Alex Cora is nothing if not passionate about baseball.
And in the last contest of a four-game series against the Minnesota Twins, the Boston Red Sox manager had that side of himself on display before getting ejected.
“I didn’t want to get thrown out, right? I don’t want to make a scene early on, you guys asked me all that stuff, and there’s some people that thought that I wasn’t into this,” Cora said after the 4-3 loss. “Well, you saw it. I’m into it.”
With two runners in scoring position and one out in the eighth inning of a tie game, Cora challenged the home plate umpire on a call after Twins’ batter Ryan Jeffers swung and missed a 1-2 pitch from Red Sox reliever Matt Andriese. It was called a foul tip, which are not reviewable under Major League Baseball’s policies.
Though the replay showed what should have been a strikeout, there was nothing anyone technically could do.
“And they decided that it was a foul tip,” Cora relayed. “(Umpire) Jordan (Baker) stayed with a call and I got thrown out.
“Just one of those that is a tough one, especially that situation. We come back, we’re scratching and we’re fighting, and we know we got a strike out. But, you know, it didn’t work out right there, but then we got the strikeout, we got out of the inning.”
The loss snapped Boston’s nine-game winning streak, but the Red Sox still took three straight series.
We’ll see if they can keep that going in another four-game series, this time against the Chicago White Sox at Fenway Park beginning Friday.
