MLB playoffs 2021: Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora is trying to leave behind his Astros past

HOUSTON -- The manager needed to disappear for the man to reappear. Alex Cora didn't realize it at the time, because survival tends to outweigh self-reflection when the world is collapsing around you, when everything you've built -- respect, loyalty, acclaim -- vanishes in a fiasco of your own making.

He did what he did. The cheating. The trash can. All of it. Cora experienced the worst years of his professional life, ​​which felt like an endless plunge into an empty space where a man is nothing more than his worst moment, but he earned them. He did baseball dirty, and baseball ditched him in return. And even if he knew that others would forever define him by this, for Cora it was always about how he would plow past it.

Because baseball can't help but be poetic, Cora finds himself back in the same building where he made a choice that would alter the course of his life, fighting for his season's survival. The Boston Red Sox weren't supposed to be here, at Minute Maid Park, home of the Houston Astros. They weren't supposed to make the postseason, and they weren't supposed to win a wild-card game or a division series.

Only they did, which leaves Cora sitting on a bench at Minute Maid, glancing into the expanse and starting to talk about, well, you know. As an Astros coach in 2017, he helped coordinate one of the most notorious cheating scandals in American sports history. The next year he went to manage the Red Sox and won a championship. He got fired for what he did in Houston. Then he was rehired less than a year later to do exactly this: lead Boston to the American League Championship Series and tonight, at 8 ET, help rescue them from a three-games-to-two deficit against his former team.

He's done it before, in 2018 -- won two road games in Houston to clinch the pennant -- although that was before the world learned about what he now calls his "bad decision" or "horrible mistake" or any other adjective-noun pair he deems sufficiently self-flagellating. Reliving the worst version of yourself isn't a particularly uplifting pastime -- because even if it defines him to others, he can't let it ensnare him forever, like a handcuff without a key. Especially not when the route to his professional apex included that successful pit stop at Minute Maid in 2018.

"We got some good memories here," Cora says. "And, you know, the cool thing about Boston -- and some people don't like it, but I actually love it -- is it feels like every game is Game 7 of the World Series."

The pressure of a baseball game is easier to take now, after two years of constant questions about his integrity, of notoriety that feels infinite, of hiding in shame -- of having to separate his identity so he could put himself back together and have a chance at something that resembles normal.

A 3-2 hole with two must-win road games, a worn-down pitching staff and a lineup that has gone ice cold? Alex Cora has come back from much worse.

ON JAN. 14, 2020, the manager was fired.

Cora understood the inevitability of this. Two months earlier, The Athletic had detailed a sign-stealing scheme the Astros undertook during their 2017 championship run when Cora was the bench coach. Soon thereafter, the names of the participants emerged, and he was pegged as a central figure.

While MLB's investigation deemed the system -- in which a catcher's signs were stolen through illicit video and relayed to batters via banging on a trash can -- as "player-driven," accusing manager A.J. Hinch of knowing about it but not stopping it, the league's report was damning for Cora. It alleged that he "was involved in developing both the banging scheme and utilizing the replay review room to decode and transmit signs. Cora participated in both schemes, and through his active participation, implicitly condoned the players' conduct."

The day after commissioner Rob Manfred's report, the Red Sox and Cora agreed: He had to go. The stain was already set, a violation flagrant beyond laundering. While Hinch and Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow were banished for a season and fired by the Astros, the league's discipline of Cora was pending the completion of another investigation into whether the 2018 Red Sox championship team stole signs, too. Following a report that exonerated Cora from any wrongdoing in '18 but accused the Red Sox of lesser rule-breaking, Manfred on April 22 suspended him for the 2020 season.

"He got blinded by winning," says Joey Cora, the longtime major-league infielder and Alex's older brother. "Sometimes you say, 'I'll do anything, whatever it takes, to win.' Sometimes that whatever-it-is is not right. He knew at the time it wasn't right, but it was working. They were winning. Forget about everyone else around."

Such disregard ensured others wouldn't forget his actions. And the consequences were immediate.

"One thing you learn is, who is who," Cora says. "It's not about having your back, but who's there to support you. The investigation is the investigation. But there were some people that were there, and there were some people that weren't there. And I was there for them for a long, long time. And that hurt, but it made me realize that at the end of the day -- and this is something that I learned from my brother -- the circle of friendship is a small one. I didn't push them out. They just ran away from it."

As people scattered, Cora persona non grata, he focused on himself. He conceded the duplicity of the scheme. He asked himself difficult questions. Who am I? How can I be better? What sort of man do I want to be? His league-imposed sabbatical had a partner in the self-punishment that can accompany misdeeds. Cora tried to embrace where he was -- and then was forced to by the pandemic.

FOR MONTHS, the man isolated himself in Puerto Rico with his fiancée, Angelica Feliciano, and their twin 3-year-old boys. Embarrassment kept Cora away from a public that long adored him. He had grown up in Puerto Rico, served as general manager for its World Baseball Classic team, loved how so many players saw him as the pied piper for Puerto Rican baseball like his father was for baseball in Caguas, the city in which he grew up.

It's a 30-minute drive inland from the coastal capital of San Juan, the sort of place that in the 1960s didn't have Little League baseball until Jose Cora, Alex's father, started a local chapter. Jose, who died of colon cancer when Alex was 13, was revered in Caguas and respected in his household, where discipline and structure were guiding principles. If Jose wanted you somewhere by 3:30 p.m., 3:31 wasn't good enough.

Growing up, Alex wasn't blessed with raw power or blazing speed, but he had a sixth sense for baseball. His mind worked faster than the game. He saw things others couldn't, felt things others didn't. He could study a pitcher and within an inning know every pitch he was going to throw strictly based on the positioning of his glove. His baseball brilliance got him to the University of Miami and then the major leagues, where he played for 14 seasons as much because of his mental acuity as his physical ability.

During the winter, Cora would return to Caguas, play winter ball and leave those watching in awe. On the island that produced Roberto Clemente and Orlando Cepeda, Carlos Delgado and Carlos Beltran, here was an entirely different sort of player -- relatable because he was no specimen.

"I met him when I was 13, and when I first saw him, I thought, 'This guy is in the big leagues?'" says Red Sox center fielder Kiké Hernández, whose father, Enrique, was a scout and one winter coached with Caguas. "But when I watched him, it made sense. He just understood the game better than everyone else."

Cora retired in 2011 and held dual roles as GM of the Criollos, Caguas' winter ball team, and ESPN analyst. In 2017, he joined Hinch's staff and won a World Series. The next year, he took over in Boston and won another. He checked every box for an elite modern manager: bright but hungry for others' input; analytical but with a tinge of old school; relatable but authoritative; media-friendly but protective; cool but serious.

All year, Cora made it a priority to help Puerto Rico recover from the damage of Hurricane Maria in September 2017, so he returned not just a champion but a hero. Cora was not the privileged son descended from baseball royalty. He was the rare scion whose impact exceeded his father's. Which made his fall that much more severe, his shame that much deeper. He was, in addition to all of his finest qualities, a cheater, evicted from the sport he loves. And after that removal, he retreated to the place he knew best and stayed there. He couldn't face others until he figured out who he was, what kind of man he wanted to be.

"I hate to say things happen for a reason, because that's not the right thing about this," Cora says. "I f----- up. But to be around the family in the middle of the pandemic -- I realize how important my family is. You don't need the iPad, the computer after the games. I don't need to take work home. I was so locked in the first two years and I lost that contact, and being around them really made me realize that you know what? It's good to disconnect. I don't need to take scouting reports to the house. It doesn't have to be that way."

And yet all these little lessons, these questions Cora asked himself, had another effect: He was learning more about himself. And on that path, he soon came to realize that perhaps the manager could learn something from the man he was trying to be.

ON OCT. 30, 2020, the private jet landed in Puerto Rico, and the rebirth of the manager's career began. Three days earlier, the Los Angeles Dodgers had won the World Series, marking the end of Cora's season-long suspension. On the first day he was allowed to, Red Sox chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom called Cora and talked about their managerial job, which opened up after Ron Roenicke, Cora's replacement, was let go after one season. Though Boston had been conducting a thorough managerial search, Bloom wasn't hiring anyone until he met with Cora. They had worked together for a few months in 2019 but never during the season. So Bloom came to San Juan, along with Red Sox GM Brian O'Halloran, on owner John Henry's private jet. If the Red Sox were going to entertain re-hiring Cora, Bloom wanted the interpersonal connection a Zoom call simply cannot provide.

While he waited to sit down with Bloom, Cora was skeptical. He knew he could do this job. He vowed that he would be better than ever if he got the chance to return to Boston. But the Red Sox were far into the process already and had identified strong candidates, all while Cora waited on the sidelines for his suspension to lift. He called Joey one day and said: "This is not gonna work out, man."

"He shed tears," Joey says. "Because he wanted to come back. It wasn't just about coming back. He wanted to come back to Boston. He wanted to do right by Boston."

Elucidating that to Bloom and O'Halloran was the trick. The setting wasn't exactly ideal: an empty airplane hangar that had all the ambiance of a funeral home. Neither were the accoutrements: no food, no drinks, nothing except time to convince Bloom, the ultimate decision-maker for the hiring, that lip service was not on the menu, either. Bloom needed to judge, as much as anything, Cora's sincerity.

"It's one of the questions as I went through the process that I needed to ask myself," Bloom says. "This, for me, was not just about what happened in Houston. I felt that although this opening was not one any of us asked for, once we had it, our duty was to step back and, with fresh perspective, take the bigger picture and look at who was the right person for this job, not just for today or tomorrow but for the long haul. That, obviously, involved a serious consideration of what had happened in Houston. And also everything that it might imply about who he is.

"But I felt very strongly that for any candidate, you aren't just getting the parts of the person that you feel like talking about. You are getting the whole person and you're gonna have a very close relationship with this person. You're getting all of the strengths and the weaknesses, you're getting all the wonderful things about them and all of the worst, and you are going to get it all. And so anybody you consider, you should consider them in full. Yes, their story is part of that. And a part of it is trying to assess who they would be for the organization going forward and in this job, and just trying to weigh all of it. So for Alex, doing that had some different aspects than for the other candidates we talked to. I thought it was really important, with everybody we talked to, to get to know the whole person, as a human being, as a baseball person, as a leader, as a partner, to build as full a picture as we could."

Over the course of more than five hours, Cora painted it: what he did, what he'd learned, why he was contrite and where he'd take the Red Sox. Bloom had already known how beloved Cora remained inside the organization: His candidacy had buy-in from ownership, as well as O'Halloran and assistant GMs Raquel Ferreira, Eddie Romero and Zack Scott. Now, after that draining, intense conversation in San Juan, Bloom had made up his mind: He saw Cora as sincere and credible.

"A lot gets made out of Alex's tactical ability and the way he sees the game and it goes without saying those are both very impressive," Bloom says. "Where he stands out the most to me is just how he can lead and motivate a group. And one of the things that the great managers that I've worked with all have in common is their relationships are genuine. They can connect with the people that they lead. They inspire them through the authenticity of their relationships. And there's so many examples of that with Alex. When he gets to know you, he gets to know who you are in so many ways and he wears his heart on his sleeve. And he builds trust because the relationships are genuine."

Bloom believed in the man. And Nov. 6, 2020, 297 days after he was fired, the manager was back.

WHAT CAME NEXT was the easiest and hardest thing Cora needed to do. The Red Sox had collapsed during the pandemic season, finishing 24-36, occupying the AL East basement, worse than the woebegone Baltimore Orioles. Turning around a club so disappointing -- especially when only four everyday players, three starting pitchers and two relievers from Cora's 2018 team were still around -- was daunting.

He also lived for this sort of thing. Cora was a builder. He built up players and built culture. He already had done it once with this franchise. The 2017 Red Sox went 93-69. They fired manager John Farrell, hired Cora, added J.D. Martinez and Steve Pearce and finished 108-54 en route to their fourth championship in 15 years. Cora didn't account for all of the added value, certainly, but between his deft in-game decision-making and general je ne sais quoi, the Red Sox morphed into a juggernaut.

Like with the 2017 Astros, the blemish of nefariousness allows cynics to discount their success, even as most of the core members' excellence hasn't waned in the aftermath. It's the permanent Mr. T chain around Cora's neck, heavy and burdensome and unsheddable, and it provided the main question surrounding his return: Would the trust he lost around the baseball community nearly two years ago, when the veneer of his excellence cracked, still resonate inside a clubhouse he once owned?

"The whole thing was hard for me to believe, because in '18 he never imposed any of that on us," Martinez says. "When they said it, it really caught me off guard. I was like, what the? This is really what happened?"

It was. Cora told everyone who asked -- both at the time and upon his 2021 return -- because doing anything else would have registered as an excuse, and because the truth, it turned out, was therapeutic. It was his entrée back into the game, back to building. Cora recruited Hernández with the promise of regular playing time, and Bloom negotiated a two-year, $14 million deal that wound up one of the best of the winter. They panned for gold in the Rule 5 draft and scored in right-handler Garrett Whitlock, the reliever pilfered from the New York Yankees who wound up their most reliable bullpen arm.

Cora's presence did what it always does: enlighten and inform, calm and soothe, motivate and arouse. He dug into the lives of everyone in the clubhouse, not in a nosy way but a curious and compassionate one. Part of Cora's secret sauce is the appreciation that often the personal and professional overlap, and a manager invested in both can connect dots when one affects the other.

"He's very aware of everything that's going on in everyone's life," Martinez says, "which is, I think, the biggest thing. He's understanding: We're all human beings. That just goes a long way. I'm not just a bunch of numbers on a paper. I'm a person."

Alex Verdugo, the left fielder who was the main return in the wildly-unpopular-in-Boston trade that sent star outfielder Mookie Betts to the Los Angeles Dodgers, likes to sidle up next to Cora, ever perched on the dugout steps and surveying the field, when he's in the hole. Verdugo gleaned little morsels of wisdom more times this year than he can remember. One day in particular this summer, though, stood out, and it had nothing to do with baseball. Instead of rewarding Verdugo's presence with knowledge, Cora turned to him and asked: "How's your girl?"

His girlfriend was pregnant at the time, about to give birth to their first child, a boy named A.J.

"I was just locked in, and he said that," Verdugo says. "Just those little comments go a long way for me. It makes you feel good. Like, you know, he cares."

Everyone in the Red Sox's clubhouse has a Cora story like that. If they thought him insincere, fraudulent, deceitful, they wouldn't speak about Cora as reverently as they do. They wouldn't have continued to trust themselves during the up-and-down swings of an inconsistent season. They wouldn't have forged through one of the worst COVID outbreaks baseball has seen since the pandemic started to stay afloat in the playoff race, snag a wild-card spot with a come-from-behind win on the season's final day, throttle the Yankees in a winner-takes-all game, dispatch the 100-win Tampa Bay Rays in the division series and find themselves here, still alive though with one whale of a task ahead.

Cora owns the difficulty of that task, too. So adept at putting in the right pitcher at the right time, he used starter Nathan Eovaldi in a relief role in Game 4 only for it to backfire and left starter Chris Sale in an inning too long in Game 5. They lost both and frittered away a two-games-to-one advantage. Even in the aftermath of decisions that went wrong, Cora refused to sulk or spend too much time second-guessing. It's not that getting this far is enough. It's belief. The Red Sox lavished him with it. The least he can do is return the favor.

EVERYWHERE THEY GO outside of Houston, Astros players face a chorus of boos, screams, chants, F-bombs and sundry other nastiness. Cora's experience differs. Just one person deeply understands what the last two years have been like for him: A.J. Hinch, his former boss and current contemporary. Even before the scandal, they shared a striking number of similarities. Hinch is 47, Cora 46. Both were chosen in the third round of the 1996 draft. They lost their fathers at a young age. Each is regarded as having high emotional and baseball IQs. They have teenage daughters. Though what tied them together this past year, and almost certainly forever, is trying to figure out how to navigate past the indignity of involvement in baseball's biggest cheating scandal in a century.