Yankees: Alex Cora and Red Sox apology statements are embarrassing

Yankees fans will be ashamed of Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora’s apology and the team’s embrace of him.

Alex Cora is officially back in baseball after what must’ve been a tough, 60-game break where he didn’t actually have to deal with the stress of the Red Sox trading Mookie Betts. In essence, MLB gave Cora a brief vacation, as well as the reward of not having to face the 2020 Yankees with his stripped-bare roster.

Can we have the Pete Rose, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens Hall of Fame conversations now, by the way? As long as this is the league’s take on morality?

After reports of Cora’s arrival finally emerged on Friday morning, the Red Sox rang the bell later in the evening with their most embarrassing tweet since the “IYKYK” Mookie Betts reset button, welcoming their old manager back with open digital arms.

Officially official. Cool.

So, with that in mind, was there a chance that the American public would finally get their first-ever apology from Cora for leading a cheating operation in 2017 in Houston, then magically improving the Red Sox the next year without, uh, doing the exact same thing? And what about a similar statement from his now two-time enablers in the Sox front office? Yankees fans demand honest answers, and they demand them now.

After months during which Cora would never admit contrition, but would only say the Astros were twisting his narrative a bit to make him look worse, we finally got some form of an apology. It didn’t cut it.

We’re respectful of any self-reflection that Cora did during the past year, but this is equivalent to George Costanza’s shocked, “Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?” after being accused of sleeping with his office’s cleaning lady. If you need a 60-game vacation to decide that it’s wrong to cheat at least once, but probably twice, then you might not have the moral fiber necessary to hold water in this game.

Sam Kennedy really gave up the ghost here, too, admitting that he was excited about Cora’s “leadership and energy,” two things they never really wanted to rid themselves of in the first place last year, only doing so begrudgingly. If it were up to the Sox, they would’ve pretended Cora had already learned his lesson after leaving Houston, ushering reporters out the door when they tried to pry into the cheating scandal in their own backyard, one for which the video room assistant was reportedly the only man at fault (wink wink).

COVID’s silent season gave Boston what they were looking for: A flimsy excuse to welcome Cora back into their lives, barely a few weeks after he left. This apology, swept out while the Presidential Election results were still pouring in and distracting the world, didn’t do anything to assuage Yankees fans or the team’s many other detractors.

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