The Red Sox made their issues with Junior Valentine abundantly clear Monday night.
Alex Cora isn’t expecting it to carry over into Tuesday.
Valentine, the home plate umpire Monday, was all over the place in Boston’s 5-4 loss to the Baltimore Orioles. He wasn’t the reason the Red Sox lost, but he certainly took the wind out of their sails.
Hitting coach Peter Fatse got tossed in the sixth for barking from the dugout, presumably over how Valentine was calling pitches both low and high a strike. Umpires have tendencies to favor pitches a little up or down and teams adjust, but Valentine was calling both, making for a pretty tall strike zone.
Valentine irked the Red Sox at other points too, including in the fourth and ninth innings on called third strikes to Triston Casas and Kiké Hernández, respectively.
After the game ended, Cora continued shouting at the umpires, and received an ejection of his own – even if it was more symbolic than anything.
“Honestly, we were actually having team breakfast and I was talking to Pete Fatse, our hitting coach, who had gotten thrown out earlier,” Cora said Tuesday in his weekly appearance on Gresh and Fauria. “It was like, how does this work? Do I not manage today because I got thrown out after the game? That's not -- whatever. That was our reaction. Whatever dude.”
In the spirit of that “whatever dude” approach, Cora didn’t sound worried about bad blood lingering the rest of the series.
“No, no, no, I don’t think there’s carryover," Cora said. "We disagreed with the strike zone throughout the day and we let him know, it's part of the game. There were some pitches that we didn’t agree with -- there were some pitches we didn’t agree with and they were strikes at the end.
“They’re professionals, just like us, nothing is going to happen. They understand there’s frustration from our side, and probably frustration from the other side, but no, there’s no carryover (with) the strike zone or arguing.”
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