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CM – Back in Houston, Alex Cora apologizes but challenges Jeff Luhnow

Monday’s game at Minute Maid Park was Alex Cora’s first since the Astros’ 2017-18 sign flight plan revealed. The former bench coach took offense at how former general manager Jeff Luhnow portrayed Cora’s role in the operation.

Alex Cora returned to Minute Maid Park on Monday to apologize for “my proudest moments” and to challenge former Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow’s characterization of his role in the Astros sign-stealing scandal .

“I’m dealing with the situation the way I’m going to handle it,” said Cora, the Red Sox manager who Major League Baseball described as a central part of Houston’s trash program in 2017.

“I’m not afraid to talk about it. It’s part of who I am. It is part of my present, of my past and will be part of my future. It’s something I’m not proud of, but at the same time I have a job to do and that is to manage the Boston Red Sox. “

Major League Baseball’s investigation found that Cora, then Houston’s bench coach, had a member of the Astros’ video playback room set up a monitor displaying the center-field camera feed just outside of the box. the outside of the team’s canoe. Commissioner Rob Manfred’s report called the theft scheme signs of the Astros “except for Cora, led and executed by the players. “

Manfred suspended Cora, Luhnow and former Astros manager AJ Hinch for a year. Hinch and Luhnow were subsequently fired. The Red Sox parted ways with Cora in January 2020, but rehired him this offseason after his one-year suspension ended.

In a statement released on January 13, 2020, Luhnow proclaimed “I’m not a cheater” and blamed the Astros’ wrongdoing on “lower level employees working with the bench coach.”

“On the whole report Jeff talks about me and says ‘the bench coach’, that really bothered me,” Cora said Monday. “It really bothered me. Obviously, I don’t know what was said in the survey. I know what I said and what I went through. It’s like that. I was suspended and rightly so.

Cora has refused to divulge much about her personal relationships with the remaining Astros. He called coach Alex Cintrón a “best friend” and called Carlos Correa and Martín Maldonado “good friends”.

“There are a lot of things that happened during the investigation that are hard to swallow,” Cora said. ” I made a mistake. I went through the process and after that MLB did the right thing. I prefer to stay away from personal relationships. “

Although Major League Baseball determined that Cora’s 2018 Red Sox team also violated sign-theft rules, her one-year suspension came solely because of her role in the Astros scandal. The league determined that the 2018 Boston squad had engaged in less egregious violations and blamed most of the blame on an advanced scout named JT Watkins who worked in the Red Sox replay room.

This Red Sox club beat the Astros in five games in the American League Championship Series. Cora chose to reflect on the memorable moments in this series – the diving capture of Andrew Benintendi to wrap up Game 4 and Jackie Bradley Jr.’s grand slam in Game 3 – rather than the ones he created during his two years in Houston.

Cora called the 2017 Astros a “good baseball team,” but acknowledged the doubt with which some now see them.

“In the end people are going to judge us for what we did, but in the end it was still a good baseball team,” Cora said. “… People will ask why we did it?” I don’t know, man. We just did. We just did. And we put ourselves in a bad situation.

Chandler Rome joined the Houston Chronicle in 2018 to cover the Astros after spending a year at Tuscaloosa covering Alabama football – in which Nick Saban asked if he was in college. He did so, at LSU, where he covered the Tigers baseball team for nearly four years. He also covered most of the Astros’ playoffs in 2015 as an intern for MLB.com.

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