Cora adds fire to this rivalry
BOSTON — The fire runs deep, and it fans wide — in unpredictable directions, even.
And that, combined with his team’s remarkable success, has made Alex Cora a delightful addition to baseball’s most important rivalry.
Before the Red Sox continued their weekend dominance over the Yankees on Saturday afternoon, 4-1, Boston’s manager turned his ire on himself in response to controversial remarks he had made on Friday night.
“Actually, I didn’t know why I said the last thing I said [on Friday]. Honestly,” Cora said, and he added, “That was awful.”
Following Boston’s 4-1 dispatching of Luis Severino and the Yankees on Friday, Cora dropped the mic in surprising fashion. Asked whether the tension between the two teams — fueled by Severino’s knocking down of Mookie Betts with a high and tight pitch, which sparked umpire warnings and then Cora’s ejection — had ended, Cora responded: “I don’t know. We scored four runs in less than six innings [against Severino]. Is that a quality start?”
By offering a harsh mea culpa, the rookie manager extinguished the flame in humorous fashion. And he served further notice to the Yankees and their first-year skipper, Aaron Boone, of his aptitude at this gig.
“I know there’s intensity to Alex. Obviously he and I are very good friends,” said Boone, who played alongside Cora on the 2005 Indians and then worked with him at ESPN. “So I don’t know, maybe that’s as fired up as I’ve seen him. But I know that fire lives inside him.”
“We of course were very impressed with him when we interviewed him and thought he would do really well,” Red Sox president of baseball opera- tions Dave Dombrowski, who hired Cora, said of his manager on Saturday. “I can’t tell you that you’d ever predict that a club would play to this type of record, but it doesn’t surprise me that he’s successful. But watching him day in and day out, the way he handles things and situations and circumstances continues to grow. He asks questions, learns. He’s very impressive.”
Cora expressed no concern his verbal attack on the Yankees would impact his relationship with Boone. The two men had texted their relative transactions on Saturday as a professional courtesy.
“This is just a game,” Cora said. “There’s … stuff bigger than Yankees-Red Sox and baseball. I consider Aaron a friend of mine. He helped me a lot at ESPN. We stay in touch. … I don’t think all this madness is going to mess up our relationship.”
Cora’s fire, though, makes the madness even more fun.