Over the weekend, the Boston Red Sox appeared to wake up for one game against the New York Yankees after Gerrit Cole hit Rafael Devers in his first at-bat and then intentionally walked with the bases empty in his second.
Boston went on to to win the game 7-1 with all seven of their runs coming against Cole, which was a season-high for New York's starter.
After the game, Red Sox manager Alex Cora was not happy with Cole and called him out over both hitting Devers with a pitch and the intentional walk.
"I mean, we don't wanna hit people on purpose, right? You can get hurt," Cora said. "Especially, in the position they're in, right? They're 20-whatever games over. We hit somebody and somebody gets hurt and that puts us in a bad spot. We want the best players to be playing every single day out there. I want Aaron Judge to be out there every single day, regardless of what he does against us. That's when our sport is at its best. Raffy got hit. They can say whatever they want. The intentional walk was loud and clear. 'I don't want to face him.' The second pitch against Raffy. You see it. It was intentional. I'm not going to back off. It was intentional."
However, Cora seemed to contradict himself the next day, when he essentially admitted that Brayan Bello was trying to hit Aaron Judge with a fastball that went behind him in the sixth inning of Saturday's win.
“(The situation) was closed yesterday, like around the sixth inning,” said Cora on Sunday (transcribed by The Boston Globe). “So, you know, we had our chance. Didn’t happen, and we have to move on.”
Maybe Cora addressed it with Bello after the game and condemned him for his decision, but it didn't seem like that.
For the manager to be so vocally against hitting players and then admitting to his guys trying to do the same just an inning later is interesting.
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