Alex Cora is good at a lot of things in the world of managing. That’s probably obvious considering he won 108 games and ran through one of the toughest postseason slates in recent memory without much trouble, all in his first year as a major-league manager. You don’t accomplish that without first of all having a ton of talent at your disposal, which Cora did, but also having many strengths. The Red Sox manager excels just about everywhere you’d want for a manager, knows his clubhouse and pushes all of the right buttons.
One of those buttons that was among the most jarring in his first season was his propensity to rest his players.