“We’re in the yes business,” the late Red Sox CEO Larry Lucchino used to say, and he said it often. Yes . It was short and sweet, and it conveyed a progressive, forward-looking message, even if, OK, the Red Sox didn’t say yes when it came time to make sure Jon Lester played his entire career in Boston.
Advertisement Anyway, the Red Sox no longer are in the “yes” business. Based on some recent comments from manager Alex Cora and chief baseball officer Craig Breslow, not to mention a purpose pitch from right-hander Brayan Bello that served no purpose, it appears this team has transitioned to the “What We Have Here is Failure to Communicate Red Sox.” In chronological order, here are the recent failures to communicate that are worthy of discussion: • In the sixth inning of Boston’s 7-1 victory over the Yankees last Saturday in the Bronx, Bello threw a pitch behind Bombers slugger Aaron Judge .
If the pitch was supposed to be payback for Yankees starter Gerrit Cole hitting Rafael Devers in the first inning, well, he missed his target. • Before Sunday’s game, a 5-2 victory by the Yankees, Cora seemed to indicate Bello didn’t do what he was perhaps supposed to do, such as, oh, direct a pitch at Judge’s hip. “So, you know, we had our chance,” Cora told reporters.
“Didn’t happen, and we have to move on.” GO DEEPER Red Sox rally around Rafael Devers, but fail to capitalize on momentum in New York • And then there’s Breslow, the former big-league reliever and first-year boss of baseball ops for the Red Sox. In a piece in Tuesday’s Boston Globe, Breslow, addressing the team’s poor performance since the All-Star break, offered this mind-numbing explanation: “We have been poor clusterers or sequencers of performance.
” In fairness, Breslow continued by saying, “Coming out of the break, the offense was really, really productive and we were scoring a bunch of runs but we weren’t preventing them ...
and then that flipped a bit.” But it’s that first part, with the “clusterers” and “sequencers,” that had to have many Sox fans rolling their eyes. Alex Cora basically admitted that Brayan Bello tried plunking Aaron Judge on purpose.
He was asked if he considered yesterday's IBB/HBP fiasco closed: "It was closed yesterday around the sixth inning. We had our chance. It didn't happen.
" pic.twitter.com/x1z4iA0HfF — Chris Kirschner (@ChrisKirschner) September 15, 2024 Let’s start with Bello.
Pitchers failing to hit an opposing batter they intended to hit is something that happens all the time. It’s a delicate assignment. You want to send a message, but what you don’t want to do is send someone to the hospital.
Especially one of the game’s great stars (Judge), a point later made by Cora. Advertisement In a Red Sox-Yankees game at Fenway Park on Aug. 18, 2013, Sox starter Ryan Dempster apparently felt the need to mete out some hardball justice to Alex Rodriguez, who was at odds with the baseball establishment while appealing a pending 211-game suspension for using performance-enhancing drugs.
Dempster knocked A-Rod off the plate with his first pitch and then went to 3-0 before finally hitting A-Rod on the elbow. The issue with Cora is that perhaps he was trying too hard to communicate. His wink-wink/nudge-nudge that the Sox had tried/failed to hit Judge inspired a let’s-look-into-this from MLB .
Per Chris Cotillo of MassLive, the investigation went no further than a conversation with Cora. But, yes, the Boston manager did wander into the danger zone as to what managers should say, and not say, in these situations. By way of example, let’s return to Dempster hitting A-Rod in 2013.
Then-Red Sox manager John Farrell, asked after the game if his starter was throwing at A-Rod, calmly said Dempster was merely trying to “establish his fastball,” adding, “Obviously, the pitch got away from him.” That was a whopper, but it was also managerial omertà . MLB, not impressed with Farrell’s explanation, suspended Dempster for five games and issued a fine.
Dempster also didn’t do a good job of “establishing his fastball,” considering A-Rod launched a home run to center field off him in the sixth inning. GO DEEPER MLB investigating Alex Cora after suggesting team tried hitting Judge on purpose As for Craig Breslow, let’s begin here: I refuse to believe he’s some kind of front-office cyborg who’s hopelessly lost in baseball’s ever-infuriating obsession with metrics. He is, after all, a former pitcher who carved out 12 seasons in the big leagues and was a key contributor on Boston’s 2013 World Series winners.
For further evidence that Breslow does possess a feel for the game that comes straight from the belly, here’s something he said at the news conference last November to introduce him as chief baseball officer: “I know what it’s like to put on a Red Sox jersey and jog through the bullpen gate across freshly cut outfield grass. I know what it’s like to stand on the mound in front of tens of thousands of the most passionate fans in the game, to feel the cool, fall breeze hit the Red Sox jersey. And I know what it’s like to hoist the World Series trophy overhead, the culmination of a group of people coming together to accomplish something that they couldn’t have alone.
” Beautiful. But as I wrote then, and I’ll repeat it now ..
. Breslow will learn, quickly, that you don’t get deals done by jogging through the bullpen gate across freshly cut outfield grass. Translation: Whatever long-range plan Breslow has for the Red Sox, it would serve him well to do a better job .
.. communicating.
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setAttribute("style", "pointer-events: none;");}) Free, daily sports updates direct to your inbox. If the Red Sox were in limbering-up mode for the postseason, Bello’s pitch behind Judge’s back would be a footnote. Heck, Sox fans would still be high-fiving over Cole’s jittery intentional walk to Devers last Saturday in the Bronx.
The same goes for Cora’s unsteady remarks about how the Sox “had their chance.” And if the Sox were in first place we’d be seeing “We’re clusterers and sequencers” T-shirts at Fenway. But the season is sputtering to an unsatisfactory conclusion, and right now it’s not that the Sox have no answers but that they have bad answers.
(Photo of manager Alex Cora talking to Red Sox players at the pitcher’s mound Sunday at Yankee Stadium: Luke Hales / Getty Images).
