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One of the beautiful things about modern baseball is the divergent paths available for teams seeking the sport's biggest prize. A year ago, the Houston Astros clinched a World Series title at Dodger Stadium using the most aggressive and all-encompassing embrace of analytics the game had ever seen.
And on Sunday night, also at Dodger Stadium, the 2018 Boston Red Sox reached the same apex – winning the World Series and cementing their place as one of the best teams in recent baseball history – at the end of a three-year cycle that began with a sudden and disavowal of the analytics-based approach.
The approaches, though, were not as different as they appeared. Where the divergent paths of the 2017 Astros and the 2018 Red Sox are seen in the face of one another, the self-described "nerds" coming to recognize the value in unquantifiable assets, and the latter's brain trust capably bridging the gap between a strategy based on analytics and one based on scouting.
And in both cases, at the center of the transformation sat Alex Cora. As the Astros' bench coach in 2017, he was tasked with synthesizing the reams of information from the front office and disseminating it in easily digestible chunks to the players. And as Boston's rookie manager in 2018, he became the rare skipper who did not resist the intrusion of analytics in his job-but rather, pushed his bosses to do more.
John Henry said on the Dodger Stadium late Sunday night, following the 5-1 win over the Los Angeles Dodgers in Game 5. "We have a unity that was unlike Alex got that he did everything right, on every level. "
To be clear, the Red Sox authored the most dominant season since the 1998 New York Yankees – winning 108 regular season games and running 11-3 through the postseason over excellent teams from the Bronx, Houston and Los Angeles – because of their great collection of The World Series of MVPs Steve Pearce, the suffocating defense of their all-homegrown outfield, the tireless work of a half- dozen or so heavily taxed pitchers, and on and on.
They won because they spared no expense in assembling a deep and pedigreed roster, running up the game's highest payroll by far in 2018, highlighted by the $ 110 million they gave free agent J.D. Martinez in February. Martinez hit 43 homers this season and is expected to finish a couple of behind the scenes teammate Mookie Betts in the American League MVP voting next month. They won because two of Dave Dombrowski's trade-deadline pickups, Nathan Eovaldi's Pearce and pitcher, became indispensable contributors in October.
But the Red Sox also won because of its organizational strengths, and its front-office, and its seamless melding of old-school and new-school concepts about how to baseball team should be run.
In the winter after the 2015 season, Henry and the Red Sox undertook a massive retooling of the franchise's first back-to-back last-place finishes in 85 years. massive spending.
That winter, Henry, himself a numbers man who had made his fortune by applying self-discovered algorithms to derivatives and futures trading, a well-known strategy for the rediscovery of the early 1980s. led to World Series titles in 2004, 2007 and 2013 – but that had just left the team, in Henry's mind, too rigid and soulless.
"Baseball is a complex, dynamic, living thing on a daily basis, 12 months of the year," Henry told the Boston Globe in February 2016. "I think we were connecting too heavily on analytics." In the future, Henry said, the team would be "more holistic and with a broader approach."
That was the first winter after Henry hired Dombrowski as president of baseball operations. Dombrowski had been working in baseball front offices since the late 1970s and had earned a reputation as a scouting-first talent evaluator and an aggressive dealmaker. With Dombrowski at the helm, the Red Sox has begun to spend heavily, making the highest-paid pitcher in baseball history, among other moves.
Goal after winning division titles in both 2016 and 2017, the Red Sox flamed out in the division series both years, leading the team to fire John Farrell as manager. Among the first contestants they met a new face in Cora, holding their interview in New York during an off-day in the Astros / Yankees championship and coming away.
"He was a top candidate even before we spoke with him," Henry said. "We felt our approach [to running a team] was wrong. We needed a different approach. He had ideas. He told us from his perspective what we did wrong against [the Astros] last year, it was just what we wanted to hear. "
In that interview, the Red Sox brought along a vice president of baseball research Zach Scott, the head of their analytics department, and Cora began peppering Scott with questions about the Red Sox's processes and how they buy from the players. Cora's implication: the Red Sox could and should be doing more.
A week after the interview, on Oct. 22, 2017, Cora was named the 47th manager in Red Sox history. And one year and six days after that, on Sunday night, he was hoisting the World Series trophy on a makeshift stage in the infield dirt at Dodger Stadium. Though careful to deflect credit to his players – "It's all about the players; they're the ones [who] Make managers look good, "he said after Game 4 – Cora, who just became the fifth rookie manager to win it all, emerged from this championship run as the undisputed, beating heart of the franchise.
"We have an unbelievable leader," veteran left-hander Chris Sale said.
"Pearce said of Cora. "Whatever he says, we listen and we do it." "We all have a great leader."
While Dombrowski's anti-analytics reputation is unfair and incorrect – with the Florida Marlins in the mid-1990s, he was one of the first GMs in the game to work with an upstart data firm called Advanced Value Matrix to Evaluate Players – until Cora's arrival, The Red Sox is in the middle of the pack and its application of analytics.
"We had a strong analytics department," said GM assistant Frank Wren, a Dombrowski longtime lieutenant. "Where we were lagging in getting the players to buy it."
That, of course, had been Cora's specialty in Houston. It helped, too, that he was rarely forced to give up as Boston's data leads, as he had had a few words in the forefront. The Red Sox are among the few top teams that still let the manager run the game he wants, from the starting lineup on down. The harmony in their organization is contrasted with the tension of the Dodgers, where the rifts between the staff and the front office, with its massive analytics department, were scarcely disguised, especially as things unraveled.
"You need to let [the manager] run the club, "Dombrowski told Fox Sports late Sunday night." We communicate every day [but] when it comes to making the lineup or running a game, he gets all the information he wants, from all the analytics and statistics – he's very open minded to it. That's his job. How do you gain the respect of your club if they know upstairs you're making decisions? [to the manager]? "
Never was Cora's leadership more needed, or more effective, than in the aftermath of the 3-2 loss to the Dodgers in Game 3, 18-inning marathon that left Boston's pitching staff in tatters and had the feeling of a devastating blow. At his conclusion, as Nathan Eovaldi walked on the field in the field of a heroic, 97-pitch relief effort, his teammates, led by Price, puts him down to the mound, engulfed him and practically .
For the first time, the Red Sox, despite still leading by a game, could see a clear path to losing the series, with Games 4 and 5 the next two nights on the Dodgers' home field.
It's not a big team, but it's called in the wee hours of Saturday, in the aftermath of Game 3. And rather than implores his team with empty words of encouragement, he highlighted the sacrifice of Eovaldi and told his players loss is the greatest loss in baseball history, because of how hard they made the Dodgers work to beat them. By the end, the players spontaneously rose for a standing ovation – less for Cora than for themselves.
"A loss like that – 18 innings, seven hours long – stinks," workhorse reliever Joe Kelly said. "We got in that clubhouse, and there were a lot of tears in people's eyes [from] Watching Nate. "Cora's speech and its aftermath, Kelly said, was" one of the coolest things I've ever been a part of. A lot of teams could have folded. But we were fired up. It took the Dodgers – and they're a very good ball – but it took them 18 innings to beat us. And we were not going to let that happen again. "
As hitting coach Tim Hyers told reporters, the players "left a lot different than when they came in."
They would go on, of course, to win Games 4 and 5 to close the series – if not before falling behind by the trainer, prompting Sale by now-famous dugout tirade and leaving Cora to go around begging their players to " pick me up Eduardo Rodriguez in the game too long.
There were many different final impressions left by the Red Sox during their title run: the relentless at-bats and two-strike approach of their hitters, the selflessness and tirelessness of their pitchers, the contributions they got from superstars and role players alike. But the overarching impression was a frankness in perfect harmony, from the top down – its yin and yang intersecting in the person of Cora.
The final image of the World Series was sold out, arms raised in triumph, after striking out star Dodgers Manny Machado for the final out. But for symbolism, it should have been just happened.
Like all the Red Sox starters, Sale made in one of the most expensive places in the world. He and Eovaldi were both warming up in preparation for the ninth, but it was Sale who got the call.
And now, as the gates to the visitors 'bullpen opened, the rest of Boston' s relegated to the side of the road, and applauded Sale 's entrance to the field, a chilling moment captured by Fox Sports' cameras.
So to the lengthy list of things Alex Cora's The Red Sox was extraordinarily well done, on your way to completing a memorable, historic campaign.
First published by The Washington Post
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