managers suck more, then the Sox are in good shape.