Inside Alex Cora’s Red Sox ‘culture change’ — Chemistry, competition, camaraderie (the 2024 manager thread)

[Bob Montgomerys Helmet Hat]

In this day and age of advanced analytics dictating so much, I'm not convinced that the impact of the manager is really all that meaningful. Or at least the difference between most managers isn't that great. Watch almost any game and you'll see a manager make a head-scratching decision. Talk to fans of other teams, and you'll hear complaints about the manager. Obviously, we're hyper-focused on the Sox manager, but I don't see much difference between Cora and others. And I think that's because so much less managing is about "feel" and "gut," which we fans can relate to, and more is about what the numbers say. In the end, the numbers are probably right, but it doesn't make the decision seem right to fans at the time.

The players do seem to like Cora, which is cool, but I'm not really sure what that gets us. And this isn't snark--I really don't know. We don't get free agents at a discount because they want to play for Cora. We don't have a history of players maximizing their effort because they want to run through a wall for him.
Was he responsible for the sloppy play and crappy plate discipline the team has had for the past couple of years? Is he responsible for the exciting go-go Sox this year? Was he the driving force behind the record setting 2018 team, or the 2019 hugely disappointing team? Or the surprisingly delightful 2021 team, or the nightmarish teams of 2022 and 2023? Or maybe...baseball is a game of inches, players play, shit happens, and managers matter at the margins.

Bottom line, I think he's a decent, average manager, like the majority of managers these day. I won't lose any sleep over him staying or going.

 

[StupendousMan]

Put me in the camp of "Cora's a cheater." I don't lie awake at night grinding my teeth and dreaming up ways to punish him, but I didn't condone his actions, and still don't.

What bothers me more than that is the fact that the team has consistently made poor choices on the basepaths and is among the bottom dwellers in team defense year after year. From what I can tell -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- he doesn't seem to be holding practices to address these issues. I think a good manager would do _something_ to improve his team's performance in these areas.

 

[nvalvo]

Team is too young to quit, not ebnough veterans. Other than Masa, and perhaps Reese, no candidates (at least positional players) strike me as the type. Maybe Kenley but I even doubt he ha sthe potential to quit on Cora.

You don't have the 2011roster, no Crawford no Drew, no Scutaro, no Beckett, no Agon, no Lackey most of all. You don't have those type of veteran personalities/contracts that would quit.

Put me in the camp of "Cora's a cheater." I don't lie awake at night grinding my teeth and dreaming up ways to punish him, but I didn't condone his actions, and still don't.

What bothers me more than that is the fact that the team has consistently made poor choices on the basepaths and is among the bottom dwellers in team defense year after year. From what I can tell -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- he doesn't seem to be holding practices to address these issues. I think a good manager would do _something_ to improve his team's performance in these areas.

We’re up from last in team defense to below-average. If you extrapolate what we’ve done out to a full season, you get -~20 runs. We were at -42 last year. We’ve passed the terrible teams (LAA, CWS, OAK, WSN).

That’s a big improvement, and done without more than a week of games from Trevor Story, who should have been the linchpin for progress in that department. The outfield defense now grades out as quite good, even though the statistical systems don’t love Rafaela. The infield defense is pretty bad still. To do much better, we will need a real shortstop, and we have one on the IL and another in AA.

Hamilton has gone from unplayable to playable (-1 in 306 IP at SS, from last years -0.8 in 90 IP). Duran has gone from unplayable to okay to actually quite good. Devers has been… fine? (-1.1 in 534 innings). Yoshida has been all but prohibited from wearing a glove (0 in 1.0 IP).

 

[simplicio]

Metrics (except UZR, which says he's much improved) also think Valdez is about the same, but the eye test says he's tangibly more capable this year.