BALTIMORE — It was impossible to ignore the furry, neon-green, detached mascot head resting by itself, perched upright on the leather clubhouse sofa.
As Boston Red Sox players filtered in and out of the mostly empty, grim visiting locker room at Camden Yards on Sunday morning, the club’s “Wally” home run celebration totem acted as something of a comedic constant. Its fuzzy orange eyebrows raised, its pearl-white peepers three-quarters open, its enormous, empty mouth completely ajar in what can only be described as a look of surprise.
All the animate, sentient, decidedly less green beings around the Red Sox were similarly stunned.
That’s because Alex Cora, the club’s longtime manager, was fired on Saturday. Chief baseball officer Craig Breslow, team president Sam Kenndey and owner John Henry — none of whom had previously been on the club’s roadtrip — flew in from Boston to deliver the news. Five other members of Cora’s staff, including hitting coach Peter Fatse and gameplanning coach and franchise icon Jason Varitek, were also relieved of their duties.
The timing was blindsiding. Cora, resoundingly considered one of the game’s top skippers, was under contract through the 2027 season. Even though Boston had gotten off to a disappointing 10-17 start, few believed his job to be in immediate jeopardy.
Perhaps if the losing continued, the thinking went, Breslow would make a change come summertime. But an April firing?
Nobody — not Cora or his now-former players — saw that coming.
“It was a big shocker,” veteran reliever Garrett Whitlock said.
On Sunday, shock was indeed the prevailing sentiment among the players. Connelly Early and Garrett Crochet both referenced it. Whitlock said “shock,” “shocked” or “shocker” four times. Second-year star outfielder Roman Anthony got up to seven.
But Trevor Story, an 11-year veteran in his fifth season with Boston, was the player most outwardly peeved by the circumstances.
“They’re some of the best coaches in the world, and they care more than anybody, and just felt like they didn’t get a fair shot,” he said of the jettisoned group.
Asked whether he was comfortable with the explanation provided by Breslow during a team meeting that morning, the 33-year-old shortstop answered resoundingly in the negative.
“There just has to be more conversations,” Story said. “I wouldn’t say it was satisfactory.”
That not-so-veiled criticism contrasted sharply with the rosy, future-oriented outlook presented by Breslow and Kennedy during their news conference earlier in the morning. The pair — who, bizarrely, spoke in front of an Orioles-branded backdrop — were predictably skittish when it came to specifics, opting for optimistic platitudes and surface-level word salads.
“I don’t think it’s productive to get into the merits of an individual decision,” Breslow replied evasively when asked why he thought firing Cora was necessary. “We believe in the group of players that we have in the clubhouse down the hallway, and we believe that a new direction is warranted.”
Both framed the timing of the decision as a show of faith in the roster, arguing that providing new interim manager Chad Tracy with a longer runway gives the team a better chance to turn things around. Kennedy, meanwhile, put the responsibility for Cora’s firing squarely on Breslow’s shoulders.
“Craig leads our baseball operation, and he’s made several bold decisions and recommendations, and this is one of them, and we fully support it,” he said. “That’s why we took the action we took yesterday.”
Conspicuously absent from the proceedings was principal owner John Henry. The 76-year-old businessman, who has run the Red Sox since 2001, was the subject of “SELL THE TEAM” and “F*** JOHN HENRY” chants outside Fenway Park just last week, following the club’s series loss to the New York Yankees. While Henry was present at Camden Yards on Sunday — he was spotted on an elevator — he did not address the media or the team.
During Breslow and Tracy’s pregame remarks to the team, Henry was a silent observer in the clubhouse. But while he didn’t utter a meaningful word on Sunday, his fingerprints are all over this thunderstorm of dysfunction. Cora’s ousting marks the second messy power struggle under Henry’s watch in the past three years, following the firing of top baseball exec Chaim Bloom in September 2023.
Henry’s unwillingness to speak publicly about his franchise makes the entire situation worse. He is a rich ghost, terrified of the spotlight, scared off by the consequences of his actions, happy to throw his underlings in front of the camera and into the fire. Accountability, it appears, is not in Henry’s vocabulary. Frankly, his absence Sunday was entirely unbecoming of the leader of an organization that clearly considers itself to be a critical American institution.
“John, Bres[low] and I have been together for the past 48, 72 hours and have been working on this process together,” Kennedy offered when asked if he thought Henry should take on a more forward-facing role. “l’ll leave that at that.”
Technically speaking, the Red Sox won on Sunday, defeating the Orioles 5-3. Accordingly, the postgame scene was a lively one. Tracy was bombarded with beer, shaving cream and various other liquids in a ceremony to celebrate his first big-league victory. Rap music blared in the visiting clubhouse as relieved players munched on pizza and packed their belongings for a night flight to Toronto. Normalcy, for at least a moment, reigned supreme.
But beneath the surface, a sense of unease lingered. As is often the case when a manager is fired, a number of players felt responsible for Cora’s departure, believing that their poor play had precipitated his exit. That guilt, given the clubhouse’s fondness for their old skipper, will take time to expunge.
“It’s a grieving process,” Crochet said after the game, “It’s going to take some time for us to get over it mentally, but when we’re out there between the lines, it’s just ball.”
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