After Tuesday night’s 4-3 loss in extra innings to the Angels (28-32), Red Sox manager Alex Cora was both visibly and vocally frustrated with the current state of his team, who have now lost 8 of their last 10 games with a record of 29-34 overall.
“We keep making the same mistakes - we’re not getting better,” Cora said postgame. “At one point it has to be on me, I guess, right? I’m the manager. I gotta keep pushing them to get better.
“They’re not getting better. They’re not. We keep making the same mistakes, same mistakes. I’m being very honest about it, very open about it.”
This type of rhetoric from Cora in a press conference might be out of character, but it’s warranted given the on-field product from his team in 2025.
With a 6-17 record in one-run games, half of Boston's 34 losses have been by a run.
Close losses mean you’re losing in the margins, and Cora acknowledged ahead of Wednesday’s series finale against the Angels that something needs to change.
Cora was incredibly introspective, speaking for over four straight minutes when he was asked by Alex Speier of The Boston Globe about how he gets his team to start cleaning up the simple, sloppy mistakes that have them 10 games behind the Yankees on June 4.
Here’s Alex Cora’s full answer from his pregame press conference on Wednesday:
“That's a good question. We can talk about that one for a while. But in the present, I don't know. We're always aggressive talking about mistakes. It's not like we just let them go by, you know? We just have to pick and choose when, understanding the players, right?
“For example, the one that always gets me - I hate when it happens, but it happens all over the league - somebody will forget the outs. And they hit the ball in the air, and they forget the outs, and they give the ball up. What [are we] gonna do when they come back? ‘You should [look at] the scoreboard, you forgot the outs.’ They freaking know they forgot the outs, you know? Like, you tell them, ‘Hey man, just be on top of it, right? Like, let's go.’
“But I think decision making is the one that - not only us, but I think in baseball - is the hard one, right? And how we teach that, how we do it at the big league level, when every play, every pitch, every decision, it means a lot, you know? And it goes from the 50/50 to like the 60% win probability, right? Every play has value, right? I mean, in the industry, we talk about value, right? Well, it happens at 7:05, it happens at 1:05, 1:30, you know?
“And you have to understand as a player how to manage the game. That's the way I put it. And this is not the manager managing the game. It's the players managing the game, you know? Understanding that there's situations that - I don't know, you don't make a play, it's 15 pitches for the starter, right? We can go from Crochet throwing 112 to Crochet going 105, right? Because we play good defense behind it.
“And going back to the question - we show them, we talk to them, we just have to execute, you know? And with some of them, you have to be more patient. With others, you're like, ‘Come on, you've been in the big leagues for seven years, you know? You know it, right?’ So it's a balance of how to manage, how to go about it, how to teach a game, how to talk the game. There's days that you don't say much, there's days that you say a lot. And that's the reason - this meeting that we have on a daily basis about hitting. Timmy Hyers was the one that brought it up from LA. And when we talked to him after the World Series in ’17, he mentioned that meeting and he's like, ‘I always talk about that meeting as a hitters meeting, but it's a baseball meeting, right?’ Like the topic can go from forcing a cutter-sinker usage to, ‘Hey, we have to put around the basement better, this situation came up yesterday.’
“Sometimes the voice of the manager - not sometimes, the voice of the manager is very important - but the voice of the teammates are important, right? And that's something that we used to do as players. We talk about the situations and we help each other out. Decision making and this and that. And like I always say - this game, it's not always black and white, right? There's always something different. The way you saw it, the way I see it, that's how it works. But I think I'm talking a lot.
“But I think it just - you have to be on top of it. You do it in different ways. We get frustrated with the results, but you have to trust the process. And right now, I don't know if the process is good, right? Because we're not seeing results. Maybe we have to change the process. That's on us, that's on me, and obviously let's see how the players react.”
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS - JUNE 03: Manger Alex Cora #13 of the Boston Red Sox signs autographs before the game against the Los Angeles Angels at Fenway Park on June 03, 2025 in Boston, Massachusetts.Elsa/Getty Images
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