Alex Cora was involved in a major sign-stealing scandal with the 2017 Houston Astros but he left that behind when he came to the Red Sox.
So it’s fair to wonder why he decided not to bring those tactics from Houston to Boston.
Cora, speaking Tuesday in his introductory press conference after again being named manager of the Boston Red Sox, explained why he just didn’t find it necessary.
“That’s a great question, and something that — I got that from other people. I didn’t feel like we needed to do something like that, honestly,” Cora said over Zoom. “I know people will not believe me in that sense, why I didn’t bring it here, so it wasn’t that effective. I don’t know, I just decided in that offseason to not bring it here. We had some conversations actually in spring training about a lot of stuff — from (Brian O’Halloran) to Dave (Dombrowski) to the people that were around to MLB — I think at that point people were starting to talk about what was going on around the league.
“It wasn’t worth it, it wasn’t worth it. But all of the sudden there’s an article out there and there’s a guy (Mike Fiers) out there that decided to take a step and say what happened over there, and I paid the price.
“The way I can put it is I decided no, we did not need to do that, and the organization was very loud and clear about the whole sign-stealing stuff and what happened before with the organization and other organizations and they walked me through it in the meetings in spring training with MLB and when I talked to them it was like wow, I better not even try to do something like that. That’s the way I can put it.”
Although the 2018 Red Sox were punished for alleged sign-stealing transgressions, it was determined that Cora had no involvement in that, and the scope of the missteps paled in comparison to the ordeal in Houston.
