Cup of Coffee: BONUS

Red Sox re-hire Alex Cora

Normally I let news that happens after I publish wait until the next day, but it’s Friday and this happened this morning, so let’s send out a bonus edition for everyone.

And, of course:

Red Sox Re-Hire Alex Cora

There are news dumps, there are epic news dumps, and then there is the Texas-sized news dump the Red Sox pulled off this morning.

Within moments of Joe Biden passing Trump in the Pennsylvania count, all but sealing the election — and just as the entire internet was exploding in either rapture or anger over it all — Jon Heyman tweeted that Boston had re-hired manager Alex Cora. If you’re gonna give your disgraced, cheating manager his job back, best to do it while no one is really paying attention, eh?

Cora, of course, was fired back in January after he was named as the primary architect of the Astros’ 2017 sign-stealing scheme. Rob Manfred then suspended him for a year.

The first sign that Boston was really only taking a break from Cora instead of moving on from him came when they replaced him with bench coach Ron Roenicke, who may as well have had “place-holder” tattooed on his forehead. Boston then dumped salary by trading Mookie Betts to L.A., all but conceding competitiveness in the 2020 campaign. I would’ve bet my kids’ pinkie toes that Roenicke was not going to be around to see 2021 and, in the event he was asked not to return as soon as the season was over.

At almost the same time the Boston front office began making noise through its media surrogates about re-hiring Cora. This despite the fact that Cora was not hired by new general manager Chaim Bloom, who now will not get a chance to hire his own guy for many, many years. If there is any consistency in the Boston Red Sox front office — and there isn’t much — it’s that the owner, team presidents and vice presidents make the final call on the big moves, not the baseball operations department.

As I mentioned earlier this week, it was pretty clear that Cora was going to get his old job back. Sure, Boston interviewed a handful of other candidates, but they made a special trip down to Cora’s home in Puerto Rico to interview him. When they didn’t even go through the motions of making Cora fight to get his job back but, instead, went to him, it was pretty obvious who had the power here.

So, Cora is back. He served his time and nothing is stopping his return. Between his re-hiring and the immediate hiring of A.J. Hinch in Detroit, however, we also know that baseball is more than happy to pretend the sign-stealing scandal never existed. That’s the real takeway here. The only guys still on the outside looking in are (a) Carlos Beltrán who, now that Cora has a job, will probably seem less toxic and will probably get another look from someone; and (b) Jeff Luhnow, who has been shitting the bed publicly for the past month so, well, maybe he’ll have to wait a bit longer.

How will Cora’s hiring be received? Well, thanks to the timing of his hiring in the news cycle, we won’t be sure for a bit. In the meantime, the Boston brass has plenty of time to come up with some good talking points about how, actually, this is all totally cool.

Have a nice weekend, folks.