Red Sox manager Alex Cora headed into Friday night’s game against the Yankees seeking his 397th win as the skipper of the Olde Towne Team. If he reaches the magic number of 400 career managerial wins, he will become the ninth Sox manager to reach that milestone.
I’m not sure he deserves the opportunity to reach 400 victories anymore, and I’m pretty sure that I feel the same about his boss, Chief Baseball Officer Chaim Bloom.
And if I were running the team, I would see how this three-game series against the Pinstripers goes. Although it got off to a rollicking start Friday night for the Sox, if the rest of the weekend doesn’t go well, which is a distinct possibility, I would call both Cora and Bloom into my office after Sunday night’s primetime ESPN contest and tell both that they do not need to board the team plane bound for Minneapolis, saying that their services as employees of the Boston Red Sox are no longer needed.
Harsh? Perhaps. But as outlined last week, the 2023 Sox are on a road to nowhere, and if not nowhere, then more likely than to their third last-place finish in the last four seasons, and that is downright embarrassing and unacceptable for one of MLB’s hallmark franchises.
(For comparison, Boston has finished in last place five times since 2012, while the Yankees haven’t occupied the AL East basement since 1991.)
Is the manager or the CBO more responsible for the team’s failures, and should both of them go at once, or should one be retained while hoping that the replacement for the ousted leader can right the ship?
Let’s look at the two situations. If Sox management believes that the product on the field just is not performing up to its collective capabilities, then it has every right to fire the skipper, given that the team is lacking a lot of the fundamentals that make for a successful ballclub, including solid team defense.
Since Cora returned as Sox manager after the last-place COVID-19 season, he has gone 204-189 as the skipper, which is a winning percentage of just .519, which is not bad, but is a sharp drop from the .591 mark he had in his first two seasons as Boston’s manager (2018-19), which included a championship season in his first season of managing.
Cora seems downright depressed and frustrated about the efforts his team is putting forth on the field, but he likely has similar feelings about the roster that he has been given. After all, it has just one real superstar on the roster (Rafael Devers), while the heroes of the 2018 squad are all plying their trades for other clubs, or are on the injured list (Chris Sale).
So it is probably not all Cora’s fault about the performance of the club, but management has to look at his situation and his immediate future. He is signed through next season with an annual salary of around $8 million, so that would be a lot of money to eat for the recently tight-fisted organization.
But there’s a way around that for the Red Sox, if they want to follow the lead of their Boston sports brethren, the Celtics, to change the team leadership without paying two managers concurrently.
And that would be to not actually fire Cora, but to instead promote him to be the new Chief Baseball Officer after firing Bloom, as the Celtics did with head coach Brad Stevens two seasons ago, promoting him to GM. Cora even said last May, “One of the things that always intrigues me is building a team. I was a GM in winter ball in Puerto Rico, I was the GM for our national team in the last (World Baseball Classic),” Cora said. “So we’ll see, time will tell what I’ll do in this sport. I’ll always be around, but one thing is for sure: I’m not going to be the guy that works as a manager for 20 years.”
And even if the Sox decide to fire Cora and retain Bloom, that would put the team in the position of hiring a new manager, and if he were to fail to turn things around, well, that would sound the death knell for Bloom at the end of the season as well. And any new CBO would not really want to take over the reins of the Boston Red Sox without having his own skipper in place, so would the interim manager for the balance of 2023 get canned at the end of this season so that Bloom’s replacement could be chosen and install his own guy?
But Bloom doesn’t deserve to continue in his role right now, either. Even though he’s likely following management’s orders to cut payroll and build back up the minor-league system, he’s failed in myriad ways.
Just look at the product on the field: there are massive holes offensively and defensively at catcher, first base, second base, shortstop, and center field, and every position on the field for the Red Sox is below average defensively except for right field (Alex Verdugo). Boston leads the AL and is second in the majors in errors, and this is squarely on Bloom and his minions’ shoulders, because they knew entering 2023, with the changes in the rules and particularly the ban on infield and outfield shifts, that defense would be a much more critical element of a team’s success, and the team did not construct a roster that was focused on that. In fact, they over-relied on the hopes that some of their younger players would blossom and learn on the job, but that has not been the case for the youngsters, particularly guys like Triston Casas, Jarren Duran, and Bobby Dalbec. Instead, the team let guys like franchise cornerstone Xander Bogaerts, DH JD Martinez, veteran first baseman Eric Hosmer, and the team’s three best pitchers walk away in free agency during the offseason, not to mention trading effective catcher Christian Vazquez last summer.
Bloom also mismanaged the payroll last season, and put the team above the luxury-tax threshold and cost the team $1.3 million that it shouldn’t have had to pay.
A lot of people think that Bloom was hired away from the frugal Tampa Bay Rays as their GM to run a much higher-salaried ballclub, but the fact is that when he was selected by Boston to be its new CBO, he was just second-in-command for the Rays, so not only was he ill-equipped to run the show for a “real” baseball franchise, but had little to no experience overseeing a franchise that had tons of money to spend.
So what if the Sox decide to can Bloom right now, but retain Cora on the field for the rest of the season? Well, there is little precedent for firing the player-personnel guy of a team mid-season, so it’s hard to imagine the Sox would hire an “interim” CBO, but would instead have to hire a big-name CBO right away. That would put the club on the hook of paying for both the current and former manager and CBO through next season, and Red Sox management, as constituted, seems unlikely to spend big money on two guys who are no longer working for the team.
Still, the idea of firing both at once makes sense, although it would undoubtedly become even more of a clown show the rest of the way while management scrambles to replace its skipper, the CBO, and presumably, the entire scouting and analytics team that works for Bloom. That’s why promoting Cora to CBO and letting him hire his own replacement as manager would not seem as far-fetched as it sounds.
Either way, Cora and/or Bloom are going to be gone at the end of the season (if not sooner) the way things are going, so it makes sense to make this kind of drastic step sooner rather than later, and have a new coaching and managerial structure in place when Opening Day dawns in March 2024.
Next week: Logical (or illogical) replacements for Cora and Bloom.