HOUSTON -- The manager needed to disappear for the man to reappear. Alex Cora didn't realize it at the time, because survival tends to outweigh self-reflection when the world is collapsing around you, when everything you've built -- respect, loyalty, acclaim -- vanishes in a fiasco of your own making.
He did what he did. The cheating. The trash can. All of it. Cora experienced the worst years of his professional life, u200bu200bwhich felt like an endless plunge into an empty space where a man is nothing more than his worst moment, but he earned them.