Red Sox pick up 2023 and 2024 options on Alex Cora
- Thread starter RedOctober3829
- Start date
Good move. I think I griped about Cora in the game threads but at the end of the day this was a tremendous effort to coax strong performances from what felt like a bit of a Frankenstein team at times. I think he has stuff to work on from a managing perspective - whatever techniques were being used to work on defensive fundamentals obviously didn't work out as anticipated - but I think he still strikes a good balance of "player's manager" and extension of the F.O. in terms of executing the vision of how the team is supposed to function. Not an easy thing to do, probably a bit underappreciated at times in the heat of the season.
Can’t complain about results. I have and stil will bitch about the process sometimes… but he deserves this.
He took a super flawed roster to within a game of the World Series. What more do you really want out of a manager? There's nobody they could bring in that is gonna be better than him.
Not a surprise. One of the Sox hard-and-fast rules seems to be "don't ever have a manager in the final year of his contract" - the constant media attention to the "will he or won't he come back?" saga isn't worth the hassle. They obviously weren't going to fire him going into 2022, so they needed to extend him. Besides, manager contracts are the only contracts in baseball that don't cost anything other than money, so there's not much downside in using contract length to show support for the manager.
I’d add that a manager without job security might have incentives that aren’t aligned with ownership — for example, he might ride pitchers too hard, not focus enough on the development of young players, etc.