Not even revenge for a 10-3 blowout loss in Baltimore Friday night could spare Alex Cora. Not even his mixed-up, muddled-up, twisted Red Sox frying the Orioles alive on Saturday with innings of three, one, and three runs before a ninth inning that could have had them hauled before the Hague could do it.

Cora was taken to the guillotine after that 17-1 Saturday afternoon massacre. So were his five coaches. Before you shake your heads pondering why you should take pity upon six men executed for the Red Sox’s 10-17 start (they beat the Orioles with far fewer human rights violations Sunday, 5-3, for win number 11), you might want to ponder how this mess got built in the first place.

It wasn’t by Cora. It sure wasn’t by Jason Varitek, franchise icon as a catcher when the Red Sox broke the (actual or alleged) Curse in 2004 and followed up anchoring another World Series winner three years later, now “reassigned” from game planning coordinator to another, as-yet-identified role in the organisation.

It sure as hell wasn’t put together by now-beheaded hitting coach Peter Fatse, third base coach Kyle Hudson, bench coach Ramón Vásquez, Fatse’s assistant Dillon Lawson, or major league hitting strategy coach Joe Cronin.

This one’s on chief baseball officer Craig Breslow, who once wrestled his way through a twelve-season career as a middling relief pitcher of occasional flashes and flights. And very few people watching the Red Sox closely think otherwise, no matter how the massacre resonates as par for the baseball course when a team thought to be a division or league power isn’t exactly behaving that way on the field.

Maybe nobody put it with quite the nail-driving force of Athletic writer Steve Buckley. “For anyone choosing to cite this as just the latest example of a dead-ass ballclub whose manager is unable to inspire his players to keep performing at a high level regardless of the circumstances, you have just cause to do so,” he began Sunday.

Or you can look at the misshapen roster and the lack of clubhouse leadership and ask who put this mess together.

That would be Craig Breslow, who, believe it or not, once lived in big-league clubhouses. Lots of them. He soldiered on, year after year, with organization after organization. He was released five times. In 2018, at age 37, he pitched at three levels of the Toronto Blue Jays’ farm system as part of one last effort to get back to the big leagues.

How strange that a guy who’s been in so many clubhouses doesn’t seem to know how they work. How strange that a guy who has been on so many rosters hasn’t figured out how to build one.

Alex Cora signing a baseball in the clubhouse. His execution papers were signed Saturday despite the Red Sox nuking the Orioles that day, proving who gets to take the fall for a hot mess starting 10-17.

Remember Alex Bregman? Brought aboard to play third base last year while easing incumbent Rafael Devers into designated hitting and first base. Except that Devers wouldn’t buy in, before he would, before he wouldn’t (easy to get the sequence confused, no?), before he was shipped to the Giants in a “trade” that made the word a euphemism for the Red Sox ridding themselves of the $250+ million left on Devers’s deal.

Fighting injuries, Bregman still endeared himself to the Red Sox clubhouse with leadership and agreeability in hand with accountability. Then he hit free agency. Then Breslow convinced one and all upstairs that, no, of course not, the Cubs weren’t really being serious about offering Bregman a big chunk of the vault, a no-trade clause, and the Van Allen Belt. (That last is a joke, son.)

Except the Cubs were deadly serious. And, oh, by the way: while the Red Sox sputtered, spun, and plunged into the morass that culminated in the Friday night flogging they suffered, the Cubs won ten straight and eleven of thirteen to claim second place in the National League Central.

“I mean obviously, it’s kind of up in the air what the true direction of the franchise is,” said Trevor Story, Red Sox shortstop. “Some of the best coaches in the world didn’t get a fair shot.” The dear boy. Somebody forgot to brief him about Red Sox life under John Henry’s hammer. As another Athletic writer, Ken Rosenthal, wants to remind us, these Red Sox “could win the World Series—unlikely as that might be with the roster Breslow constructed as chief baseball officer—and it would only spare him for so long.”

Ask Dave Dombrowski. Ask Ben Cherington. Ask Theo Epstein, who once escaped the Henry regime in a gorilla suit, only to return, win a second Series and then bolt for the Chicago Cubs. Oh, to hear the honest thoughts of Epstein, back with the Fenway Sports Group as a part-owner and senior adviser, on the latest installment of As The Red Sox Turn.

It’s an endless game of survivor at Fenway Park, only no one ever survives. Not top executives. Not superstars like Mookie Betts, Rafael Devers and Alex Bregman. Not managers like Terry Francona, John Farrell and now Alex Cora . . .

Was Cora perfect? (Pause to stop laughing.) Remember, he had to take time off (ho ho ho) over his role in the Astros’s illegal, off-field-based, electronic sign-stealing operation of 2017-18 that was exposed over a year after he led his Red Sox to a World Series ring in his first year on the bridge. He also couldn’t sell Devers on the DH/1B transition the Giants proved to have little trouble selling, after all.

He wasn’t perfect. But neither were he or his staff going to get too much out of this assemblage, no matter how they looked on Saturday. “At the end of the day, when we take the field, it’s on us,” said outfielder Roman Anthony, currently struggling with back trouble. “It’s not AC’s job to go out there and do the things that we’re expecting to do as players. So, I mean, it’s nobody’s fault but ours.”

Eyes will be upon interim manager Chad Tracy as he tries to find the right pieces from among those bequeathed him. The pieces were random and testy enough that Cora found himself having to play mad scientist searching for the best formulae.

Forget whether Albert Einstein could square this roster’s mass into energy instead of this mess. Meaning Breslow himself could be the next execution. As the Red Sox Turn . . .