A lot of the time, when a general manager is fired, the manager he put in the dugout gets let go too, at least eventually. The idea is that a new GM will want to craft the team in his or her own image and one of the most important ways to do that is to put someone in the manager’s office with whom he or she can work and communicate well.
Whoever replaces Dave Dombrowski as the next Red Sox GM will not have the luxury, however, as Red Sox president and CEO Sam Kennedy said yesterday on WEEI that Alex Cora will return in 2020.
Which, as unusual as that may be, is probably the right call too. Cora, like Dombrowski, is still less than a full season removed from winning a World Series and there hasn’t been any suggestion that he has lost the confidence of either the players or the front office. Really, it all just underscores again how weirdly-timed Dombrowski’s firing is. And suggests, perhaps, that maybe it was something more singular to Dombrowski as opposed to something with broader bearing on the organization that ultimately led to his dismissal.
Part of me also wonders if Cora’s safety means that one of the executives who are currently serving as the Red Sox interim brain trust -- assistant general managers Eddie Romero, Zack Scott, and Brian O’Halloran and senior vice president of major and minor league operations Raquel Ferreira -- have the inside track on the GM job. A strong outside candidate may balk at not being able to name his or her manager, but one of those four may have no problem with Cora whatsoever.
It’s gonna be an interesting offseason in Boston.
