Alex Cora tells all

Started by Sea Dog 23, February 03, 2023, 01:19:41 PM

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Sea Dog 23


Bad, bad PR for the Sox today on the eve of their 2023 season.  Evan Dreilich did a book about the Astros cheating scandal with a chapter about Cora.  Cora was bragging about it!

“Alex Cora didn’t exactly hide his sign-stealing ways â€" in fact, the alleged mastermind behind the Astros’ shocking 2017 scandal bragged about them to his new team.

“Members of the 2018 Red Sox would listen to their new manager â€" along with bullpen coach Craig Bjornson, another ex-Houston staffer â€" discuss their scheme “in a late-night setting” and “especially when they started drinking,” according to Evan Drellich’s new book, “Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess.”

“We stole that f”$;ing World Series,” Cora reportedly told his players, according to a Boston Herald transcript.”

elktonnick

How is what Cora did any less an offense against baseball than what Pete Rose did?

Sea Dog 23

On WEEI today they said the timing of this story is about as bad as it gets, coupled with an already terrible off-season for Sox management.

Then they heard J.T. Watkins, the employee who filmed the opponents in the Boston cheating in 2018, was paid during his year long suspension before they hired him as a scout.

SeaBeachFred

Well I have said repeatedly that Cora should never have been rehired as Red Sox manager became he was a rotten filthy cheater..  now we also found out that he bragged about it to his players on the RedSox the following season.  We will never win a thing with that bum managing us.  Again, he is a rotten filthy cheater and never should have been rehired.

MongoLikeSox

Quote from: elktonnick on February 03, 2023, 01:52:48 PM
How is what Cora did any less an offense against baseball than what Pete Rose did?
The way I see it, and I am not defending Cora one bit on this point.

Rose bet $$$ on games he participated in. It's as voodoo as it gets and deserves the penalty it got if only because baseball needs to show it is a zero tolerable offense. That said, I've always thought there was something about it that we do not know.

Cora and friends blew away the boundaries of "gamesmanship", bringing the sign stealing art form into the realm of clandestine activities per rule. We honor sign stealing as a grass roots individual effort. We can't use electronics to aid and implement. That's the line that was crossed after word went down to not do it.

So the difference? Both affect the outcome of games. Rose's offense has the added stigma of throwing a game and/or controlling a game's score to cover a spread. Given the disaster of the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal where some players played poorly to make some money from organized crime, MLB has since been very strict on such things. So one was an extreme crossing of boundaries while the other was a cardinal sin.

MongoLikeSox

My second part of this Astros, Cora thing. Does Cora bragging about it with fellow coaches and some players really surprise anyone? This is all part of a paradigm shift. Cora was a celebrated bench coach because of three things. Relationships with players and coaches, baseball knowledge and his ability to steal signs and determine what the other team is trying to do. The latter is almost as old as baseball itself. It;s a celebrated part of out past time.

So MLB passes down some communiques officially stating that electronic assistance is forbidden. Surprise, surprise. Some teams did not take it seriously. It became a massive thing under the direction of Cora. He got himself a good Manager's gig because of it. The baseball Gods even rewarded him with a whole season's worth of bull pen moves that almost never back-fired. If I said it once, I said it a thousand times in 2018. "oooohhhhh, Cora's gonna pay for that one when baseball decides to get even with him." It's funny how baseball got even.

I'm rambling. Point is, he/they did not take that communication from the Commissioner's office seriously enough and turned it into a fiasco. They got caught, albeit via a whistle blower was the one it took for something to be done. The commissioner then wanted it done with. He gave the players immunity to see how massive it was. It was massive. The decision to tarnish a whole city's World Series experience, several baseball lifers, some super-stars reputations and put an invisible asterisk on the 1917 season was a huge price to pay. It was paid, message sent and I'm glad.

If scouting is about establishing probabilities, a system like this is about absolutes. Turning a probability into an absolute takes away too much of the game for me. Now imagine a bench coach stealing a sign and yelling out to a pitcher, "go get 'em bobby" for a fastball and "go bobby!!!" for a breaking ball. Bobby hits a hanger out and the bench coach gets a free dinner from Bobby that night. The punishment? None. Not until the other team gets wind of this, tells the pitcher and the pitcher feels cheated. Bobby gets drilled in the back from a fellow pitcher. No benches cleared. This just got policed. This is all "celebrated" in baseball lore, right? Baseball players still policed the key Astros' players 3-4 years afterwards, but that's going way off topic.

In Cora's and others' minds, they brought this art form to a much higher level. It was a definitive and major violation of the rules, of course. Cora's third strength is relationship building. If he is in the state of mind that what he did was a good thing, why would he NOT brag about it to fellow coaches and players after a few too drinks? This part of the story is where I have the least amount of problems.

We all know Cora as a little ball of spit-fire who can talk smack with the best of them. Is he still talking this up as a point of pride in private conversations to this day? I frigging hope not. I hope he took his year off to re-consider and re-configure that moral compass. Not being around the same group of people that he's been around his entire adult life might allow space for a paradigm shift. Then again, that might be an extreme outcome saved for Hollywood movies.

The opposite extreme would be something akin to harboring resentment for being the one baseball decided to make an example out of all while, in his mind, doing something everybody else was doing? At this point, I would not be surprised if the real truth was one of the extremes. Does a thief resent his choices, getting caught or getting sold out? I really don't know which way to think on this one. Well, maybe I do.


SeaBeachFred

Quote from: elktonnick on February 03, 2023, 01:52:48 PM
How is what Cora did any less an offense against baseball than what Pete Rose did?

Cora has proven he is of low character in many of his actions, and while Rose's gambling was a blot on baseball according to those who run it (forgetting how those from the Commissioners office had a  tin ear and amnesia when steroids came close to giving baseball a permanent black eye), Rose is NOT connected to the Red Sox while Cora is one of us.  That makes Cora our problem whether we want it or not.  Hopefully that louse will not be with us any longer than Bloom is.  Think of it my friend, we have Cora, Bloom and Henry running the show with that boring jackass at the mike.  Can you think of many worse four flushers than that quartet?

elktonnick

To me Cora is the bigger cheat than Pete Rose. Pete Rose may have bet on baseball but there is no evidence nor has anyone ever claim that his betting ever affected the outcome of any ball game.  He never bet against his own team. 
Cora however did something that he knew was wrong and against the rules of the game that deprived another team of a fair result.

If it were up to me Cora would be out of baseball for at least twenty years.

MongoLikeSox

That's the reason I've always believed there was something about Rose's situation that we were never told. Then again, this is the sport that banned Mantle and Mays for being corporate function ambassadors for gambling hotels in Atlantic City. Ueberroth later re-instated both after replacing Kuhn.


longgame

I'm with Mongo.  Gambling is baseball's cardinal sin.  Rose had to be punished.  Every clubhouse has a sign that says "No Gambling".  Cora's transgressions have more to do with the spirit of the game and getting ahead of where baseball was in terms of the use of technology.  What makes no sense is why he would be bragging about it to the Sox' players.  They were victims of this scheme as much as anyone.  However, I don't get why the punishments were so selective in the Astros case.  The manager makes sense, but the guy who got the biggest punishment was Beltran who seems to be shadow banned.