Don’t make it joyless job
Cora needs to bring the fun back to Sox
It is difficult to define joy, but you know it when you see it. You also know when you don’t see it, which is one of the many things that differ between the team Alex Cora is now on and the one he will soon be coming to Boston to manage.
The Houston Astros play with a joy so apparent it makes you smile. The 2017 Red Sox played with a face so grim one wondered who stole their dogs. As much as anything, that is the biggest problem Cora will face when he first steps into the clubhouse at JetBlue Park in Fort Myers in February.
Who stole the fun?
Everyone who devotes their life to sports — be it the athlete on the field, the scout traversing the country in search of the next great talent or the fan in the stands investing so much time, money and emotion in the game — got this way because the games of our youth were joy-filled moments. There was little of that feeling evident in the Red Sox clubhouse.
Win or lose, most of them found a way to treat every day as if it was a wake. Sure there were the three B’s in the outfield dancing after a victory but half the time Jackie Bradley Jr. seemed to be making a list of everyone who ever suggested he might not be good enough to be an everyday big league hitter and then checking it twice to refresh his memory. No joy in that.
As he has aged, Dustin Pedroia has devolved from a scrappy guy who was easy to admire into a sourpuss who leads by complaint. The chip on his shoulder that once served him so well as he tried to prove wrong all those people who said he was too small has metastasized into a cancer that is eating him up and was doing the same to a goodly portion of the people around him last season.
Contrast Pedroia with Jose Altuve, the tiny second baseman of the Astros who seems so clearly happy to be doing what he’s doing. To be fair, Pedroia was dragging around a leg attached to a badly disintegrating knee that was surgically repaired yesterday. Having had four knee operations of various complexity, I can vouch for the fact trying to function with a constantly inflamed and aching knee will not always bring out the best in you, but Pedroia’s emotional dyspepsia didn’t begin this spring. It just deepened the more time he spent around David Price.
The Red Sox were not a bad baseball team in 2017 but they were a flawed one. Frankly, Manager John probably led them as far as they were capable of going so no one should really complain that their 93 wins and AL East title were all they could muster. If you really believe they were better than the Astros, you should start following another sport.
This should have been a Red Sox team we liked because of what it accomplished but it was not. The Sox came from behind time and again to win and they maximized their abilities for the most part. Yet who among you would say you loved these Red Sox? The reason you didn’t was too many of them didn’t seem to love what they were doing.
It is difficult to put your finger on how this manifested itself but nearly everyone I know who follows the Sox closely asked some form of the same question as one nasty display of petulance or dull display of disinterest followed another: “Do these guys like to play baseball?”
The answer was, “It didn’t seem so.”
So now Alex Cora must come in and try to change this culture of disillusionment. Price fostered it but, to be honest, he didn’t do it alone. He had the grousing presence of Pedroia, who is not aging gracefully and is probably now being hurt by the very me-against-theworld attitude that once helped make him a great player, to go along with him but frankly those two were not alone in establishing a barren joylessness that often seemed to engulf the Red Sox this season. Eradicating it won’t be easy.
Neither you, the fan, nor Cora, the manager, should be fooled into thinking the attitude of gratitude in Houston and the one of dyspepsia in Boston simply reflects the Astros winning more often. The truth is the 2017 Red Sox won more than often enough to have filled their workplace with joy. That they didn’t says much about them, and perhaps Manager John, who never seemed too happy himself as the season wore on. Dealing with the sourness around him seemed to wear him out, too.
Certainly the Sox need more power in the middle of their lineup. They need someone to replace Pedroia, who will not be ready when the season begins. They will always need another arm and they need to manage Chris Sale differently, so he doesn’t fade at the end of the season as he has in both Chicago and Boston. Most of all they need to convince Price that playing baseball for more than $30 million a season is the same game he once so gladly played for free.
Baseball was once a joyous expression of who everyone in the Sox clubhouse hoped to be one day. Now they are those guys, living out a dream. Before Alex Cora does anything with his pitching rotation or his batting order, that’s the first, and most important, thing he must do.
He’s got to find a way to remind his players that the right approach to playing a game is to remember why you started playing in the first place — because it’s a lot more fun than cutting sugar cane or being a hod carrier. It’s a joy to play, pressure or not. If the Red Sox are made to see that, they might not be the Astros in 2018 but they’d be fun to watch again.