Hours after the Boston Red Sox walloped the Baltimore Orioles 17-1, the team’s most lopsided win in an otherwise dreadful season, Alex Cora returned on Saturday night to the Four Seasons Hotel Baltimore. Awaiting him there, a league source told The Athletic, were principal owner John Henry, CEO Sam Kennedy and chief baseball officer Craig Breslow. They soon informed the manager that he had been fired, along with several members of his coaching staff.
Despite the team’s awful 10-17 start, the moves were swift and unexpected.
Around 6:30 p.m., as two members of the coaching staff headed out to dinner, they passed another team employee. The coaches told their colleague that they’d see each other again on Sunday. About 30 minutes later, both coaches were among those who were dismissed.
In addition to Cora, the Red Sox also fired five members of the coaching staff: hitting coach Peter Fatse, third-base coach Kyle Hudson, bench coach Ramón Vázquez, assistant hitting coach Dillon Lawson and major-league hitting strategy coach Joe Cronin.
Spared in the firings were pitching coach Andrew Bailey (a close friend of Breslow’s from his playing days) as well as first-base coach Jose David Flores, bullpen coach Chris Holt, catching instructor Parker Guinns and assistant hitting coach John Soteropulous. Jason Varitek, the former game-planning coordinator, will have a new role with the team.
Triple-A Worcester manager Chad Tracy — son of former big-league manager Jim Tracy — will take over as Boston’s interim manager. Double-A Portland manager Chad Epperson will serve as third-base coach. Both Tracy and Epperson managed top prospects Marcelo Mayer, Roman Anthony, Payton Tolle and Connelley Early as they came up through the system the past few seasons. Former Triple-A hitting coach Collin Hetzler will serve as a hitting coach on the major-league staff.
Tracy, 40, was managing Triple-A Worcester on Saturday evening when he left the dugout in the third inning to head to the clubhouse, according to a league source. That’s where he received news he’d been named the Red Sox’s interim manager. Defense coach Iggy Suarez took over in-game as acting manager while Tracy processed the news, eventually leaving the ballpark to head to his home right behind Polar Park to pack his bags for Baltimore to take over as Boston’s manager.
On Friday, coming off a three-game sweep by the New York Yankees as the team began a six-game road trip, Cora did not explain why he was roughly 45 minutes late to his media availability session. While Cora can sometimes be late for his media sessions, the excessive tardiness was odd, perhaps the first indication that something more than the record was amiss.
With Cora and the coaching staff taking the fall for the immensely disappointing start to the season, there was no mistaking that Breslow created a disjointed roster for Cora entering this season.
Cora toed the company line all offseason and into spring, saying he would find a way to make things work with the roster, particularly in rotating five players — Jarren Duran, Ceddanne Rafaela, Wilyer Abreu, Roman Anthony and Masataka Yoshida — through three outfield spots as well as designated hitter.
Some within the coaching staff this offseason felt an outfielder needed to be moved to clear up the logjam. A move never materialized despite the Red Sox seeking trade partners for Yoshida as late as the final weekend of spring training.
Before the season even began, Cora began to admit the strain the outfield situation could cause.
“It’s not easy,” he said on Opening Day in Cincinnati. “Whoever thinks that this is easy to move them around, they’re wrong. I’m going to say it like that. It’s not that easy, but I’ll make it work.”
Red Sox ownership had remained staunchly loyal to Cora, hiring him in 2018 and watching him steer the organization to a World Series championship. They even re-hired him in 2021 after he was fired in 2020 for his involvement in the 2017 Houston Astros sign-stealing scandal. From 2021 through his abrupt departure Saturday evening, the Red Sox heavily supported Cora despite the team making just two postseason appearances during that span. Coinciding with their playoff drought was a scaling back of payroll relative to the rest of the league’s big-market teams. Cora was tasked with doing more with less, in a sense. For that, ownership rewarded him in 2025 with a new three-year deal.
Throughout his tenure in Boston, his first big-league managerial job, Cora was lauded for his communication skills — not only because he is bilingual, but because he understood the unique grind of the Boston market as a former player.
When asked in spring training how Cora might manage a complex roster situation, Breslow was complimentary.
“Well, I think Alex is masterful at using the entirety of a roster,” Breslow said on Feb. 11. “I think he’s at his best when there’s flexibility, when he can find the right matchups for players. And he’s such a strong communicator that everyone understands the way that they fit into the bigger picture. And so I suppose there’s the possibility that too much optionality can be difficult to manage, but I don’t see that being an issue with Alex.”
Breslow, who’s in the midst of his third season on the job, was also keenly aware entering the 2026 season that his own job status would be under more scrutiny this season. That was especially so given the truncated timelines of his three predecessors — Ben Cherington, Dave Dombrowski and Chaim Bloom — who were each fired within their first four years as leaders of baseball operations.
“As soon as you start thinking about (the end), you’re probably defeated,” Breslow said this spring. “The obligation I have to the organization and to our fan base is to try to build the most competitive team we possibly can, and that is completely independent of what or for how long I have this job. That’s firmly where my focus is.”
Rather than wait to be fired, Breslow, with ownership’s blessing, did the job first.