When the Red Sox pulled the plug on Alex Cora and half the coaching staff in late April, it felt like the kind of move teams make when they’ve accepted a long, miserable summer in the basement. They weren’t just bad, they were flat, having started the season 10–17, and sitting at last place in the AL East. They were fresh off a four-game sweep by the Yankees, and the firings came after a 17–1 win in Baltimore that looked like a hiccup. That’s the definition of streaky — one explosive win after a month of lifeless baseball — and it set the tone for everything that’s come since.
The scale of the housecleaning told you how fed up the front office was. It wasn’t just Cora; hitting coach Peter Fatse, third-base coach Kyle Hudson, bench coach Ramón Vázquez, assistant hitting coach Dillon Lawson, and hitting strategy coach Joe Cronin all got shown the door on the same day. Jason Varitek, who had become a kind of institutional memory on the staff, got shunted into a different, undefined role. That’s clicking reset button at the end of April, the kind of move that screams, Whatever this is, it’s not working.
And for a while, it looked like just another desperate front-office play. Teams in last place at the end of April rarely become anything more than spoiler material by August. The Red Sox were firmly in basement dweller territory — buried behind the Rays and Yankees, staring at an uphill climb that would require them to play like a 95‑win team the rest of the way just to be in the conversation. The narrative was simple. Go on a nice little 2018 run, thanks for the memories, back to the slog.
Then the streakiness cut the other way.
Under interim manager Chad Tracy, they didn’t suddenly turn into the ‘04 Sox overnight, but the vibe shifted from resigned to volatile. You could see it in the way the record moved. From stretches where they still looked like that last-place team, dropping series they had no business losing, followed by spurts where they ran through good clubs like they were still trying to prove they deserved that 2018 banner hanging at Fenway. For a fan base that lives on mood swings anyway, it was like the roster decided to match the city’s emotional bandwidth pitch for pitch.
Fast-forward to mid-summer and you look up to find that the basement dwellers aren’t in the basement anymore. Boston has clawed its way to around the .500 mark, sitting third in the AL East instead of dead last, with a positive run differential and they’re on an elven-game winning streak. That’s the wild part, the standings column that showed them double-digit games back now has them hovering within arm’s reach of the pack, clearly close enough that one hot week or cold week can swing the division math.
The wild card picture tells the same story. In the early going, the Red Sox were essentially an afterthought in that race, one of those teams you mention only as part of a long list of mathematically alive, but come on.
Now you check the updated wild card standings and see Boston right there in the mix, bouncing between holding a spot and sitting just a couple games out, with that same positive run differential and recent hot streak making them look more like an October problem than an afterthought. On any given day they can wake up in if the season ended today, they’re in territory or a game or two out, which is exactly what being in a race looks like.
That’s streakiness in its purest form — not just on the field, but in the story arc. One month you’re firing a manager with a 620–541 career record in Boston, a guy who oversaw a 108‑win championship season and got a three-year extension less than two years ago. And trying to talk yourself into an interim manager from Triple‑A Worcester, wondering if this is a bridge year to something better or just another episode of the Red Sox front office’s revolving door drama. Then by midseason you’re arguing on talk radio about whether Tracy deserves to have the interim tag removed if they keep hanging around the top of the wild card queue.
What makes this team feel especially streaky is that the numbers never quite match the eye test in a stable way. You see the blowouts — like that 17–1 game that weirdly preceded Cora’s firing — and you see long stretches where the offense disappears entirely.
You see the pitching staff oscillate between shutdown weeks and everyone’s ERA went up a run in three days. Yet when you zoom out, the run differential stays on the positive side and the record keeps nudging closer to respectability, like the aggregate of all these mood swings stubbornly refuses to line up with rebuild.
And honestly, that’s kind of perfect for Boston right now. This is a fan base that doesn’t do middle ground. They lived through decades of heartbreak, then a run of titles that felt like karma finally paying out, and now they’re stuck in this in-between where every season is either an insult or a redemption arc. A streaky team sells hope after a big series win, then leans into outrage after a sloppy homestand, all without leaving the basic reality that the Red Sox are — again — relevant deep into the summer.
Here’s the thing, folks: It’s important to realize that the the staff shakeup didn’t lead to the quiet anonymous season that everyone expected. Instead of fading into the background while Tampa Bay and New York traded blows at the top of the division, Boston played itself back into both the AL East and wild card conversations by sheer volatility.
With that . . . When you say the Red Sox have been streaky since firing Cora and five coaches, you’re really talking about a team that turned chaos into relevance. Riding their swings from basement to contention, from clean-out-the-staff desperation to keep an eye on these guys in October chatter.
If you cannot play with them, then root for them!