For Red Sox, good times never seemed so brief
Not that long ago, the Red Sox appeared built to endure any challenge within reason.
COMMENTARY
Not that long ago, the Red Sox appeared built to endure any challenge within reason.
It was just 445 days ago — or just one year, two months, and 19 days — that they had established a new glorious status: 2018 World Series champions.
The scene on the clinching night of Oct. 28, 2018, at bucolic Dodger Stadium, where the Red Sox secured their fourth World Series title since 2004, was one of champagne-fueled assurance that the good times were here, and they were going to last.
David Price, who should have been the World Series Most Valuable Player, was defiant in his redemption, but occasionally let a smile sneak through the practiced stoicism.
Chris Sale, who blew away Red Sox nemesis Manny Machado to punctuate the series, whooped and hollered at anyone within range, his arms constantly raised, seemingly 11 feet high in celebration.
Mookie Betts, who had established himself as the best player in baseball among those whose surname is not a fish, embraced David Ortiz, the man who changed history with clutch performance after clutch performance as a player and now watched as a proud Papi.
President of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski, the architect, grinned and shook hands with anyone within an arm’s length, then grinned some more.
And Alex Cora embraced family members and players with equal vigor, a champion in his first season as manager.
Four hundred and 45 days ago. One year, two months, and 19 days. That’s practically yesterday in baseball. And yet since then, so much about the Red Sox has changed for the worse in ways we never could have fathomed then.
Dombrowski was fired in September after that World Series hangover refused to fade, with ownership deciding his stars-and-scrubs approach to roster-building wasn’t the ideal direction for the franchise. We learned in the season’s final meaningless days from owner John Henry (who also owns the Globe) that the franchise intended to reset the luxury tax penalties by getting under the $208 million threshold. In late October, Chaim Bloom, who had played a relevant role in the Tampa Bay Rays’ knack for finding cheap roster solutions that performed well, was hired to succeed Dombrowski, a stylistic opposite if there ever was one.
We’ve spent the offseason enduring rumors that the Red Sox would consider moving Betts, a free-agent-to-be, if it meant getting Price’s remaining $96 million off the books at the same time. No significant trades have happened, unless you’re some kind of weirdo Austin Brice fanatic. Jose Peraza and Martin Perez have been the big free agent signings. Brock Holt, good at his job and the kind of goodwill ambassador franchise could use right now, remains in free agent limbo.
The offseason went from uninspiring to downright lousy earlier this week with the news that Cora had been one of the masterminds of the Astros’ sign-stealing schemes while he was the bench coach for the 2017 champs. The punishments hammered down on Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch — a ban from spring training through the end of the season — suggested that Cora was in for a massive suspension, especially since his Red Sox were being investigated for a sign-stealing scheme of their own.
When Luhnow and Hinch were fired in Houston, it seemed a matter of time before Cora lost his job, too. Tuesday night at 7:36,
news came via press release from the Red Sox that he and the franchise had “mutually parted ways.’’
Cora’s Red Sox career began with 119 wins, a championship, and logical suggestions that he was the franchise’s best manager since Terry Francona. It ends with him as the common thread in a scandal that has damaged two organizations and tainted two World Series championships. It’s confirmed right there in big type on the front page, a topic on every sports and news channel in the country, and it’s still hard to comprehend how it came to this.
The instinct is to refer to the Red Sox as a mess. But that doesn’t do their situation justice. They’ve fallen so far, so fast, that right now it’s hard to envision where and how they pick themselves up.
Spring training begins Feb. 12. As of Wednesday morning, the Sox don’t have a manager. It’s not exactly ideal to be looking for the new leader of a ball club less than a month before camp opens, and it’s not as if there’s an endless pool of candidates.
We don’t know whether those on the current coaching staff — including bench coach Ron Roenicke — will be part of the fallout, or whether they’re candidates. There are old-school managers without work, such as the great Bruce Bochy, but they may not be copacetic with Bloom’s analytic approach.
Red Sox fans love to cite Mike Lowell and Jason Varitek as potential managers, and either might tempt management as a face-saving, appease-the-fans move, but would either want to step into this maelstrom as a managerial novice?
And what about Bloom? His task as the first-time leader of an organization was already tough enough with the quest to get below the luxury-tax threshold. Now he has to find a manager — one to replace someone who was very popular within the organization and had a huge positive impact on the likes of Xander Bogaerts and Rafael Devers — all while navigating the trade market and deciding whether to part ways with Betts, arguably the most complete player the Red Sox have developed in the draft era.
Bloom is very smart, of course, and he seems a positive fellow by nature, but the calculus of all of this has to be daunting — and we haven’t even considered the effects of potential further punishment on the organization, such as the probable loss of draft picks.
Do further consequences make it more likely that the Red Sox will trade current stars for prospects, and perhaps go full rebuild two years after winning 108 games in the regular season? Or do they hope the Betts-Bogaerts-Devers core is enough for the team to overcome on the field this lousy winter of disarray away from it?
As it turns out, those champions crowned just 445 days ago were not built to last. The good times ended so quickly that right now it’s hard to tell how exactly they should go about beginning again.
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