Thoughts on Alex Cora, Dom Smith, and the filling of Fenway after a lost opportunity Sunday (2024)

Red Sox

Saturday featured stupendous baseball weather, and in days gone by, Fenway would have been jammed to the gills.

By Jon Couture

June 3, 2024

COMMENTARY

Sunday’s game was on a plate for the 2024 Red Sox, even after a squandered 3-0 lead. The sort that turns 80-odd win seasons into something more, and manna for TV production people always thirsting for hooks.

With Cam Booser’s story already in their pocket, in walked Jamie Westbrook on Sunday. The proud native of Holyoke, getting his first major-league taste after 11 years and some 1,200 professional games across Mexico, independent ball, and five organizations.

Beyond his mere presence, Barrel Man was summoned to pinch-hit with the winning run on second in the ninth inning. Alex Cora, with his history in TV, is no stranger to scene building.

“While the inning was going I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s going to happen,’ ” the Sox manager told reporters, “and it was a great at-bat.”

Westbrook, 28, walked on five pitches, never swinging the bat. Connor Wong, already with a couple critical hits this season, blasted a fly ball to deep right. Good enough to get out of Detroit’s Comerica Park, Yankee Stadium, Tampa, Philly, Toronto . . .

Just an out in Boston. Booser, summoned for the 10th, got hit hard for four runs. Detroit split the four-game series.

No movie magic. Just more middling.

As noted in the frankly ridiculous number of replies that tweet got, the Seattle Mariners pulled much the same trick last season, repeatedly ponging around .500 for games before ripping off a 25-6 stretch and narrowly missing the playoffs.

A few additional thoughts from the weekend.

Cora chatter

Hours after Friday’s column, which mused about the likelihood that Cora will happily enter free agency following the season, the Sox boss essentially confirmed it.

“We’re not talking about contracts during the season. Out of respect for the organization, the players, and the season, we’re not going to talk about contracts,” he told reporters during his Friday pregame availability. “We’ll play it out and whatever is decided is decided.

“My intent is to manage today and keep helping this team to be better. I think we have something good going on as far as developing players, and it’s a challenge right now of course with all the injuries, but I feel really good where I’m at. I feel really good with where I’m at in my personal life, which is the most important thing. I love the Red Sox, but the Cora-Feliciano team is my number one team, and we’re good where we’re at.”

Cora stressed he had no issue with Sox CEO Sam Kennedy saying the team had “underperformed” during a Thursday appearance on WEEI. (Kennedy walked his words back Friday, and — as he did on radio — praised Cora.)

It’s reassuring to see even in this moment where Red Sox fervor is far from full throat, nothing can still quickly become something. Kennedy’s usually got his talking points down better than that, but hey, even C.J. Cregg slipped up now and again.

At the end of last season, Cora was hard on himself, declaring “I feel like I haven’t done my job the last few years.” In those years since the 2021 playoff appearance, the Red Sox sagged after underwhelmening trade deadlines, losing 16 of 25 in 2022 and 16 of 28 before an awful September 2023. Frankly, it justified Chaim Bloom’s refusal to go in harder for a playoff chase.

“It’s been my team since 2018. And if people are going to praise me for what we did in 2018 or in 2021”, Cora told reporters last Oct. 1, “well, at the same time, I got to be better when we’re not on top of the division or playing in October.”

It brought change to the spring preparations. It has produced far more from an injury-hammered, underbuilt group than anyone could have reasonably expected. And it has come with the 48-year-old Cora seeming to revel in it all.

He’s used 42 players across 60 games, spinning 56 different batting orders and 50 different defensive lineups. As with any manager, there are micro criticisms. But that we can still humor the idea of meaningful games into the late summer is about more than Rob Manfred’s embrace of bloated playoffs and mediocrity.

“I cannot be selfish in this situation. We finished last the last two years and we’re playing under .500 baseball,” Cora told reporters Friday. “My situation will be taken care of in the future, whatever the organization decides — or whatever I decide to do. We both know we’re growing as a partnership, right? And it’s been really good, but at the same time, the future is the future.”

Dom Smith’s work

Boston’s outfield defense is continuing to do its job, tied for third after the weekend with eight outs above average. Jarren Duran and Ceddanne Rafaela — who turned a nifty double play Saturday — are each in the top 10, with Wilyer Abreu also above average.

The infield, without Trevor Story, Triston Casas (to a lesser degree), and now Vaughn Grissom, is tied for third-worst. Specific metrics vary, but most don’t like David Hamilton or Rafaela’s fill-in work at short, nor Rafael Devers’s work at third.

“The numbers will never back me up, but he’s playing good third base,” Cora told reporters Sunday afternoon. “Moving his feet . . . out there, he’s the veteran, and I think he’s been more consistent.”

The manager also took the time to praise Dom Smith’s work at first base, which was well-timed. The first-round pick of the Mets in 2013 — about two dozen slots ahead of Aaron Judge, and 140 in front of Jamie Westbrook — was non-tendered two winters ago and bounded through the Nationals, Cubs, and Rays employ before opting out of a minor-league deal at the end of April and signing with Boston.

He’s here as a stopgap, and that’s what he’s been — .195/.286/.276, a .562 OPS off last year’s .692 in a full season with Washington. On Sunday, though, he bailed out Hamilton with multiple deft picks at first base, including a double-clutch throw that the backup shortstop rifled almost right on Smith’s feet.

Smith’s Sox tenure figures to be neither memorable nor long, but he is chipping in to make this season a little more than it could be. And, if nothing else, his grimace while scoring from first on Devers’s triple spoke to me in ways fellow 44-year-olds can probably understand.

Not inflated, but not deflated

Saturday featured stupendous baseball weather, and in days gone by, Fenway would have been jammed to the gills. I can personally attest, having picked up tickets for the family that morning, that it wasn’t.

The team announced a good weekend for 2024 — 33,806 on Saturday, 34,662 on Sunday. (Capacity is 37,555 for night games, with 450 seats lost when the batter’s eye is covered.) Noted and recorded, with their 31,503 average for 30 home games 12th in the majors.

The above picture is mine, and though things did fill in within a couple of innings, the fact most of the concession areas behind the Coca Cola sign on the left-field deck were closed speaks to a dearth of tickets sold in advance.

One man’s perspective: In an era of dynamic pricing and an active secondary market, it remains difficult to sit anywhere other than the right-field hinterlands or the bleachers — an don’t-do-that-to-yourself for a sunny matinee — for much less than $100 a seat. Hardly the sort of thing to excite the spontaneous buyer.

The team has been running a “Tickets & A Drink” promotion on limited midweek dates, with two for the Phillies series offering $15 of concession credit for seats starting at $35. (Bleachers and grandstand corners, naturally.) And, lest we forget, the student deals and the giveaways.

Numbers like this weekend don’t figure to force much of a change, nor does the upcoming schedule. The Phillies and their fanatics crash Boston next week, the Yankees are finally on the schedule next weekend, and the Padres — albeit without Xander Bogaerts — visit the weekend following.

Stiff competition for a compromised team, muddling along in baseball’s wide middle, searching for a made-for-TV spark.