Boston Red Sox first baseman Willson Contreras believes a weight has been lifted off his team's shoulders since manager Alex Cora and his staff were fired in late April.
"After Cora got fired, the guys got loose a little more because I feel like the tension was gone. ... That's what I felt. That's my own opinion," Contreras said following Sunday's 3-1 loss to the Houston Astros, according to MassLive's Sean McAdam.
"When Alex wasn't in the dugout (anymore), the team was kinda, like, loose. But that doesn't matter. We have to play better. We have to find consistency. We have to get better, we have to be better."
Cora, hitting coach Peter Fatse, third base coach Kyle Hudson, bench coach Ramón Vázquez, assistant hitting coach Dillon Lawson, hitting strategy coach Joe Cronin, and game-planning coach Jason Varitek were relieved of their duties April 25 following a 10-17 start. (The team intended to reassign Varitek, but he's expected to leave the organization.) The Red Sox have gone 3-4 with new skipper Chad Tracy, including 4-for-39 (.102) with RISP over the last five games.
Contreras pointed to a young and inexperienced lineup as the reason for Boston's offensive struggles. Teammate Marcelo Mayer, who's in his second MLB season, disagreed with that sentiment.
"To me, that's just kind of an excuse: Blame the young guys," Mayer said after Sunday's loss. "But at the end of the day, we're all playing baseball, we're all pros. We all know what we need to do. I don't think we're doing a good job with runners in scoring position. When you don't do that, you don't score runs.
“We had a lot of opportunities. We want to win every series and that one we thought we should have had. A lot of runners left on base. Just not good overall."
Boston (13-21) sits last in the AL East and owns the AL's second-worst record.
