Alex Cora swears he didn’t necessarily mean for this to be his Larry Bird/Moses Malone parade moment.
The Boston Red Sox manager got a rise out of the local fans Wednesday prior to the club’s World Series parade when, recounting the team’s playoff run, he brought up Boston’s 16-1 win over the New York Yankees in Game 3 of the American League Division Series.
“And we scored 16 at Yankee Stadium — suck on it,” Cora said to a huge roar from the fans at Fenway Park.
But there was far more context to that quote than just the Yankees and “suck on it.” Despite what some headlines might have inferred, the quote wasn’t directed at the Yankees, rather the folks who believed Boston was dead after losing Game 2 of the ALDS at home.
“I was texting with a good friend of mine and said ‘They took that out of context.’ That wasn’t about the Yankees; that was about the sky was falling,” Cora explained Thursday at a year-end press conference.
“(It wasn’t about)Â the people who picked the Yankees,” he continued. “It was the people who gave up after Game 2. It was like, ‘Really?’ I think Xander said it best: Yankees in four after winning one away, ya know? Kind of like, give us our respect; we have a good team.”
The Red Sox certainly earned their respect in the games that followed. After that Game 2 loss to New York, the Red Sox won 10 of their next 12 games — including the Game 3 laugher — on the way to a World Series title in Cora’s first season in the Boston dugout.
However, he also admitted he, too, was a little concerned about the Yankees series.
“Out of the three series, that is the one that’s really scary because it’s only five games,” he said Thursday. “And we play them 19 times, and we have to play them again. It’s so tough because as far as like something new, they’re not going to reinvent the way they play in two or three days. They were gonna do it the way they did it the whole season. There were no secrets … playing them right away, oof, that was a grind I’m happy obviously we won.”
