Mastrodonato: Alex Cora gives cold shoulder to most of Houston Astros organization

Whether or not you’ve forgiven Alex Cora for his morally corrupt decision-making as part of the 2017 Houston Astros, it’s becoming quite clear that he couldn’t care less what the general public thinks.

“The thing is, at this level, this platform, it’s going to be tough forever,” he said Monday afternoon from Minute Maid Park in Houston, his first visit there since the scandal became public knowledge. “Not only when I come here, it can be when I go to other places and there are going to be situations that are going to come up through the season. There are going to be books, there’s going to be stuff that’s going to be said, there are going to be narratives.

“For people to judge me, I understand. There’s nothing I can do. There’s nothing I can do to change the past. What I can do is be myself in the present and keep getting better.”

In other words: Say what you want about me, but I’m moving on.

At this point, nearly 18 months after he lost his job when MLB pinned him as the mastermind of the cheating scandal that rocked the sport, Cora seems tired of apologizing (although he continues to do it and says he will for as long as he’s asked about it).

“The fact that we’re playing good baseball, and the story should be the Boston Red Sox against the Houston Astros, two of the best teams in the big leagues, it helps,” Cora said, taking a small victory lap.

And oh yeah, for the majority of folks in the Astros organization, Cora has something for you, too: an ice-cold shoulder.

He singled out three people — shortstop Carlos Correa, catcher Martin Maldonado and hitting coach Alex Cintron — as three guys he was looking forward to seeing in Houston this week.

That was it.

Not even Alex Bregman, the third baseman Cora once spoke of like he was his own son, was mentioned as someone he wanted to see.

An entire organization full of people he once coached, worked with or looked up to suddenly seemed dead to him, although Cora chose not to get into specifics about which relationships he no longer values.

“I really don’t want to go into that,” he said. “There’s a lot of stuff that happened through the investigation that was tough to swallow, but at the end like I’ve been saying all along, I made a mistake, I went through the process and after that MLB did the right thing. But I’d rather stay away from personal relationships.”

Here’s one further: asked if he had any good memories from Minute Maid Park, where Cora was the bench coach for a team that won the World Series, he had nothing to say about his time in the home dugout.

“I remember a grand slam by Jackie Bradley Jr. in the ’18 American League Championship Series,” Cora said. “I remember the catch by Andrew Benintendi. I remember Jackie hitting a home run off Josh James. There’s some good memories here as the Red Sox.”

Not a single Astros memory, huh?

“No,” he said. “I mean, you asked me if I can come in here and have good memories. I have good memories. Jackie hit a grand slam, we won a playoff series here, we swept them, so that’s good memories.

“I’ve got good friends around, some good stuff that we did in ’17, but right now, as manager of the Red Sox, this is what I remember: when we came here and we swept the Astros. And we went to the World Series.”

The Red Sox actually didn’t sweep in the series; they won in five games. But they did win all three in Houston, where they celebrated on the field in front of Cora’s former boss.

Whatever was said by the players, coaches and team employees who were interviewed by MLB in the investigation last January, the end result was a picture of a bench coach who had an insatiable desire to win, and was willing to break the rules in the process.

Cora has been willing to acknowledge his mistakes every time he’s been asked about the scandal since he was rehired as Red Sox manager. But one thing he won’t do is point fingers or talk about who was loyal to him and who wasn’t.

Well, for the most part.

“I said it before, I think out of the whole report, the way (former Astros general manager Jeff Lunhow) talked about me, just saying, ‘the bench coach,’ that really bothered me,” Cora said. “That really bothered me. Obviously, I don’t know what was said in the investigation. I know what I said.

“What I went through, it is what it is. I got suspended, that’s something that will always be on my resume, and I think at the end, we all made a mistake. We all messed up and we all are paying the price.”

Cora is moving on. His team is good again. He’s getting a lot of credit for it.

As for the Houston Astros: who are they?

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2TxVjTC