Alex Cora managed his last game for the Boston Red Sox this weekend against the Baltimore Orioles at Oriole Park at Camden Yards.(Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images)
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With the Boston Red Sox firing Alex Cora and his coaching staff on Saturday, you have to wonder if there’s more to come. Uneasy owners in Houston, Philadelphia and New York must be apoplectic about their teams' poor starts not living up to the money they’ve spent.
There’s no crying in baseball, but there’s certainly plenty of firing, and owners are now lowering the boom on managers with uncommon regularity.
The Astros’ Joe Espada, the Mets’ Carlos Mendoza and the Phillies’ Rob Thomson are skidding toward the edge of the cliff.
Twelve managers have lost their jobs since Derek Shelton was fired by the Pirates and Bud Black by the Rockies last May. Nine more were let go at the end of the 2025 season and now Cora makes it a dozen. That’s 40% of Major League Baseball’s 30 teams in less than a year.
Some of them, like Bob Melvin in San Francisco, were on guaranteed contracts. The Giants had just exercised his option for 2026. Cora left with $13.54 million remaining on his three-year deal. Is this any way to run a business?
At 11-17, the Red Sox are seven games behind the first-place Yankees in the American League East and are trying to salvage the season with a sixth in MLB payroll for luxury tax purposes of $266.8 million.
“Yesterday was definitely painful,” Red Sox president Sam Kennedy said at a Sunday morning media conference in Baltimore where his club beat the Orioles, 5-3, with interim manager Chad Tracy on the bench. “But we felt it was a necessary move to take decisive action to achieve the goal of a fresh start for the 2026 season.”
That count of fired managers is sure to rise. Only three current managers have World Series titles on their resume: Tito Francona, A.J. Hinch and Dave Roberts. That’s a lot of turnover.
In Boston, the pattern is clear with owners John Henry, Tom Werner, and company. The Red Sox are a very much a “what are you doing for me now?” organization. General manager-manager tandems are a dime a dozen.
Theo Epstein and Francona combined to win the World Series in 2004 and 2007, the franchise’s first titles since 1918. Both were gone, only to continue their stellar careers elsewhere. After Ben Cherington and John Farrell won the 2013 World Series, they were banished. Dave Dombrowski and Cora in 2018—sayonara, Cora now for a second time.
“These decisions are never easy, but this one is especially difficult given what Alex has meant to the Red Sox since the day he arrived,” Henry said Saturday in a statement. “He has had a lasting impact on this team and on this city. He has led on and off the field in so many important ways.”
Dombrowski, one of the most successful GMs of this era, has his proverbial back against the wall again. The Phillies are tied for last with the Mets in the National League East, at 9-19 already 10.5 games behind first-place Atlanta, after stopping a 10-game losing streak against the Braves on Saturday night. They lost again Sunday.
Thomson’s name came up in the managerial firing carousel last October when the Phillies dropped an NL Division Series to the eventual World Series-winning Dodgers on a throwing error by reliever Orion Kerkering. Dombrowski decided to retain Thomson.
The Phillies are no strangers to mid-season managerial changes under any management having swapped out Charlie Manuel for Ryne Sandberg in 2012, Pete Mackanin for Sandberg in 2015, and Thomson for Joe Girardi 51 games into the 2022 season. Thomson took them into that World Series, a six-game loss to the Astros, and has had three consecutive seasons of 90 wins or better. But under Thomson they haven’t won it all.
The Phillies have the fourth highest payroll in MLB at $296.5 million for luxury tax purposes. They are slated to pay $34.3 million in taxes. That can’t be sitting well with Phillies’ principal owner John Middelton. The famously cranky Phillies fans are getting more cantankerous.
It’s always easier to fire the manager than the players.
In Houston, owner Jim Crane has a short fuse. He fired his general manager, James Click, because of a contract dispute. And that was just after defeating the Phillies in the above-mentioned World Series, Dusty Baker’s first such win in his 25th season as a Major League manager for five teams.
Crane was itching to jettison Baker, too, if he didn’t win the Series. He graciously held him over for another year. Baker had too much pride for that. He decided to retire at 74 after the 2023 season. Baker took over for Hinch in 2020 following Hinch’s suspension because of the sign-stealing scandal that also implicated general manager Jeff Luhnow, Cora and Carlos Beltran.
Baker captured a pennant and the World Series for Crane, restoring some respect to the franchise. He won 320 games for a .642 winning percentage in four seasons, one of them shortened to 60 games by the 2020 pandemic. Baker never got along with the analytic bent of baseball operations, but twisted himself into a pretzel trying.
Crane went with Espada, a respected Astros bench coach for six seasons. As manager, he’s won 185 games and ended a seven-year run for the club of at least making it to the American League Championship Series. The Astros are in last place in the AL West they have dominated at 11-19 after salvaging the finale of a three-game series Sunday over the Yanks, now on a 11th-ranked $237.8 million player payroll. So, here we are.
That brings us to Flushing, owner Steve Cohen, and the Mets. They failed to make the playoffs last year with a second in MLB payroll of $346.7 million for luxury tax purposes. They’re back at it right now at $381.9 million, again second, well behind the Dodgers.
They let franchise stalwarts Pete Alonso flee to free agency and Brandon Nimmo go in a trade, but kept Mendoza, who oversaw the losing chaos in 2025. The Mets have lost 14 of their last 16 games after a home double-header sweep by the Rockies on Sunday in which they scored one run and had 10 hits. Cohen’s 15-year, $765 million free agent payout to Juan Soto has gotten him nowhere thus far. At least he has 13 more seasons after this one on that contract to straighten it out.
Cohen, a hedge fund owner worth $23 billion according to Forbes, changes personnel like they were failed day traders.
He’s gone from Sandy Alderson to Billy Eppler to David Stearns in baseball ops. He’s gone from Luis Rojas to Buck Showalter to Mendoza in the dugout.
Who’s next and when? Cora? Watch this space.
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