Alex Cora and the Red Sox were on top of the world entering spring training in 2019.
Boston enjoyed a historic 2018 season with nary a speedbump, winning a franchise-record 108 games while steamrolling to a World Series championship.
As the Red Sox descended on southwest Florida the following season, Cora was insistent the Red Sox weren’t about to “turn the page.” Instead, they were going to “write a new chapter” in the same book. It was supposed to be a “continuation” of 2018.
“You turn the page because something negative happened,” Cora said in February of 2019. “There was nothing negative from 2018. Life is a book. We have different chapters. We’re not closing the door, we’re continuing.”
It didn’t work. The Red Sox went 84-78, finished third in the American League East and missed the playoffs. The club fired Dave Dombrowski and eventually replaced him with Chaim Bloom, starting, coincidentally, a new chapter in Red Sox baseball.
Cora has had plenty of time to reflect on that season in the last few years, a span that also included a season-long suspension for his role in the Houston Astros’ cheating scandal. As he charts the course for 2023, he’s able to lean on some hard lessons learned as the Red Sox look to bounce back from a last-place finish in 2022.
“I did that mistake going into 2019, and it didn’t work,” Cora admitted in a recent interview with MLB Network. “I felt like ‘Oh, 18, yeah, let’s roll the same team (out) and we’ll win the World Series. Let’s go! It’s easy,’ and boom! It didn’t work out.”
The goal is obviously to get back to playing meaningful baseball. But Cora believes the Red Sox must focus on their day-to-day work and hope the focus on the process yields a better result.
“Different goals this year. Different group, obviously. We’re not talking about that month when they play the playoffs,” Cora said. “To play in that month, we’ve gotta be better each day. We have a group that finished last last year in the toughest division in baseball. For us to accomplish that (playing in October), we have to be better on a daily basis: throw strikes, play better defenses, run the bases well, know the rules.”
The narrative outside the Red Sox clubhouse is clear. FanDuel Sportsbook has 18 teams with better odds to win the World Series than Boston at 60-1. The 20-1 odds to win the division are longer than every team in the AL East than the Orioles.
