Alex Cora, who until Saturday was manager of the Boston Red Sox, played 14 seasons in the big leagues. But his feel for the game was honed years earlier as a kid hanging around baseball clubhouses in his native Puerto Rico.
His late father, Jose Manuel Cora, was in the game for years as a broadcaster and youth coach. And Alex was just 11 when his older brother, Joey Cora, made his big-league debut with the San Diego Padres.
That Alex Cora is a baseball lifter is practically stamped on his forehead.
What a cruel hoax, then, that on Saturday, Cora was fired by a team whose chief baseball officer, Craig Breslow, performs his duties in a way that suggests a man who’s never so much as stepped inside a big-league clubhouse. And there’s the rub: Breslow actually gutted out 12 seasons as a lefty reliever, including two tours with the Red Sox. Just as Cora played on a World Series winner with the 2007 Red Sox, Breslow pitched for the 2013 World Series champion Red Sox.
And yet the roster Breslow assembled for the 2026 season looks as though it was stitched together just hours before Opening Day. He assembled a team with too many outfielders and too few power hitters. Since spring training began in 2025, the third-base position has regressed from Rafael Devers to Alex Bregman to Caleb Durbin. The defense stinks. The starting pitching was supposed to be a strength. It has not been.
But it gets worse. Remember when Bregman joined the club last season and instantly brought leadership and accountability to the clubhouse? Yes, Bregman’s arrival was horribly botched, given that he was acquired to play third base, the idea being that Devers would DH and learn how to play first base. Thus began a chain of events that culminated with Devers being “traded” to the San Francisco Giants, the word “traded” being used in quotes because it was really just a deal to unload the more than $250 million remaining on Devers’ contract.
Bregman missed time with injuries, but he brought that aforementioned leadership and accountability to the clubhouse. Young Sox players crowded around him. He played one season with the Red Sox and then went back into free agency. One would think Breslow, having kicked around the big leagues and having been in big-league clubhouses for all those years, would see value in that.
Bregman was the goods, and the Red Sox should have given him everything he wanted — the money, the no-trade clause — to get him signed. Now he’s with the Chicago Cubs, and the Red Sox have too many young players and too few leaders.
You can blame Breslow for that or you can blame ownership, but it’s disingenuous to blame Cora. But it’s easier to blame the manager (and the five members of his staff who were also let go). It always is. It’s just that the 2026 Boston Red Sox are a true Island of Misfit Toys, seemingly built from spare parts and on hunches. It’s a team built to kinda, sorta contend for a wild-card spot, which is new Red Sox math, instead of being built to shock, awe and intimidate, which was the old Red Sox way. I guess you need a fall guy when your kinda, sorta playoff contender can’t contend, and, well, Cora has taken the fall.
This isn’t to say Cora doesn’t deserve criticism. To offer just one recent for-instance, consider the dumb, stupid base-running mistake Marcelo Mayer made in the ninth inning of Boston’s 10-3 loss to the Baltimore Orioles on Friday night at Camden Yards. The bases were loaded, nobody out, and Carlos Narváez hit a fly to shallow right. Trevor Story, the runner at third, pretended to tag and then returned to the bag. The throw went through to catcher Adley Rutschman, who spotted Mayer, the runner on second, wandering far off the bag. Rutschman easily threw him out.
For anyone choosing to cite this as just the latest example of a dead-ass ballclub whose manager is unable to inspire his players to keep performing at a high level regardless of the circumstances, you have just cause to do so. Or you can look at the misshapen roster and the lack of clubhouse leadership and ask who put this mess together.
That would be Craig Breslow, who, believe it or not, once lived in big-league clubhouses. Lots of them. He soldiered on, year after year, with organization after organization. He was released five times. In 2018, at age 37, he pitched at three levels of the Toronto Blue Jays’ farm system as part of one last effort to get back to the big leagues.
How strange that a guy who’s been in so many clubhouses doesn’t seem to know how they work. How strange that a guy who has been on so many rosters hasn’t figured out how to build one.
