Alex Cora was brazen about Astros scandal: ‘We stole that World Series’

It sounds as if Alex Cora has a similar view of the Astros’ 2017 World Series title, when they used an illegal electronic sign-stealing scheme to win a championship, as much of the rest of the baseball world.

The Red Sox manager — who was Houston’s bench coach in 2017 — reportedly told his players in Boston in 2018, “We stole that [expletive] World Series,” according to a Boston Herald transcript of an excerpt of the new book “Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess” by Evan Drellich.

Cora was found to be one of the masterminds of the cheating scheme and was let go by the Red Sox — and suspended for the 2020 season by MLB — following the league’s investigation of the scandal.

He returned as Boston’s manager in 2021 and declined comment on the matter when reached on Friday, according to the Boston Herald.

Following MLB’s investigation, the Astros fired then-manager A.J. Hinch — who was also suspended by the league for all of 2020, before he was hired to manage in Detroit in 2021.

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According to the book, members of the 2018 Red Sox would listen to Cora, during his first year as manager — along with bullpen coach Craig Bjornson, another ex-Houston staffer — discuss their scheme “in a late-night setting” and “especially when they started drinking.”

The scheme, which included a video monitor and players hitting a garbage can to indicate what type of pitch was being thrown, carried on at least through the 2017 postseason, when the Astros beat the Yankees in seven games en route to the World Series title.

“We knew the Astros did [steal signs] because Alex Cora told us,’’ one member of the Red Sox told Drellich. “He said that when they played the Dodgers, ‘We already knew what everybody was throwing before we even got on base. We didn’t have to get on base.’ And everybody was like, ‘What the hell does that mean?’ ”

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It remains a sore subject in The Bronx, and general manager Brian Cashman discussed it again last spring, when he told The Athletic, “The only thing that stopped us [in 2017] was something that was so illegal and horrific.”

Cashman also told The Post last March: “The only thing that derailed us [that year] was a cheating circumstance that threw us off. I think that’s the only thing that stopped us. … I feel like I can technically put ‘American League champion’ on that season.”

While Cora declined to speak about the situation on Friday, he addressed it when he came back to the Red Sox prior to the 2021 season.

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“I want to make sure everybody knows that this situation is part of who I am for the rest of my career,’’ Cora said at the time. “As a man, I have to deal with it. I don’t want people to make it seem like it’s a great comeback story.”

But even then, Cora refused to delve into the specifics of what his role was in the scandal.

“I don’t want to get into what happened in ’17,” Cora said. “But it’s a tough lesson.”

The Red Sox had their own sign-stealing scandal — on a much smaller scale — prior to their hiring of Cora.

The previous season — 2017, when John Farrell was still the manager — the team was proven to have stolen signs with the help of an Apple Watch. And replay coordinator J.T. Watkins was banned for the season in 2020 after he was found to have relayed signs from the team’s video room to the dugout during games in 2018.