Alex Cora often has sounded like a defeated man at the podium recently.
Sam Kennedy insists those aren’t his cries for help to Chaim Bloom.
The Red Sox have gotten smacked on multiple occasions leading into and coming out of the All-Star break. The quality of play has been appalling, and certainly not what one would expect from a team that had a sensational June.
Cora, generally candid, hasn’t hidden his frustrations about the caliber of play. That could be interpreted as him pleading with the chief baseball officer to add reinforcements, but Sox president and CEO Sam Kennedy said on "The Greg Hill Show" that's not the case.
"I’ve been in baseball since 1993 and typically the perception that sports figures are talking to each other through the media in the organizations that I’ve seen is just never true," Kennedy said Tuesday. "And I can say with absolute certainty that Chaim and Alex Cora have perhaps the best manager/general manager relationship that I've seen in my time here. They’ve got an incredibly open dialogue, honest dialogue, all of us talk all the time on a daily basis, so everyone is on the same page. …
"When we’re not playing well, it’s frustrating," Kennedy later added. "But we believe in this team, we believe in Alex and in terms of Chaim Bloom and the entire baseball ops front office, they have a close relationship with the staff and are in touch all the time and no one is talking to each other through the media, I can assure you of that. If we express frustration publicly, that’s because we’re frustrated."
There is some perspective that can’t be lost here. Make no mistake, the Red Sox aren't currently submitting a lineup card that resembles a contending team. However, they’ve been so decimated by injuries that even the deepest of teams would have their depth tested.
That said, the Red Sox are in a precarious spot. Becoming full-fledged sellers would break the spirit of a team that really isn’t that far outside of the playoff picture, but it could help them retool right away for 2023. They could make some minor moves and ride with the group they have in hopes that the health improves, but if they come up short there will be a lot of second-guessing about what they could have done at the deadline.
If the relationship between Cora and Bloom is as copacetic as Kennedy is making it out to be, they’ll have the conversation about needs amicably behind closed doors, not into a microphone after getting walloped.
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