ANAHEIM, Calif. (AP) — Alex Cora is 0 for 2 in arguing obstruction calls with umpire Alan Porter after the Boston Red Sox manager was ejected Monday night in the fifth inning of a 9-5 loss to the Los Angeles Angels, the second straight game in which Cora was tossed.
Boston was trailing 5-4 when Jarren Duran doubled to lead off the fifth. Abraham Toro grounded to shortstop, but Duran hesitated before breaking for third and was tagged out in a rundown by Angels second baseman Christian Moore.
Moore then spun and threw to second base, where Angels third baseman Luis Rengifo was covering, to nail Toro trying to advance. Cora argued that Rengifo blocked the bag with his knee and was ejected after a long argument with Porter, who made the out call.
Porter ejected Cora for arguing a similar play in a game against Minnesota last Sept. 22 after Red Sox pitcher Nick Pivetta threw to second baseman Vaughn Grissom in an attempt to pick off Byron Buxton.
Buxton was safe, but the Twins argued that Grissom blocked Buxton’s path to the bag with his knee. The umpires ultimately agreed, and Buxton was awarded third base.
“Our point of view was that he was blocking the bag,” Cora said, referring to Monday night’s play. “I guess the rule is if he’s going to be out easy, they can do that. But we had a similar situation last year with the same (umpiring) crew … and Alan reversed the call.
“That was the whole point
I was trying to make — it happened six months ago, the same situation, and it was reversed. Maybe he’s right, you know, if he was going to be safe, but I wanted to make sure.”
Major League Baseball Rule 6.00(h) awards the base to the runner when the fielder is ruled to have impeded the runner’s progress while not in possession of the ball and not in the act of fielding the ball.
Porter, however, told a pool reporter there was an extenuating circumstance — mainly, that Moore’s throw arrived well before Toro, who was out by several feet, essentially making an obstruction call moot.
“Did the fielder obstruct, or was the runner just out?” Porter said. “We felt that the runner, no matter what the fielder had done in that situation, was out. He was out by a lot. And that’s part of also not calling the obstruction.
“And the other side of it is that it’s a very quick developing play there. So we’re able to give them a little bit of leeway when they don’t have time to set up because it was the rundown, and (Rengifo) is running back (toward second base).”
Cora wasn’t around to see the Angels score four runs in the eighth to snap a 5-all tie, but he saw enough of Walker Buehler’s shaky start to acknowledge the veteran right-hander might be losing his grip on a rotation spot.
Handed a 3-0 lead before he took the mound, Buehler walked four and hit two batters during a five-run first inning in which he threw 39 pitches. He finished with a career-high seven walks in four innings.
The Red Sox rallied to tie the score in the sixth, taking Buehler off the hook for a loss, but he is 5-5 with a 6.29 ERA in 13 starts. In his previous outing, he gave up eight runs and eight hits over 3 1/3 innings in a loss at Seattle last week.
“You can’t walk seven guys in a major league baseball game and expect to be successful,” Buehler said. “I think we keep trying different things and looking at different stuff, this (pitch) mix or that mix, but at the end of the day, if you don’t execute and throw strikes, you really don’t have a chance.
“I feel like a broken record. It’s embarrassing. It’s not who I want to be as a baseball player, obviously. I’d rather get whacked around than do that.”
Buehler struggled in his return from a second Tommy John surgery last season, going 1-6 with a 5.95 ERA in 16 starts for the Los Angeles Dodgers, but he recovered in October to play an integral part in the team’s run to a World Series title. He even came out of the bullpen to get the final three outs of the series-clinching win over the New York Yankees.
Asked if he was sure Buehler is healthy, Cora said: “One hundred percent.” When Buehler was asked if he's pitching through anything right now, he said, “I don’t want to talk about that.”
Buehler recovered from his brutal first inning to blank the Angels on one hit over his final three frames, perhaps earning a longer leash in the team’s rotation.
“The second, third and fourth innings were really good,” Cora said. “The velocity was up and the movement on his pitches were great. There’s a few things mechanically that he feels he needs to do better, but he’ll be ready for the next one.”
Buehler was a postseason star for the Dodgers as they won three National League pennants and a World Series crown from 2017-20. But is he worried about his spot in the Boston rotation?
“Yeah, I think you have to be,” Buehler said. “At some point, there’s 26 guys that are going to help this team hopefully make the playoffs and if you’re not one of them, I don’t really think it matters what you’ve done in years past.
“At some point, I’ve got to put some results out there for myself, but also for this organization. … It just sucks, man. I want to contribute to this team so badly. I’ve enjoyed playing here so much outside of my own performance, so it’s just really frustrating.”
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Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora, left, argues with umpire Alan Porter, front right, as umpire Jim Wolf, back right, looks on after he was ejected in the fifth inning during a baseball game against the Los Angeles Angels, Monday, June 23, 2025, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Jayne Kamin-Oncea)
Boston Red Sox starting pitcher Walker Buehler (0) tosses his glove and cap into the dugout as he leaves the field after giving up five runs during the first inning of a baseball game against the Los Angeles Angels, Monday, June 23, 2025, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Jayne Kamin-Oncea)
Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora, left, argues with umpire Alan Porter, front right, as umpire Jim Wolf, back right, looks on after he was ejected in the fifth inning during a baseball game against the Los Angeles Angels, Monday, June 23, 2025, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Jayne Kamin-Oncea)
NEW YORK (AP) — No quick dispatching of disease investigators. No televised news conference to inform the public. No timely health alerts to doctors.
In the midst of a hantavirus outbreak that involves Americans and is making headlines around the world, the U.S. government's top public health agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has been uncharacteristically missing in action, according to a number of experts.
To President Donald Trump, "We seem to have things under very good control," as he told reporters Friday evening.
To experts, the situation aboard a cruise ship has not spiraled because, unlike COVID-19 or measles or the flu, hantavirus does not spread easily. It has been health experts in other countries, not the United States, who have been dealing primarily with the outbreak in the past week.
“The CDC is not even a player," said Lawrence Gostin, an international public health expert at Georgetown University. “I've never seen that before.”
Not until late Friday did CDC actions accelerate.
Health officials confirmed the deployment of a team to Spain's Canary Islands, where the ship was expected to arrive early Sunday local time, to meet the Americans onboard. They said a second team will go to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska as part of a plan to evacuate American passengers from the ship to a quarantine center. Also, the CDC issued its first health alert to U.S. doctors, advising them of the possibility of imported cases.
The CDC's diminished role in this outbreak is an indicator the agency is no longer the force in international health or the protector of domestic health that it once was, some experts said.
The hantavirus outbreak is “a sentinel event” that speaks to “how well the country is prepared for a disease threat. And right now, I’m very sorry to say that we are not prepared,” said Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, chief executive officer of the Infectious Diseases Society of America.
Early last month, a 70-year-old Dutch man developed a feverish illness on a cruise ship traveling from Argentina to Antarctica and some islands in the South Atlantic. He died less than a week later. More people became sick, including the man's wife and a German woman, who both died.
Hantavirus was first identified as a cause of sickness of one of the cases on May 2. The World Health Organization swung into action and by Monday was calling it an outbreak. About two dozen Americans were on the ship, including about seven who disembarked last month and 17 who remained on board.
For decades, the CDC partnered with the WHO in such situations. The CDC acted as a mainstay of any international investigation, providing staff and expertise to help unravel any outbreak mystery, develop ways to control it and communicate to the public what they should know and how they should worry.
Such actions were a large reason why the CDC developed a reputation as the world's premier public health agency.
But this time, the WHO has been center stage. It made the risk assessment that has told people the outbreak is not a pandemic threat.
“I don’t think this is a giant threat to the United States,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of Brown University’s Pandemic Center. But how this situation has played out “just shows how empty and vapid the CDC is right now,” she said.
The current situation comes after 16 tumultuous months during which the Trump administration withdrew from the WHO, has restricted CDC scientists from talking to international counterparts at times and embarked on a plan to build its own international public health network through one-on-one agreements with individual countries.
The administration has laid off thousands of CDC scientists and public health professionals, including members of the agency's ship sanitation program.
As this was playing out, Trump's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said he was working to “restore the CDC’s focus on infectious disease, invest in innovation, and rebuild trust through integrity and transparency.”
The CDC has not been completely silent on hantavirus.
The agency on Wednesday issued a short statement that said the risk to the American public is “extremely low,” and described the U.S. government as “the world’s leader in global health security.”
Said Nuzzo: “Not only was that not helpful, it actually does damage because a core principle of public health communications is humility.”
The CDC's acting director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, posted a message on social media that the agency was lending its expertise in coordinating with other federal agencies and international authorities. Arizona officials this week said they learned from the CDC that one of the Americans who left the ship — a person with no symptoms and not considered contagious — had already returned to the state. WHO officials said the CDC has been sharing technical information.
The CDC also is “monitoring the health status and preparing medical support for all of the American passengers on the cruise,” Bhattacharya wrote.
But federal health officials have mostly been tight-lipped, declining interview requests.
In interviews this week, some experts made a comparison with a 2020 incident involving the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship docked in Japan that became the setting of one of the first large COVID-19 outbreaks outside of China.
The CDC sent personnel to the port, helped evacuate American passengers, ran quarantines, shared genetic data on the virus, coordinated with the WHO and Japan, held public briefings and rapidly published reports “that became the world’s reference data on cruise ship COVID transmission,” said Dr. Tom Frieden, a former CDC director.
Some aspects of the international response to the Diamond Princess were criticized, and it did not halt the outbreak or stop COVID-19’s spread across the world. But some experts say it was not for the CDC's lack of trying.
“The CDC was right on top of it, very visible, very active in trying to manage and contain it,” Gostin said, while the agency's work now is delayed and subdued.
Instead of working with nearly all of the world's nations through the WHO, the Trump administration has pursued bilateral health agreements with individual nations for information sharing, public health support, and what it describes as “the introduction of innovative American technologies.” Roughly 30 agreements are currently in place.
That's not sufficient, Gostin said. “You can't possibly cover a global health crisis by doing one-on-one deals with countries here and there,” he said.
Associated Press writers Ali Swenson in New York, Darlene Superville in Washington and Susan Montoya Bryan in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contributed to this report.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Passengers on the the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, watch epidemiologists board the boat in Praia, during their voyage to Spain's port of Tenerife, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo)
Workers set up temporary shelters in the area where passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship are expected to arrive at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
Crew members of the hantavirus-stricken cruise ship, MV Hondius, wait their turns for a first interview with epidemiologists, during the voyage to Spain's port of Tenerife, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo)
Health workers in protective gear evacuate patients from the MV Hondius cruise ship into an ambulance at a port in Praia, Cape Verde, Wednesday, May 6, 2026. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
A Spanish Civil Guard officer inspects the area where passengers from the MV Hondius cruise ship are expected to arrive at the port of Granadilla in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain, Saturday, May 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)
