Just Like Their Manager, the Red Sox Keep Coming Back
The New York Times
Alex Cora spent a season in exile, and the Boston Red Sox sank to the A.L. East basement. With their manager back, the resilient Red Sox are in the A.LC.S. These things are related.
Some year-long suspensions are better than others. The suspension Major League Baseball levied on Alex Cora, for example, could not have been imposed at a more convenient time.
After Cora played a principal role in the Astros’ illicit sign-stealing caper of 2017, M.L.B. suspended him for the entire 2020 season. The Boston Red Sox let him go, even after he had led the team to a World Series championship in 2018 with a flawless and at times brilliant postseason managerial run.
To then be exiled was humiliating and caused anguish for his family. But in terms of baseball, all Cora missed was 60 rotten Red Sox games. For four months of his suspension, he shared the same fate as virtually everyone else in baseball: At home in lockdown as the world waited for the coronavirus pandemic to end.
