Under the circumstances, we thought it was a good time to talk to Alex Cora again about the Red Sox’ prospensity to strike out a lot and the team’s overall offensive approach.<\/p>\n
Before we even begin: this may or may not interest you. Over the course of baseball history, batter strikeouts in baseball have most often been linked to power. Guys like Adam Dunn, Eugenio Suarez and Dave Kingman<\/a> have struck out at extraordinary rates but hit mountains of home runs and baseball’s all-time strikeouts leader, Reggie Jackson, was one of the great power hitters and clutch performers (hence the title “Mr. October”) in the history of the game and finished with 563 home runs. Generally speaking, you trade one (the strikeouts) for the other (the home runs). The 2025 New York, for instance, finished third in the majors in strikeouts – the Red Sox ultimately finished eighth – by led all of baseball in home runs. The Red Sox finished a perfectly medicore 15th.<\/p>\n Of all the comments Cora made yesterday in the several minutes he talked about strikeouts and hitting philosophies, the most notable was, perhaps, this:<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think we are this team (with regard to the strikeouts),” he said. “We will put the ball in play, but all of the sudden, you\u2019re not going to go from a 28% strikeout rate to 18%. Impossible. If you\u2019ve got that guy, let me know. If you\u2019ve got that hitting coach, let me know. I\u2019ll give him my salary and I\u2019ll retire. It\u2019s not gonna happen.\u201d<\/p>\n Obviously, everyone is entitled to believe what they believe. I happen to agree with Cora on this one. Red Sox shortstop Trevor Story is 33 years old and has a career strikeout rate of more than 28 percent. No one can coach him into becoming Luis Arraez<\/a> (a major league-best 3.1 strikeout percentage last seaon). He is who is he is. But the question about hitting approach and strikeouts is a topic we discuss frequently on The Baseball Hour<\/a> and something callers frequently bring us.<\/p>\n As such, we decided to put Cora’s entire exchange online – roughly 8 minutes and 30 seconds of audio. You can listen to his comments and decide for yourself. While impertinent or unrelated questions were eliminated, Cora’s answers to the specific questions were not.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Tony Massarotti is the co-host of the number 1 afternoon-drive show, Felger & Mazz, on 98.5 The Sports Hub. He is a lifelong Bostonian who has been covering sports in Boston for the last 20 years. Tony worked for the Boston Herald from 1989-2008. He has been twice voted by his peers as the Massachusetts sportswriter of the year (2000, 2008) and has authored five books, including the New York times best-selling memoirs of David Ortiz, entitled \u201cBig Papi.\u201d A graduate of Waltham High School and Tufts University, he lives in the Boston area with his wife, Natalie, and their two sons. Tony is also the host of The Baseball Hour, which airs Monday to Friday 6pm-7pm right before most Red Sox games from April through October. The Baseball Hour offers a full inside look at the Boston Red Sox, the AL East, and all top stories from around the MLB (Major League Baseball).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Under the circumstances, we thought it was a good time to talk to Alex Cora again about the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":662735,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2375],"tags":[858,5,141,48,2542,4,89,2543],"class_list":{"0":"post-662734","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boston-red-sox","8":"tag-alex-cora","9":"tag-baseball","10":"tag-boston","11":"tag-boston-red-sox","12":"tag-bostonredsox","13":"tag-mlb","14":"tag-red-sox","15":"tag-redsox"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/116346626045931779","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=662734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/662734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/662735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=662734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=662734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=662734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}