BOSTON -- The Red Sox fired their president of baseball operations on Sunday night, so naturally they made their manager explain it.
Alex Cora addressed the media for more than 22 minutes on Monday afternoon, but there's little point in relaying what he said. An ownership group that preaches honesty and accountability found itself bereft of those qualities when it came time to explain the how and why of Dave Dombrowski's ouster.
They instead hid behind an empty press release, leaving the task of explaining how Dombrowski could be fired just 11 months after winning a World Series to one of his underlings.
Cora did the best he could, noting that owners John Henry and Tom Werner, as well as CEO Sam Kennedy, broke the news to him after Sunday night's loss to the Yankees, leaving Cora to "call an audible" and inform his team.
That led to the absurdity of Monday afternoon, when Cora was peppered with very specific questions about why ownership decided to cut ties with Dombrowski, questions he was in no position to answer. In a Belichickian twist, they let the statement speak for itself.
"I know for some people, it's probably not enough," Cora said. "For others, maybe it is. I'm just here like every day to talk to you people for whatever you guys want to talk about it. From my end, like I said yesterday, I was very surprised, but at the same time, you think about it today, and this is the guy that gave me a shot to become a big-league manager. For four or five years, you go through this process and nobody gave you a shot. All of a sudden, Dave Dombrowski, 40 years in the big leagues, decides to give me a chance to run this organization as a manager. We were successful last year. This year, not that much. This is a business where sometimes you've got to take tough decisions, and this was a tough decision.
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"Ownership decided that from now on they're going to look forward for someone else to run baseball operations. They explained it very simple. The guy is amazing. He's probably a Hall of Famer, what he did for the organization the last four or five years, it was great. I think everybody appreciates what Dave has done."
Cora said lots of other stuff, but let's just stop right here, because the only ones who can explain the motivations behind this move own the team, and for whatever reason, they're not talking.
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