On the final day of last season in Baltimore, Red Sox manager Alex Cora sat on the bench in the visitors dugout at Camden Yards — his team on its way to a second consecutive last place finish — and offered candid introspection. He’d recently learned he’d be returning as manager in 2024 despite a front office change, but he realized what he’d done in the past wasn’t enough.
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“I have to be better,” he said on Oct. 1. “I have to improve. The vote of confidence is great but what are we doing, what am I doing to put these guys in a situation to be successful? I’ve got to be realistic. I feel like I haven’t done my job the last few years. I have to improve in a lot of things.”
Cora began sowing the seeds of change over the offseason.
One of the early steps was simple: A series of Zoom calls to maintain a connection with his team throughout the winter. Cora hosted calls with his players once a month — just the manager, his pitchers and position players, no coaches or front office members. The calls lasted roughly 20 minutes, aimed at keeping the group unified amid a winter of turnover and departures, not only in the front office, but on the roster and coaching staff. Justin Turner, a clubhouse leader, was gone. Chris Sale, a veteran voice on the pitching staff, had been traded.
A few players spoke on the calls, but it was mostly Cora with a clear, consistent message: The outside predictions for the club might be bleak, but he was serious about changing things in 2024. Be ready for a different kind of spring training.
It was a noticeable departure from previous winters.
“I’ve never had that many Zoom calls in the offseason,” Nick Pivetta said. “But I think it’s important, it makes every individual feel that they’re part of something.”
“It was pretty much AC just checking in on the group and kind of keeping everybody on the same page, setting the tone for coming into the spring,” said Trevor Story.
“It was a very candid, open conversation,” Garrett Whitlock added.
Each of the last two seasons, the Red Sox were within three games of a playoff spot at the trade deadline, before falling off the map in the second half. Sure they could have used a few outside reinforcements that never came, but regardless, Cora felt responsible.
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“It’s not that we stopped competing, but we got our asses kicked, and at this level you have to play well over 162,” Cora said, sitting at a table outside the Red Sox clubhouse one afternoon early in spring training.
“There’s a level of expectation, not only from the organization, but from the fan base, and they deserve better baseball. Did I take it personal? Yeah. It’s my team. It’s been my team since 2018. And if people are going to praise me for what we did in 2018 or in 2021, well, at the same time, I got to be better when we’re not on top of the division or playing in October.”
The Zoom calls served as a reminder that competition would be at the forefront from day one; there would be no easing into the camp. If they wanted a chance to compete this season, they had to show it from the get-go.
A culture change within the organization was in the works.
But culture is such a nebulous term. What does it mean to instill a new culture? And more importantly, how?
Even before the Zoom calls, Cora started with himself.
If he wanted the players to buy in, to step up, he knew he had to as well. Outside of the year he was suspended, Cora said 2023 was his hardest personal year and it took a toll on him. Over the winter, he got himself healthier, mentally and physically, dropping 30 pounds, and picked up running alongside his partner, Angelica, who’s training for the Boston Marathon. Cora plans to run the Boston Athletic Association 5K held two days before the marathon.
At the Winter Meetings, Cora reiterated his message of how things would be different. “If we’re going to pick a topic or theme of spring training, it’s going to be competition,” he said in Nashville. “That’s something that — it’s going to be from the roster to the coaches to the front office. We have to be better at competition.”
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Alongside his coaching staff, which included new pitching coach Andrew Bailey, Cora began mapping out what more competition in spring training meant. Cork boards in the middle of the clubhouse were filled with paper leaderboards. One tracked catcher drops, another throwing accuracy in pitcher fielding drills, a third the number of runs scored this spring and productive at-bats, a fourth charted pitchers with the highest two-strike percentages. All of it was out in the open for teammates, coaches, front office members and media to see. It created a sense of accountability.
“We as leaders of the team, if we go out there and feel naked at times and look silly at times and get embarrassed, I think that brings the group together and shows that, ‘Hey man, no one’s above this process,'” Story said.
The focus became games within the game to break up the monotony of camp. Points, prizes and glory were on the line. Players stopped by the leaderboards routinely to check in, annoyed if they hadn’t yet been updated with the latest stats. Bailey’s pitching group — which he’d dubbed the Run Prevention Unit — not only spent hundreds of hours mapping out detailed plans for each pitcher this winter, but devised competition-based drills for bullpens and fielding drills to set high intensity early. Hitting coach Pete Fatse had his group vying to hit targets on the offensive side throughout spring. Game planning coordinator and catching coach Jason Varitek kept the catchers on their toes (literally).
“We should walk into the clubhouse thinking about winning,” Fatse said. “I think when it becomes a part of the fabric, like whether it’s ping pong or if it’s an early-count swing decision for the hitters, guys tend to respond to it.”
“That’s what we’re trying to do,” Cora said. “Kind of like challenge them in practice, so when the game comes, it’s just second nature.”
It might seem simple, but they were practices that fell by the wayside as losing piled up. In recent years, the team was streaky with good offensive stretches followed by long stretches of inconsistency. They were still competing, but maybe not at as high of a level as Cora wanted and he had to be candid with his team. He wasn’t willing to call it complacency or laziness, but he knew they needed more. They needed to be better. He needed to enforce it.
“(It’s) just have our stretches individually and as a team just be a lot more limited when it comes to failure,” Triston Casas said.
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The calls over the winter prepared the team to come into camp ready. Cora knew he couldn’t control outside additions to the team, but he could focus on getting more out of his existing group. The first week of spring, there appeared to be a total buy-in and a refreshed attitude in the clubhouse, noticeable in comparison to the low expectations outside the walls of JetBlue Park.
“To me, it feels like, all right, let’s prove who we are quick,” Jarren Duran said. “Let’s be ready to go. No using spring training to ramp up and get ready. We know what we can do. We know who we have in this clubhouse. We can show who we are right away. Kind of like a punch-people-in-the-mouth-early thing.”
If ever there was a time for wholesale changes, now was it. Not only had the club hired a new chief baseball officer in Craig Breslow (the third GM-type for which Cora has worked, a feat few managers in history can claim), but it also featured a young roster sprinkled with veterans looking to prove something, which offered a rare opportunity.
On the current roster, Rafael Devers has the most years in a Red Sox uniform. After him, unbelievably, it’s Bobby Dalbec, Connor Wong and Duran among position players. On the pitching side, it’s Pivetta followed by Tanner Houck and Whitlock. Veterans Story, Tyler O’Neill, Chris Martin and Kenley Jansen have been around the league, but each has something to prove with the Red Sox.
Meanwhile, the club is expected to have at least three rookies on the Opening Day roster — Ceddanne Rafaela, Wilyer Abreu and Justin Slaten.
Cora implored those who lived through two last-place finishes and three in the last four years to leverage that embarrassment and frustration as fuel to not let up in the midst of a long season.
“These guys, most of them, they have no clue what happened here in the last two years. It’s a new group,” Cora said. “And the guys that were here, they took it very personal. I told them, ‘You have to talk about it.’”
Story, in particular, seems to be using this as motivation. Despite missing much of the first two years of his six-year, $140 million deal in Boston, Story has taken the down years in Boston to heart, especially because he hasn’t been around to help the club.
“The last couple of years we’ve been a good team for parts of the year, we just haven’t put together a full season. I think that’s where we need to get better,” he said. “Those are some things that from a focus standpoint, just really resetting the culture every day.
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“You’re going to see a grittiness and a hunger that really embraces the town,” he added. “And that starts right here. Like I said, we’ve underperformed, there’s no doubt about that the last couple of years and no one’s happy about that. And that’s what’s driven me in the offseason, every workout, every hitting session, every throwing session.”
Story was one of the players Cora talked with before and after their Zoom calls to make sure the message was getting across. He’s growing into a role as a clubhouse leader, as evidenced by a bootcamp he hosted in January for some of the young infielders at a complex near his home in Texas.
In some ways, this internal drive from Cora and his team could almost be taken as proving a point to ownership. If ownership is reducing payroll and not adding top-tier free agents to bolster the club even further, the existing roster wants to prove it is good enough.
It might sound ridiculous for the Red Sox to consider themselves fighting to make the World Series, especially when all the predictions and numbers suggest otherwise. But Cora’s overall message has been, who cares? He reminded his team of how often the Dodgers have been predicted to win the past several years and how the Diamondbacks seemingly came out of nowhere last fall.
“The goal is not ‘get better and see where we’re at,’” Whitlock said. “The goal is to win the World Series, so that’s been a motivating thing.”
“I think if people aren’t laughing at your goals, they’re too low,” Casas added.
Instead of falling into a self-fulfilling prophecy of another last-place finish, Cora wants his players to fight that narrative. They’ve been in the playoff race at the deadline the last two years.
The American League East remains tough, and yet there are opportunities. The Yankees will be without Gerrit Cole, DJ LeMahieu and Anthony Rizzo to start the year. The Blue Jays are dealing with pitching injuries in their rotation with Kevin Gausman and Alek Manoah and bullpen with Jordan Romano and Erik Swanson. Cracks in the division make the Red Sox’s unlikely feat of a wild-card spot at least possible.
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It would be naive to think some of this urgency isn’t tied to Cora entering his final year under contract. On the first day of spring training, he refused to talk about whether he wants to return to Boston, but reiterated he does not want to be a lifelong manager. He also knows for as much success as he had in 2018 and 2021, the last place finishes loom. If he is heading into managerial free agency, getting the most out of his team helps his cause too.
All of this only matters if the results follow. Chemistry, competition and culture change are all good and necessary things for a Red Sox club that’s spent more time losing than winning of late. But the bottom line is wins and losses and that’s not lost in the midst of this overhaul.
“There’s a brand (of play) that we’re looking for. We’ll make sure that we play that way,” Cora said toward the end of camp. “I think these guys are talented. They are. Now we have to go out there and prove it, and I believe they will.”
(Top photo of Cora: Kim Klement Neitzel / USA Today)
