Cora's resurgence has Red Sox on rise

There is no question, as baseball reaches the traditional mile-marker of July 4, that Xander Bogaerts has been Boston's best player so far, as the Red Sox have surprised the world with a 4 1/2-game lead in the American League East, the best record in the AL, nearly the best in the Majors.

And Chaim Bloom, the team’s chief baseball officer, has quietly made moves with his starting rotation and bullpen and with essential role players like Alex Verdugo (part of the Mookie Betts trade) and Kiké Hernández and Hunter Renfroe, as a way of reminding everyone why owner John Henry hired him away from the Rays.

But there is also a different kind of MVP for the Red Sox this season. Call him their Most Valuable Person. That would be the manager, Alex Cora, back from a year’s suspension because of his role in the Astros' sign-stealing scandal when he was A.J. Hinch’s bench coach, and being fired by the Red Sox because of that. It is a good thing for them. None of this happens the way it is happening, three years after Cora managed the team to 108 regular-season wins and Boston’s fourth World Series in this century, without him.

In the world where analytics have become such an essential part of teams’ business plans, and front offices have become increasingly powerful, Cora is one of those reminding us the difference greatness in the dugout can make. And Cora is, without question, a great baseball manager. In two-plus seasons managing the Red Sox his won-loss record is 244-163.

On Saturday, I asked Dave Roberts, a great manager himself, what qualities distinguish Alex Cora, Roberts’ old teammate with the Dodgers and opponent in the 2018 World Series.

“His ability to relate to his players,” Roberts said. “They know he’s in it with him.”

This doesn’t change what happened with him in Houston, or with his old boss, Hinch. It will always be part of Cora’s permanent record. But it also change his current record with the Red Sox, or the work he has done with him this season after an 0-3 start (at home, against the Orioles) that put the Red Sox exactly where they had been last season without Cora, which means last place in the AL East.

Now the Red Sox are trying to go from last to first the way they did when they ended up winning the 2013 Series with the kind of grinders around David Ortiz (and a 20-year-old kid named Bogaerts they brought up to play third base that year), the kind of grinders surrounding Bogaerts and Rafael Devers and J.D. Martinez in the middle of this Red Sox order.

Here is something Bloom said the other day to my friend Dan Shaughnessy in The Boston Globe about Cora:

“His ability to communicate and motivate is up there with anyone who does this job. He sees things in the game in ways that almost nobody does. I love working with a guy who is such a baseball rat. He loves everything about this game and it shows in everything he does. You can see it in our dugout. Players are talking baseball. They are watching the game and guys can learn things even when they’re not playing. The atmosphere in that dugout should help us over a long season.”

It is Joe Torre, himself a true baseball leader of men with the old Yankees when they were winning four World Series in five years and nearly five in six between 1996 and 2001, who has always told me, as recently as a few weeks ago, that “managing is still a people business. I appreciate the value of the numbers, but you will never be able to take the human element out of it.”

That is Cora. Everyone who ever came into contact with him when he was a player, and I was lucky enough to do that when he was with the Mets in 2009 and '10 understood, knew after one conversation how much of a baseball man he really was, not just because of his observations about the games, but about the people playing them. We all knew he was a manager-in-waiting. It was just a question of how long he would play, then where he would manage, and when.

It was with the Red Sox. Dave Dombrowski hired him. The Red Sox ended up winning 119 games in 2018. Even people in outer space know what happened to him, and Hinch, and the Astros organization after that. There was no guarantee that the Red Sox would take him back after his suspension. They did. And now Boston is one of the two biggest surprises in baseball this season, along with the Giants, who are a a game better than the Red Sox going into July 4 and still a half-game ahead of Roberts’ Dodgers in the NL West. Boston has organized itself around the quiet man in the Red Sox dugout who suffered a big fall and has gotten back up the way he has.

The other day, after sweeping a seven-game homestand against the Yankees and Royals, Cora talked about how important Red Sox fans and packed houses have meant so much to his team lately.

“They’ve made a difference,” Alex Cora said.

Not as big as the one he’s made at Fenway Park.