Alex Cora was out in April, and so was Rob Thomson, a pair of postseason managers gone before the month ended just seven months after they had been leading their teams in October.
The Red Sox had just scored 10 runs in the ninth inning in Baltimore and won 17-1 on April 25 when Cora was fired after the game, his last as manager. Before that inning, Boston had not scored 10 runs in any game all season.
That made the timing even stranger. Baseball Reference researcher Kenny Jackelen found that two managers had never before been fired in any April after managing in the previous postseason, and only one other manager in history had ever been dismissed in April after a previous-year postseason appearance.
That earlier case belonged to Bob Lemon, who took the Yankees to the World Series in 1981 and was no longer their manager by April 26 the next year. The modern version now includes Cora and Thomson, two men who were in the playoffs seven months earlier and were gone before spring could fully settle in.
The Red Sox’s 17-1 win was not only Cora’s final game; it also matched an odd historical marker. The last manager to be fired after his team won by 17 runs was Bob Ferguson, a reminder that even a runaway victory can arrive too late to change the decision already made.
Boston’s collapse around Cora came quickly. The club had been 28 out of its first 30 games under.500 before the change, a record that left little room for a rescue even after the bizarre ninth inning in Baltimore. Thomson’s firing before the end of April turned the pattern from a Red Sox oddity into a broader April story.
What happens next is simpler than the history suggests: two clubs now move on from managers who were in the postseason only months earlier, while the uncommon April trend they joined will sit in the record book for a long time.
