Still in Shock: Leftover Thoughts on the Alex Cora Firing
It’s been just over a week since the Red Sox fired their manager and five of his coaches, and the resulting picture hasn’t become any clearer.
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It’s been over a week since the Boston Red Sox made the shocking decision to fire manager Alex Cora and five members of his coaching staff, and the resulting picture hasn’t become any clearer.
For the most part, Chad Tracy’s Red Sox have looked a lot like they did on Cora’s squad, winning the first two games of his tenure before scoring a combined one run in consecutive losses against the Blue Jays. Then they scored just seven total as they dropped a three-game set with the Astros.
While it may take weeks or even months to see the true impact of these moves, the decision to gut Cora and his coaching staff revealed some harsh truths about the organization and the direction in which it is heading.
Here are seven leftover thoughts from the firing of Alex Cora.
1. There Is No Drama Like Red Sox Drama
With each passing year, the Red Sox feel more like a soap opera than a baseball team.
Since winning the World Series in 2018, the Red Sox have gone through three GMs, traded a future Hall of Famer in Mookie Betts, blew free-agent negotiations with Xander Bogaerts and Alex Bregman, mistreated and ultimately traded franchise cornerstone Rafael Devers, and now fired half their coaching staff less than a month into the season.
From a content creation perspective, the Red Sox are a never-ending gold mine of storylines, but the amount of dysfunction that exists within the organization is not conducive to success.
The teams that consistently find themselves competing for World Series titles almost always have alignment throughout the organization, from the players to the coaching staff to the front office.
The Red Sox, on the other hand, feel engulfed in a never-ending power struggle. Cora’s alignment with ownership in 2023 helped him win out over Chaim Bloom, but it is clear that Breslow’s vision won out this time around.
2. There Is an Important Distinction Between Being a Good Manager and the Right Manager
One thing that has been evident throughout the fallout of Cora’s firing is how revered he is throughout the game. National reporters have referenced rival executives shocked that the Red Sox would let go of one of the best managers in baseball. ESPN’s Buster Olney quoted a rival talent evaluator: “How does it make it better to fire one of the best managers in the game?”
What I believe they are missing is that Cora can both be a great manager and not the best manager for the 2026 Red Sox.
Cora’s fiery, sometimes combative personality can take a good team to the next level, as he did in 2018, but it might not be the right approach to take with a team as young and inexperienced as this Red Sox team.
It is a red flag whenever you have players talking publicly about how much they were pressing and the pressure they were putting on themselves, and it’s worth wondering if they would benefit from someone more even-keeled like Chad Tracy.
3. The Offense Needed a New Voice
For all the talk about the roster construction, which is admittedly flawed, the amount of regression from the returning players was jarring. The quartet of Garrett Crochet, Brayan Bello, Trevor Story and Jarren Duran was instrumental in the Red Sox’s playoff run last season, but those four have combined for a negative bWAR in 2026.
While you can’t put their struggles solely on the coaching staff, the sheer magnitude of underachievement gave evidence to the idea that a new voice was needed. This was especially true on the offensive side of the ball, where Wilyer Abreu was the only everyday returning player coming anywhere close to replicating their 2025 production.
More concerning than just the surface-level results was the underlying process. From the start of the season to the loss to the Orioles, when the decision to fire Cora was made, the Red Sox ranked at or near the bottom in nearly every offensive category:
| Runs | 95 | 26th |
| Home Runs | 15 | T-29th |
| BB% | 8.8% | 23rd |
| K% | 23.0% | 13th-highest |
| Batting Average | .226 | 27th |
| On-Base Percentage | .306 | 26th |
| Slugging Percentage | .335 | 30th |
| WRC+ | 78 | 30th |
| GB% | 46.9% | 2nd-highest |
| Outside Swing% | 33.4% | 9th-highest |
| Zone Swing% | 63.5% | 27th |
The only major categories in which the Red Sox didn’t rank in the bottom half of the league were average exit velocity (ninth) and hard-hit percentage (eighth), but that just speaks to how poor they were at maximizing their batted balls.
At a certain point, when the approach is this poor and the results are this bad, you have to start questioning the game-planning and the overall offensive philosophy. There is no guarantee that this new coaching staff will right the ship, but it’s clear that whatever was going on simply wasn’t working.
4. The Decision To Keep Andrew Bailey Was Justified
While Breslow took a wrecking ball to the offensive infrastructure, the pitching side of the coaching staff was left untouched. While some believed that pitching coach (and Breslow’s close personal friend) Andrew Bailey should have been among the casualties, his argument to keep his job was much stronger than that of the offensive coaches.
Though the Red Sox ranked 20th in MLB with a 4.44 ERA the day Cora was fired, that figure was heavily inflated by Crochet’s 1.2-inning, 10-run catastrophe against the Twins and Bello’s disastrous season-long struggles.
Bello’s performance in particular has dragged down the entire pitching staff. Taking out his numbers would improve the team’s ERA by about half a run.
This is not to say that the Red Sox should have a top-10 pitching staff – for that comparison to work, other teams should be allowed to take out their worst pitchers as well – but it reflects that the rest of the pitchers besides Bello have largely done their jobs.
If you zoom out from the early-season sample, it’s undeniable how much progress the pitching staff has made since Breslow took over after the 2023 season.
In just two years, the Red Sox cut their staff ERA from 4.52 (21st in MLB) in 2023 to 3.70 (fifth) last season. While there are certain pitchers that didn’t work out, the success stories, most notably the acquisitions of Garrett Crochet and Aroldis Chapman and the development of Connelly Early and Payton Tolle, far outweigh the failures.
One month of mediocre production doesn’t erase what the pitching infrastructure has accomplished over the last two months, and they deserve the opportunity to drag themselves out of this mess.
5. The Red Sox’s Front Office Will Face Negative Long-Term Consequences
In the early years under the John Henry ownership group, the Red Sox were right up there with the Yankees as a premier free agent destination. They may not have always spent as much as their archrivals, but they were always near the top of the league in payroll, had a clear vision and direction for the franchise, and offered the chance to compete for a World Series title every single year.
The last 20 years have slowly chipped away at that reputation, as the constant shuffling of GMs and questions about ownership’s involvement and willingness to spend created the impression of a dysfunctional franchise even before Craig Breslow arrived in 2023.
Breslow’s tenure has only fed into that idea, specifically in the last year, with the bungling of the Devers/Bregman situation.
His lack of feel and interpersonal skills has helped the worst aspects of the Red Sox organization come to light, displayed once again in the fallout of the firing, when the front office reportedly didn’t let the players ask questions in the team meeting introducing Chad Tracy.
Then came the report on Monday that the Red Sox front office didn’t believe in Story’s bounce-back and disagreed with Cora batting him second in the lineup. While getting ahead of the narrative has been a staple of the Henry tenure, it was surprising to see them do it with someone still on the roster.
The actions of Breslow and Henry may not have a direct impact on on-field performance, but they will undoubtedly affect the team’s ability to recruit free agents. Why would anybody want to commit long-term to such an unstable organization that is more concerned with winning the breakup than supporting their players?
Money and the opportunity to win will always be at the forefront of free-agent decisions, but there are fundamental issues in the way the Red Sox front office behaves that cannot be fixed simply with on-field success.
6. The Youth and Inexperience of the New Coaching Staff Is Cause for Concern
To be clear, this is not an indictment of Chad Tracy for never having played in MLB. Having a big-league career is not a necessary precursor to being an MLB manager, and Tracy’s reputation and popularity during his time in Worcester, along with his wide-ranging experience in player development, are far more important than the fact that his playing career stalled out in Triple-A.
This also doesn’t apply to new bench coach Jose Flores, who was Tracy’s bench coach in Worcester from 2022-2024 before becoming the Red Sox’s first base coach at the beginning of 2025, or third base coach Chad Epperson, the former Portland Sea Dogs manager who has spent over 25 years with the organization and interviewed for the Nationals’ manager job last year.
My main concern lies largely with the new hitting coaches, none of whom has ever coached or played in the big leagues and who all have fairly shallow resumes.
John Soteropulos, 32, is the lone holdover after joining the staff as an assistant hitting coach in October 2025, while former Worcester hitting coach Collin Heltzer, 35, will serve as an interim hitting coach. Rookie ball coach Jack Simonetty, 26, was promoted to interim hitting assistant.
Soteropulos and Heltzer have a pre-existing relationship from their time at Driveline, the self-proclaimed “best data-driven player development system in the world, in any sport,” by founder and Red Sox special assistant Kyle Boddy.
The Driveline-ifacation of the Red Sox has been in the works for years and has ramped up during Breslow’s tenure. They have hired nine people from the company, more than any other organization.
Yet what happened last week represents a key inflection point, as the tug-of-war between the data-driven philosophies in the minor leagues and the more traditional approaches of the major league coaching staff was definitively won by Breslow and company.
Ultimately, Driveline’s core principle of maximizing bat speed, exit velocity and launch angles is how offense should be taught and prioritized in the modern game, and there is something to be said about a cohesive message between the minor and major leagues.
At the same time, going too deep into the analytics can have negative repercussions, particularly with a position player group as young as this one. Offensive baseball is more than a collection of data points. The ability to make in-game adjustments, something veteran players reportedly feel has been lost in recent years, does not figure to be a strength of this new-look hitting group.
A coaching staff is only as good as the buy-in it gets from the players, and it’s worth questioning whether MLB hitters are going to trust the message given to them by a bunch of guys who cut their teeth at a Driveline facility rather than climbing up the minor league ladder.
This perhaps explains why Boston later promoted veteran minor league coach Nelson Paulino, 53, to the role of interim hitting coach as well. Paulino has not played or coached in the majors either, but the former minor league infielder has been working in the Red Sox organization since 1998.
7. Everything Is Now on Craig Breslow
There’s a lot you can say about Breslow’s tenure as Red Sox chief baseball officer, but you can’t say he isn’t bold. There aren’t many executives who would trade their franchise superstar under contract for the next eight years in the middle of June, and there aren’t many who would fire six coaches after a poor opening month.
With that being said, Breslow is smart enough to realize that the target is now squarely on his back. He has handpicked both the roster and the coaching staff, and how the Red Sox play the rest of the season is a direct reflection of his vision and decision-making.
This season has been a mixed bag for the Breslow Vision. His supporters (few as they may be) will point to the hot starts of new acquisitions Ranger Suárez and William Contreras and the fact that the decision to trade Rafael Devers looks better by the day.
His detractors, meanwhile, are particularly up in arms about the decision to replace Alex Bregman with Caleb Durbin, who currently possesses the majors’ fourth-worst OPS at .502 and is emblematic of an offense severely lacking in power.
At the end of the day, baseball is a result-driven business, and the product on the field has not been nearly good enough. While he may have won the head-to-head against Cora, Breslow will have to answer for the situation he created if the Red Sox can’t turn things around.
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Written by
Daniel Fox is a contributing writer for Just Baseball. He has previously written for Pitcher List, BoSoxInjection, and in the Cape Cod Baseball League. He is…