Craig Breslow is next.
It probably won’t be during the season, though the John Henry ownership certainly wouldn’t be above it. Heck, the Boston Red Sox could win the World Series — unlikely as that might be with the roster Breslow constructed as chief baseball officer — and it would only spare him for so long.
Ask Dave Dombrowski. Ask Ben Cherington. Ask Theo Epstein, who once escaped the Henry regime in a gorilla suit, only to return, win a second Series and then bolt for the Chicago Cubs. Oh, to hear the honest thoughts of Epstein, back with the Fenway Sports Group as a part-owner and senior adviser, on the latest installment of As The Red Sox Turn.
It’s an endless game of survivor at Fenway Park, only no one ever survives. Not top executives. Not superstars like Mookie Betts, Rafael Devers and Alex Bregman. Not managers like Terry Francona, John Farrell and now Alex Cora after the team’s 10-17 start.
A participant in previous Red Sox soap operas, Cora is not exactly an innocent victim. He won a power struggle in 2023 over Breslow’s predecessor, Chaim Bloom. And for all his well-documented communication skills, he failed last season to talk Devers into playing first base, a position Devers embraced immediately after getting traded to the San Francisco Giants.
The Red Sox have made the playoffs only twice since winning the 2018 World Series. Cora was the manager the entire time except in 2020, when he was suspended for his role in the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scandal. Of course, he also worked for three different heads of baseball operations, with the Red Sox careening from one team-building strategy to another.
Cora wasn’t the one who last offseason failed to trade from the Red Sox’s surplus of young outfielders. The one who blew the pursuit of Bregman in free agency. The one who then pivoted to run prevention, leaving the Red Sox with an offense that requires Roman Anthony at 21 to be the next David Ortiz.
Breslow did all that. And while the decision to fire Cora likely was not his alone — the Sox brass spent Saturday night getting their stories straight, in advance of one of their patented postmortems — Breslow’s fingerprints seemed rather apparent in the dismissals of five coaches and reassigning of another, game-planning coordinator and franchise fixture Jason Varitek.
As noted by The Athletic’s Jen McCaffrey, Breslow kept pitching coach Andrew Bailey, a close friend from his playing days. The other Breslow-selected members of the pitching group also were spared, even though the Red Sox began the day ranked 24th in ERA. The only hitting coach to remain was John Soteropulos, who was at Driveline Baseball before joining the organization in 2023 and falls in line with Breslow’s data-driven sensibilities.
The dismissal of hitting coach Pete Fatse, in particular, was not all that unexpected. The Red Sox, before their 17-1 rout of the Baltimore Orioles on Saturday, ranked 26th in runs per game. Bench coach Ramón Vázquez is a close friend of Cora’s, so it was not a shock that he, too, would be loaded into the getaway van the Sox commissioned to transport the departing staff members away from the team hotel in Baltimore.
The firings, though, also included assistant hitting coach Dillon Lawson, a Breslow appointee, and hitting strategy coach Joe Cronin, who Breslow inherited but promoted. Perhaps the most inexplicable one was third-base coach and outfield and base-running instructor Kyle Hudson. Under Hudson’s watch, Wilyer Abreu won two Gold Gloves, Ceddanne Rafaela one. One former Red Sox player, granted anonymity of candor, described Hudson as the best base-running coach he ever had.
The loss of Bregman to the Chicago Cubs already had deprived the Sox’s young hitters of a strong influence. The promotion of Triple-A manager Chad Tracy as Cora’s interim replacement and the dramatic makeover of the coaching staff 27 games into the season likely will be unsettling for the entire club.
Forgive the players — and for that matter, Red Sox fans — if they’re experiencing whiplash. The Sox signed Cora to a three-year, $21.75 million extension in July 2024. They fired him one month into the second year of the deal. And the next shock could be the return of Cora with another club, maybe even by next week if the Philadelphia Phillies dump Rob Thomson.
Sound crazy? Perhaps, but Cora is close with Dombrowski, the Phillies’ president of baseball operations with whom he collaborated to help the Red Sox win the 2018 World Series. A manager changing teams in the middle of a season would not be unprecedented, either.
In 1978, the New York Yankees hired Bob Lemon less than a month — July 24 — after the Chicago White Sox fired him. The Yankees erased a 14-game deficit to force a playoff with the Red Sox for the AL East title, and went on to win the World Series.
Dombrowski, like Breslow, is more responsible than his manager for the failings of his club, which ended its 10-game losing streak on Saturday night but still is worse off than the Red Sox at 9-18. Everyone, though, knows how baseball works. The Sox are proceeding conventionally by scapegoating the manager before the head of baseball operations. Still, Breslow surely knows his job is on the line.
This is Breslow’s third season on the job. His three predecessors — Bloom, Dombrowski and Cherington — all were fired within their first four years. So if Breslow pushed to fire Cora and remove six coaches, it might have been a last-ditch attempt to save himself. If Henry provided more of the impetus, Breslow should be even less comfortable.
The Red Sox finished .500 in Breslow’s first season. They overcame the Devers disruption to win 89 games in his second, only to lose to the Yankees in the wild-card round. This season, they should be taking the next step forward. But some of their coaches and new players in recent weeks expressed alarm at the relative youth of the position-player group.
Breslow’s job was to fortify that group, and his trade for first baseman Willson Contreras was not enough of an answer. The Red Sox could have signed Bregman. They could have signed Pete Alonso. They could have done any number of things to better protect Anthony, Marcelo Mayer and company. Instead, they wound up preaching run prevention, as if that was their plan all along.
Are the Sox better today than they were yesterday? Doubtful. Can they compete for a wild-card spot in a wide-open American League? Perhaps, if Tracy somehow finds a way to get more out of the players than Cora did and the pitching starts to click.
Even with the offensive questions, Cora maintained the Sox would be competitive as long as their pitchers performed to expectations. They haven’t, at least to this point. It sure will be interesting Sunday to hear Breslow explain why he left that part of the coaching staff largely untouched.
But enough about Breslow, who in the end is just another Henry pawn, positioned to take the next fall. Under Henry, the Red Sox are incoherent, dysfunctional and forever poised to overreact. Yet, why should the owner operate any differently? The turnstiles at Fenway keep spinning. “Sweet Caroline” keeps playing.
Time for fans to alter the refrain.
No good, no good, no good.