Alex Cora has his own read on why the Red Sox decided to move on from him, and it comes back to one ugly stretch at the start of the season.
Boston stunned plenty of people when it fired Cora and several coaches after a 10-17 opening, then handed the team to Chad Tracy, who began in an interim role before the tag was removed. The move came after the Red Sox entered the year with real expectations, only to stumble badly out of the gate.
On Monday, Rob Bradford of WEEI shared a new episode of the "Baseball Isn't Boring" podcast, and Cora laid out exactly how he sees it.
"I honestly feel like we got fired - or I got fired - because we didn't pitch in the month of April," Cora said. "As simple as that.
The two games in Minnesota, right, [Garrett Crochet] and [Sonny Gray], they struggled. Obviously now, everybody knows about Garrett.
Go to the Houston series. We went [Ranger Suarez] and [Brayan Bello] and Crochet ...
We didn't pitch. We were in that situation in April because we didn't pitch and that was something that I told the coaches before that we had to make sure we got it right."
That explanation fits the shape of Boston’s season. The Red Sox finished with the third-best team ERA in baseball at 3.54, even with Crochet missing most of the 2026 campaign. But April was a different story entirely.
Boston’s roster was built around pitching and defense, especially after losing Alex Bregman before the season. The club leaned hard into run prevention, which meant there wasn’t much room for error when the arms weren’t sharp and the lineup wasn’t providing enough punch.
In March, the Red Sox ranked 25th in the majors with a 4.78 ERA across five games. In April, they were 21st at 4.26.
That early pitching lag mattered because this wasn’t a team stocked with 30-homer bats ready to erase mistakes. When the run prevention slipped, Boston had a hard time covering it up, and that showed in the 10-17 start that ended Cora’s run.
The turnaround came later. By the end of June, the Red Sox were beginning to find themselves, and that momentum carried into July.
Over that month, Boston posted a 2.91 team ERA in 25 games, best in the league. The Yankees were next at 3.03 in 25 games.
Cora’s point is hard to argue with: the Red Sox were built to win with pitching and defense, not with a lineup that could afford to shrug off bad starts. When the pitching wasn’t there early, the whole thing came apart.
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