Alex Cora is gone. Chad Tracy is the interim manager. The coaching staff got wiped — Fatse, Vázquez, Hudson, Lawson, Cronin, all out. Jason Varitek was on the airport shuttle with the fired guys, which tells you everything you need to know about whether his “reassignment” was real.
That’s 10-17, dead last in the AL East, and the earliest Boston manager change since 1907.
The Boston Red Sox fired manager Alex Cora, hitting coach Peter Fatse, bench coach Rámon Vazquez and game-planning coach Jason Varitek, sources tell ESPN.
While the Red Sox won today, they are 10-17 and in last in the American League East. Massive change is coming in Boston.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 25, 2026
Craig Breslow stood in front of a microphone and said, “Ultimately the accountability for the roster falls on me.” Then he fired his manager. Cora didn’t construct this offense. Breslow did.
The Red Sox rank 27th in MLB by OPS and dead last in wRC+ at 78. That’s not a coaching problem. That’s a roster construction problem. You can change the manager a hundred times and it doesn’t fix a lineup that can’t hit.
Breslow missed on Pete Alonso — now in Baltimore on a 5-year, $155M deal. He missed on Alex Bregman too. The Bregman situation is particularly brutal: Boston reportedly offered $165M with deferrals and no no-trade clause, Bregman went to the Cubs for $175M. You can argue the money was close. You cannot argue the structure was competitive.
Wilyer Abreu and Willson Contreras are both hitting above .800 OPS. The problem isn’t that every single Red Sox player is terrible. The problem is that around them, there’s nothing. The team is 27th out of 30 clubs in OPS. Dead last in wRC+. Two good hitters don’t fix a lineup.
Chad Tracy went 323-296 in four-plus seasons at Triple-A Worcester and won Baseball America’s best managerial prospect honors back-to-back. He’s probably fine. He’s also inheriting a roster that finished in the bottom third of baseball offensively.
Cora posted “Happy!” on social media before his farewell message, which is a very Alex Cora way to handle getting fired. He’d previously turned down the Phillies job. He’ll land somewhere.
Official:
Red Sox today announced that the club has parted ways with Manager Alex Cora, along with five members of the Major League coaching staff: Hitting Coach Peter Fatse, Third Base Coach Kyle Hudson, Bench Coach Ramón Vázquez, Assistant Hitting Coach Dillon Lawson, and…
— Chris Cotillo (@ChrisCotillo) April 25, 2026
The Red Sox have until July to decide if this roster is fixable or if the whole thing needs to come apart again. If the lineup is still 27th by the trade deadline, Breslow’s “accountability” quote is going to be read back to him a lot. Two front office blowups in two years would be a historically bad run for a franchise that’s already having trouble pretending it’s still a championship-level organization.
The manager is gone. The roster is still here. One of those is actually the problem.
