Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora essentially admitted to hitting Aaron Judge on purpose. MLB should throw the book at him.

Arizona Diamondbacks v Boston Red Sox / Winslow Townson/GettyImages

The Boston Red Sox are falling out of the AL Wild Card race, and fast. The Red Sox are 4.5 games back of the final Wild Card spot as of this writing. Against the New York Yankees, Boston took the rivalry a little too seriously, perhaps getting caught in their emotions at the cost of making up ground in the standings.

The Red Sox have a number of their own problems. However, rather than focus on improving the clubhouse atmosphere, the lineup, starting rotation or bullpen, Boston went all-in on the rivalry this weekend. Alex Cora wasn’t thrilled when three Red Sox hitters were plunked on Saturday. They responded by trying to get retribution on Aaron Judge.

After that sequence of events, Cora considered this a closed case between Boston and New York. He even spoke to Judge, who claimed the conversation went well.

“It was a good convo. I’ll kind of keep it at that,” said Judge. “You play this game for a while, things like that happen. I know they’re upset that three of their guys got hit that day, and I think they’re just protecting their players. So something’s got to happen, and that’s the way this game kind of gets policed. It’s been policed for over 100 years. So I think the biggest thing is, just don’t miss when you do it.”

Aaron Boone and Alex Cora disagreed on Red Sox throwing at Aaron Judge

Cora and Yankees manager Aaron Boone are good friends off the field, as they both worked for ESPN prior to their current places of employment. However, they thoroughly disagreed on this topic.

“We talked, and there’s two ways of seeing it, right? Their dugout and our dugout,” said Cora. “And, like I told him, ‘Put yourself in our shoes and you will understand why we feel this way.’ We’ll leave it at that.”

Boone was asked in the Yankees clubhouse if the issues were resolved between the two sides. He, uh, didn’t sound convinced.

“Yeah, that’s not allowed,” Boone said. “That’s for somebody else to deal with. So we’re finished playing with them for now. So we’re on to Seattle now. But you can’t do that.”

MLB is rightly looking into Cora’s comments and attempt to hit Judge, and given his subtle hints at plunking the likely AL MVP, they’d be right to drop the hammer on him with a suspension. That would cost the Red Sox even more than their series loss to the Yankees over the weekend did.

Cora has no one to blame but himself. Sometimes, cooler heads must prevail, and that wasn’t the case against the Yankees.