The Boston Red Sox reacted to a slow start to the season by firing their pitching coach on Thursday. If you can’t fire the pitching staff, fire the coach instead. While there is plenty of blame to pass around for Boston’s lackluster performance so far, Juan Nieves became the scapegoat.
In a press conference held Thursay afternoon, general manager Ben Cherington and manager John Farrell provided an explanation for the decision, which points primarily to the struggles of the pitching staff, particularly with the starting rotation.
“Given the performance that we’ve had to date, we’ve been looking at all of those things,” Cherington explained via conference call, “and while we’re confident that we have many of the pieces in place to improve and that we’ll see improvement, John and I simply got to the point where we felt that in order to continue to push forward and make improvements, we needed to make a change and have a different voice in that particular position.