Red Sox' Season Was Doomed From the Start-and Firing Alex Cora Won't Change That

The Red Sox put together the worst kind of team, especially one that charges $63 per seat, second most in MLB and nearly twice the league average, and another $14.50 to wash down your sorrows with a beer. A team that was both boring and so bad it is threatening to be a non-contender before school lets out and the peak walk-up ticket-selling months. The worst slugging outfit in baseball could not even sell out Fenway when the Yankees came to town, which became a three-game sweep in which the Sox scored three runs and were largely non-competitive. The boredom they engendered was profound, a quality worse than being bad.

Lou Piniella once told me the worst thing a manager can do is to let a game get out of hand. On a larger, costlier scale, the Red Sox were looking at letting a season get out of hand before April ended. So, owner John Henry and Craig Breslow, chief baseball officer, fired manager Alex Cora on Saturday. The predicament was so bad the 10–17 Red Sox are eating $13.3 million to have Cora not manage the team through 2027, the last year of his three-year extension.

Of course, Cora is a smart baseball man and one of the least of the team's problems. But this is the way baseball always works, especially in this era when managers and coaches are routinely fired but turnover among the chief baseball officers, or whatever corporate-speak titles are created, is far more rare. When front office plans don't pan out, the blame shifts from how the group was assembled to how it plays. The fact that the Sox decimated their coaching staff along with the manager tells you they were looking at deep, systematic change, not just window dressing.

I had a long conversation with Cora before the series finale against New York two days ago. He believed in his team, but friction was evident in the philosophies of the front office and the manager. More than once, he wasn't comfortable giving his usual direct, honest answer in regards to personnel. I brought up, for instance, how the team gave him five everyday outfielders, none of whom are established power hitters and four of them bat left-handed. I told him it made for duplication that stifled players such as Jarren Duran, a high-energy player who wasn't getting enough runway to make his best impact.

Cora shrugged as if it were out of his hands. He could have played Ceddanne Rafaela at second base to get all five outfielders into the lineup, but he had to play Marcelo Mayer because the team must find out if he can hit.

"We'll need 40 games," Cora said, "to see where we are."

He never got there; gone after 27 games.

The 2026 Red Sox doubled down on "run prevention," which is a euphemism for not having enough offense. One projection algorithm predicted no one on Boston would hit 20 home runs this year. The Red Sox scoffed. It doesn't sound so crazy now.

The "run prevention" model also overrated the starting pitching on hand. Brayan Bello is a wildly inconsistent starter who is league average after 102 MLB starts (ERA+ of 99). Sonny Gray is a 36-year-old pitcher who has been average over the previous two years (ERA+ of 100) and made five starts before his hamstring gave way. Ranger Suárez, a $140 million investment, has been down two ticks on his sinker the past two years while being average at missing bats-and even less so this year. It's a rotation that needs run support, not the kind to overcome a lack of it.

The truth is the Sox have been in a low-orbit freefall for five years. Since 2022 they are 336–339, the worst record in the AL East. The February trade of Mookie Betts was a disaster, as was the 2025 debacle and trade of all things Rafael Devers, for which Cora shares blame with the front office for a lack of communication, and the hold-the-line, we-don't-give-no-trade-clauses stubbornness that cost them Alex Bregman, for which they paid him $40 million for three healthy months.

Betts, Devers, Bregman ... offensive forces that win games and create interest ... all gone, for various reasons, some understandable, but the damning comes from so very little to show for having such talent.

The Red Sox are a good defensive club. Young left-handed pitchers Payton Tolle and Connelly Early are building blocks to a good rotation, but they are kids who shouldn't throw more than about 130 innings this year.

The real problem is the offense. This was the worst home-run hitting team through 25 games that the Red Sox have seen in the past 29 seasons. Maybe they won't finish last in slugging, but it won't be much higher. Masataka Yoshida is not a No. 3 hitter. Roman Anthony is not ready to carry a team. Willson Contreras should not be your greatest longball threat. As I wrote the other day, the Red Sox have one position player who weighs 220 pounds (Contreras); the Yankees have eight of them and on average outweigh the Red Sox by 23 pounds per man. Boston assembled a run prevention team of smallish players in a home park built to bang the baseball off the wall and over it.

The complete reboot of the run production staff may have been necessary from an accountability perspective, but the personnel won't change. The Red Sox had the highest groundball rate in the league and the worst rate at pulling the ball in the air-playing in Fenway Park!

If I am Carlos Mendoza or Rob Thomson, I just got a little more uncomfortable. As we saw last year, managers fall in bunches because front offices find it easier to make moves once the first domino falls, which is how the Nationals, Twins and Pirates found cover early last season.

It is an upside-down baseball season. The Mets (2), Phillies (4), Blue Jays (5) and Red Sox (6) rank among the top six in payroll and in the bottom six in win-loss records. The Red Sox could no longer wait. Patience does not come with the prices they charge.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Red Sox' Season Was Doomed From the Start-and Firing Alex Cora Won't Change That.

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This story was originally published April 25, 2026 at 10:00 PM.