The Red Sox put together the worst kind of team, especially one that charges $63 per seat, second most in MLB and nearly twice the league average, and another $14.50 to wash down your sorrows with a beer. A team that was both boring and so bad it is threatening to be a non-contender before school lets out and the peak walk-up ticket-selling months. The worst slugging outfit in baseball could not even sell out Fenway when the Yankees came to town, which became a three-game sweep in which the Sox scored three runs and were largely non-competitive. The boredom they engendered was profound, a quality worse than being bad.
Lou Piniella once told me the worst thing a manager can do is to let a game get out of hand. On a larger, costlier scale, the Red Sox were looking at letting a season get out of hand before April ended. So, owner John Henry and Craig Breslow, chief baseball officer, fired manager Alex Cora on Saturday. The predicament was so bad the 10–17 Red Sox are eating $13.3 million to have Cora not manage the team through 2027, the last year of his three-year extension.
