CAGUAS, PUERTO RICO — After winding through the narrow streets of San Juan and speeding down the expressway named for Puerto Rico’s third governor, you come to the road sign advertising the mountain city of Caguas — “el centro y el corazón de Puerto Rico.”

The center and the heart.

Here, in the southwestern corner of Caguas, in a house his family has occupied for a half-century now, Alex Cora was born. This is where he learned baseball, a short walk away through the tall grass at a field for the local Little League that his father founded. This is where he lost his father at 13, where he took ground balls with Roberto Alomar as a teenager, where he sought sanctuary during his lonely freshman year at the University of Miami, where he found purpose after his playing days were over. This is where he is now the most famous man in town, where a week before spring training he can come as a 42-year-old and, with his mother’s cooking sizzling on the stove in the kitchen, sit in a recliner draped by a jersey retired by his hometown team, turn on MLB Network, and, in his words, crash.

“To come here, there’s no questions about strategy or the fan base or who we’re signing and what’s going on,” he says, leaning back. “It’s home.”

Caguas isn’t just el centro y el corazón de Puerto Rico; Caguas is the center and the heart of Alex Cora.

Alex Cora as a toddler (courtesy of the Red Sox)

You walk out the front door of the house that Cora’s mother, Iris, has lived in for 50 years, pass the porch hemmed in by an iron door and make a left down Calle 14, which sits, counter to your intuition, between calles 12 and 13. You continue past the end of the block onto a well-worn dirt path cut out from the tall grass, make a right, another left six blocks down, and emerge to Alex Cora’s baseball past.

Here is the field where he resided every afternoon of his youth — “He was there always, forever,” Iris says — and which produced a pair of big-league players and now coaches in Alex and his brother, Joey, who is 10 years older.

“Every day,” said Joey, now the third-base coach for the Pirates. “We had to go.”

“It’s actually in good condition,” Cora says in the present, assessing the damage 138 days after Hurricane Maria made landfall by his home. The light towers don’t all work, and he struggles to remember whether there used to be a scoreboard out in left-center. But still. “Not bad.”

The field is relatively quiet for a sunny Monday afternoon, though there are still some teenagers either playing catch down the left-field line or stretching before batting practice. Cora shakes hands and poses for pictures. Always recognizable in these parts, his fame has reached a new level in the three months since he was introduced as manager of the Red Sox.

Earlier on this trip home, a teacher had come up to him with her grade-school class, telling him how proud they all were.

“Strangers, telling me how proud they are of me,” Cora says, shaking his head. “I’m not used to that.”

The day the Red Sox introduced him, Cora got a text from his mother: a picture of a billboard she came across congratulating her son.

“I was like, what the hell is this?” Cora says chuckling.

“Everybody. Everywhere he goes,” Iris says, “all Puerto Rico is very proud.”

As he takes in his old stomping grounds, Cora mentions his father, José Manuel, who founded the Little League chapter here. He points across the field to a plain cement bench halfway down the first-base line, between the bleachers and the dugout, right behind the chain-link gate cut into the fence.

“That’s where my dad always sat,” he says. “Watched from right there.”

José Manuel passed away in 1988, when Cora was 13. Colon cancer. The family had kept it secret from the younger son.

“It just happened so quick that I was in shock,” he says.

There was a time in Cora’s life — into his major-league career — where he lamented the premature loss of his father. He wondered whether he might have been a better, more complete player had he continued to learn under the tutelage of José Manuel. Maybe he would have learned to switch-hit from him, the way Joey did.

Cora doesn’t feel that way anymore. He was surprised how, during an October that included a World Series victory with the Astros and his hiring as manager of the Red Sox, he didn’t get emotional thinking about his father. He no longer looks at José Manuel’s death only as a loss, focusing instead on seeing his father’s life as a blessing.

“Now, the tone is different,” he says. “I was lucky to have him 13 years, honestly. I know how proud he is of us. He missed everything, but I had him. He was good for us.”

The living room at Iris Cora’s house is a shrine to her family, replete with family photos and, especially, baseball memorabilia from her two sons. The hats they wore throughout their professional careers circle the room, just below the ceiling. Plaques, pictures and framed newspaper clippings cover the walls, and jerseys hang on the backs of doors and even over a window.

“My two boys,” Iris says with pride. “No more space.”

On the back of one door is Cora’s orange Miami jersey — the signature green and orange of the Hurricanes being one of the school’s chief selling points to him as a high schooler. It was here, in this room in fact, that Cora’s baseball career pivoted on a phone call.

Cora’s first year in Coral Gables was rougher than he expected. Since Joey provided him with a little extra cash for food, and American Airlines had some inexpensive direct flights back and forth to San Juan, Cora found himself spending many of his weekends here in Caguas, yielding to his homesickness. One of those weekends, he purchased a one-way ticket rather than a round-trip. He didn’t want to go back.

He figured he’d sit out the rest of the year and re-enter the draft the following June. He shakes his head now at the plan, wondering how he could have thought it’d be easier to acclimate to American life as a professional baseball player in a rural outpost of rookie ball than as a college student in Miami.

When Joey found out his younger brother was home, he called right away — rather than waiting for his usual weekly phone call with Iris. A quarter-century later, their transcriptions of the resulting phone call have slight inconsistencies.

“I picked up the phone, and he was like, ‘What the hell?'” Cora says. “‘Man, you decided this is what you wanted to do. Go, take advantage of it, and see what happens.'”

“‘Get your ass back and fucking go to school,'” Joey said with a chuckle this spring, thinking back to that call. “I don’t know if you call it a pep talk. Simple and straight to the point.”

“Joey had to take care of that,” Iris says. “Although there was an age gap, he listened to Joey. And I know he doesn’t regret it.”

“It was a life-changer,” says Cora, who embraced his time at Miami from that point forward, emerging as the stalwart shortstop for a three-year title contender that attracted large crowds and major-league attention. “Those years taught me a lot, about the game, about becoming a grown-up, understanding certain things of life. I’m glad I went there.”

If Miami was where Cora bridged the gap between the theoretical and the practical as a player, Houston served the same role for Cora as a coach. When he was introduced as manager of the Red Sox, he mentioned how ready he had thought he was for major-league managing — before his time with the Astros.

While the time spent alongside A.J. Hinch in meetings and in the dugout during a championship season was invaluable, 2017 also taught Cora how to be away from home again. He had grown accustomed to retirement, his work with ESPN keeping him involved in the game, but at arm’s length. He would fly to Bristol, Connecticut for three-day stints in the studio, and then go back home. He knew he wanted to dive back into the deep end, that he wanted to manage. He didn’t know the right avenue.

When Houston offered him the role as Hinch’s bench coach, he contemplated it for a few days. Again, it was Joey who set him straight.

“If you want to manage, you have to get back to the game,” Joey told him over the phone. “Either you want to do it or not. The offer is good. There’s no more excuses.”

Coaching in the AL West reminded Cora of his days playing for the Dodgers: “When you’re playing Oakland and Seattle and Anaheim,” he says, “it felt like you were on the other side of the world.”

He felt that far removed while his girlfriend, Angelica, was pregnant with twins, though he was able to fly home for the birth of boys Xander and Isander in July. But nothing could prepare him for the separation anxiety of September, as his daily life came to be dominated by hurricanes.

“Everything kind of got heavy,” he says of a time when the Astros didn’t know where their next game would be played thanks to Harvey, and his family had to prepare first for Irma and then for Maria.

After Irma delivered a glancing blow to the island, there was little optimism Puerto Rico would be as fortunate with Maria.

“No chance,” Cora remembers thinking while monitoring the radar. His family waited out the storm at his house, about 15 minutes from his mother’s place in Caguas. He was able to stay moderately in the loop thanks to his daughter, Camila, whose phone worked intermittently.

“When we were at Alex’s house, we could hear the wind blowing and this and that. But we didn’t figure out, we didn’t think it was that big,” Iris says.” When we went out the next morning and we saw all the trees, all the electric poles down, it was like a fire just went through.

“There’s no words.”

Cora was able to sympathize in Houston with Carlos Beltrán, Carlos Correa, Juan Centeno and fellow coach Alex Cintrón — all native Puerto Ricans.

“It was like group therapy for us,” he says. “You see the news. They had nothing. We were watching like, ‘Wow.’ It was tough — really tough.”

Cora’s family was fortunate. His house and his mom’s house were fine, the power restored within a reasonable time frame. But four-and-a-half months later, Iris is readying a bag of ice to bring to friends who are still without electricity. Down the block, a house sits gutted by the storm.

“I don’t think it’s going to be the same again, ever,” she says. “They’ve been trying and trying. They’re one step ahead and three back. It’s been five months? It was tough, and it still is.”

(Courtesy of the Red Sox)

As Cora drives the southeastern part of Caguas in early February, the impact of the storm does not merely linger in the background; it is an unignorable part of everyday life, proclaiming its presence at every intersection. It is explicit.

Most of the streetlights here are still dark. The ceilings of homes and gas stations are secured and, in some cases, replaced by blue tarps. Road signs held up by poles the width of tree trunks have been casually discarded to the grass.

Down the block from his mother’s house, Cora leans to point out the basketball hoop he and his neighbors practiced on growing up, still standing after all these years. Except …

“The hoop is right … well, I guess it’s not anymore.” Another victim of Maria.

Few places reveal the force of Maria quite like Parque Yldefonso Solá Morales, home of the Criollos de Caguas — the winter-ball team that Cora has watched, played for, managed and built as the general manager. The chain-link fence surrounding the parking lot is no longer perpendicular to the ground. The yellow light towers have been cut in half, their torsos bowing at the hip before the winds of Maria.

They have not played baseball here since the storm; the Roberto Clemente Professional Baseball League trimmed its league from five teams to four and its schedule to 21 games, played during the day because of concerns about the power grid. It used just two ballparks, including San Juan’s Hiram Bithorn Stadium, which will host the Indians and Twins in a major-league series later this year.

Caguas won the league championship and then the Caribbean Series — for a second straight year — anyway.

Parque Yldefonso Solá Morales bookended Cora’s playing career. This is where he learned how to be a major-league player, and where he learned 25 years later how not to be one anymore.

This is where he used to go with Joey in the late 1980s, where he would take ground balls on the field with his older brother’s teammates, including Alomar.

“To be able to go with [Joey], take grounders, do the same things they were doing, that was the coolest part of the whole thing,” Cora says. “That’s when I went, ‘Wow, this is what I want to do.'”

“Early in life, he understood what it took to be a successful big-leaguer. That’s what he wanted to be,” Joey said. “It wasn’t as easy as you see on TV; it took more than that. I took him to the ballpark where he saw the work ethic of all those guys. We were working out together and practicing and getting him to the ballpark on time and doing things the right way.

“He realized it’s not as easy as it looks. But he knew exactly what he needed to do.”

Of course, the best example for Cora was Joey.

“He wasn’t afraid to share his secrets,” Cora says. “It wasn’t a hidden secret; it was just hard work. He worked harder than anyone else from college through his last days with Toronto in spring training. … To see him grow and see it firsthand, ‘OK, I’ll do this and I’ll do that, and I’ll be fine. If he can do it, I can do it.'”

Cora played for Caguas in a few different offseasons during his playing career, including his last one heading into the 2012 season. That spring, when he traveled across Florida to a minor-league road game and didn’t even get an at-bat, he realized it was time to hang up the spikes.

The next winter, he became the general manager for Caguas. Later, he’d manage the Criollos for two seasons, learning over time to step off the gas and be a more relaxed presence for his players. To be himself, essentially.

“The guy brings people together,” said Johnny Monell, who played with and for Cora for years with Caguas. “He brings that family aspect, and everyone’s got each other’s back.”

While Cora has rightly referred to his time in Houston as preparation for his new job with the Red Sox, perhaps the best rehearsal he’s had for it was serving as the general manager for Puerto Rico’s entry in last year’s World Baseball Classic. No offense to Puerto Rico’s well-regarded and much-loved national basketball team, Cora says, but no other Puerto Rican team entered an international tournament with the kind of expectations that surrounded the WBC squad he built.

“To be the GM of your national team and walk around the streets, and people ask you and ask you and ask you — to learn how to block that off and be polite, that was the one that really prepared me for anything,” he says.

This is what he means when he compares the environment in Boston to that of Puerto Rico, like the day he was introduced as manager of the Red Sox.

“This is a city that lives baseball 24/7, but you know what? I come from a country that lives baseball 24/7,” he said.

(Courtesy of the Red Sox)

Earlier in the day, as Cora sat back on the recliner in his mother’s house, he realized this calm would be short-lived. He was flying to Fort Myers the next day; spring training started the next week.

“It’s as relaxed as it can be here,” he says. “It’s something that we know is not going to happen for a while — hopefully for the rest of my career.”

He is not a first-time manager with leeway. The Red Sox are not — maybe never will be — rebuilding. His predecessor was fired after winning consecutive division titles, not to mention a World Series five years ago. There’s pressure that goes with that, but Cora likes it.

“This is a team that’s ready to win now,” he says. “Not too many guys get a chance at a young age to win a World Series. Young managers don’t get a shot like this.”

On the day he was introduced in Boston, Cora proudly unfurled the Puerto Rican flag on the podium, proud to be the second man from the island to ever manage a big-league team. (The first, the Marlins’ Edwin Rodríguez, had actually been the scout who drafted Cora out of high school for the Twins.) Two months later, Cora traveled to the island with supplies provided by the Red Sox — negotiated as part of his contract with Boston.

“It was an incredible experience,” said Rick Porcello, one of several Red Sox who traveled to Puerto Rico along with Cora. “To see his hometown where everybody obviously admires him and respects him, that was a cool experience. I’ve never had an inside look at anything like that before.”

“It’s a privilege to have him here,” said Christian Vázquez, the only Puerto Rican on Boston’s 40-man roster. “It means a lot. I’m happy for him and very proud of him.”

As Cora finishes packing his suitcase in his childhood bedroom, his mother can’t stop smiling.

“My heart is bursting with pride,” Iris says. “To tell you the truth, I still have to pinch myself. The Boston Red Sox? It’s huge.”

(Top photo of Cora: Joel Auerbach/Getty Images)