On April 25, the Red Sox let go of manager Alex Cora and five other members of the coaching staff. Much has been said online as to why, with no explanation from team ownership. For more background on this decision and a look at what could come next, GBH’s Morning Edition host Mark Herz spoke with longtime Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Mark Herz: So, a firing like this, pretty unusual, I guess. Talk to me about how shocking this news was.

Dan Shaughnessy: Well, it’s very early in the season. You’re only 27 games into an 162-game season, so that’s a very small sample. You don’t see a lot of this kind of turnover at this stage of a season. I think that they’re looking at it as, there’s still 135 games to salvage. We want to do this, let’s do this now. So that’s what you got. But given the gravitas of Alex Cora — he’s one of the three winningest managers in the franchise history and won a World Series here in 2018 and was very much the face of the franchise — it’s nonetheless shocking.

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Herz: What don’t we know? The very first night you dubbed it a Saturday Night Massacre, have you been able to suss out anything about what’s behind this?

Shaughnessy: It looks like a power struggle with ... your president of the baseball operations, [Craig] Breslow, and your field manager, Cora, and Breslow won out. And we don’t hear from ownership on this. Sam Kennedy is the CEO. He speaks for John Henry, but we don t know really how John Henry feels. They’re telling us this is entirely Craig Breslow’s call. I don’t quite understand how he has this kind of clout and power within the organization. It’s his third year. He could be gone next year. No one’s lasted more than four years since Theo Epstein under this regime. They’ve gone through three other guys before Breslow — Ben Cherington, Dave Dombrowski, Chaim Bloom — and they were all gone by the end of four years. So we’ll see how it ends up.

Herz: And your argument has been, if I could characterize it, I hope correctly, that this roster, this group of players, they just stink and it doesn’t make sense to get rid of the coaching staff. So tell us more about that.

Shaughnessy: I think they’re better than they’ve performed, but it has been dismal. They’re eight games out of first place. It’s not even the end of April yet and a very, very poor start. Cora was handed a dysfunctional roster. I think probably Breslow wished he had done this at the end of last year, because it looks kind of knee-jerk at this point, but I still say that they were given five everyday outfielders. You can only play three. There’s a lot of things about this roster that don’t fit and I blame the performance of the players more than I do the manager’s performance. And to me, the player, the roster — that goes on Breslow.

Herz: Well, is there some kind of dream coaching staff that could get this team to the post-season?

Shaughnessy: Well, what you’re headed to is much more of an analytics-driven concept, I think. There’s a firm called DriveLine where a lot of these guys come from. It’s very much youth-driven and very much numbers-driven. So very robotic as it were, not a lot of seat-of-the-pants or gut managing. So, I think you’re going to see a lot that moving forward with the new regime.

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Herz: What do you make of the photos that Alex Cora has been sharing? One of them [with] the other staff smiling on the tarmac, getting ready to board the plane that was taking them home after being fired, and then another at a North End restaurant with the caption, “All good over here.”

Shaughnessy: Yeah, there’s a level of jovial spirit to this. It’s a little bit unusual. I think Cora is very secure. He’s working on a three-year contract. He’s in the middle of it. Makes $7 million a year, this year and next, still to be paid. He will get that money. And he’s got great gravitas within the sport, so he’s gonna be fine and he knows that. He’s going home to Puerto Rico to be with his family. It’s going to be great. Those other guys, they’re going along, but a coach like Jason Varitek, 30 years in the organization, I don’t think he’s too happy and I don’t think he likes the way he was treated. It was pretty disrespectful for him to go out this way.

Herz: And when you say unhappy, I think there’s a lot of unhappy fans here. You want to lay that out?

Shaughnessy: Yeah, the PR optics aren’t very good for this team right now. You know they fall back on the fact that everybody loves going to Fenway Park and singing Sweet Caroline at the [middle] of the eighth inning and the experience. That’s their best selling point at this stage of the franchise. But it hasn’t been real good around here since 2018. They still have a lot of people at the ballpark and they will this weekend against the Houston Astros.

Herz: You say there’s going to be all these people there, but are they in danger of losing the fans?

Shaughnessy: The fans are angry right now and they make that known, but they still turn out. You have a lot of people coming from other cities, they go to Fenway Park. Fenway Park’s part of the Freedom Trail right now. Folks just go there, they get off a plane, they got to see Fenway. So the team’s done a very good job creating that brand .... That insulates them a little bit from the kind of fallout that you might see in other markets. But they’re angry. They were chanting “sell the team” at the last home stand. That’s never good to have while your games are going on at home, but I think they’ll see it past that. It’s a very profitable business for FSG and will continue to be so.

Herz: You can manage the Red Sox and make ... one of the worst mistakes that I think you’ve seen in such a long time, and yet you can still run a profitable business?

Shaughnessy: Oh, sure. Their margins are very good. Go over there, you’ll see the ticket prices and what they charge for everything and how many people are in the stands. Folks love going to Fenway Park. They continue to do that. That allows the franchise to pretty much operate the way it sees fit and it works for them.

Herz: What about the future? When and how can this team get out of the hole that they seem to be in now?

Shaughnessy: They want that bad. They have a lot of talented people on the present team and coming up through the minors and they have the wherewithal to buy more talent if they choose to do that. So that’ll be a test. I think that they’re probably a little embarrassed by this start and want to show the faith in Craig Breslow to rebuild the team and get them back on track. They think they can salvage this year, and you can. Six out of 15 teams in the American League make the playoffs. So you can be one of those final six. They had a playoff team last year, so they can get back to that. It’s so early, this thing is salvageable, and that’s what they’re gonna sell, and it’s a realistic goal at this point. They’re just going to start playing better.

Herz: Last question, any names as far as you know, a permanent manager that you’re looking at?

Shaughnessy: Yeah, that’s a good question. Chad Tracy seems to be a nice fit right now and people like him. You don’t know if he’s the future. We’ll see how it goes for him. There was a player named David Ross here who was on the 2013 championship team, managed the Cubs, has worked with Breslow. I think a lot of him, a lot people think a lot of him. He’ll be a name you’ll hear around and about. Rocco Baldelli, who’s from Rhode Island and managed in the big leagues, will be a named kicked around. We’ll see how things go under Chad Tracy first and then go from there.