FORT MYERS, Fla. – For Alex Cora’s eighth full-squad meeting as Red Sox manager, he decided to “switch the whole script.”

The Red Sox spent two weeks gathering video messages from players’ and coaches’ loved ones. The end result, produced by Red Sox senior vice president of productions John Carter, was a spring training kick-off focused on family and the human aspect of baseball life that struck a different tone than years past.

“Alex Cora told me last night at dinner it was going to be a show, and it was a show,” Kennedy said. “He absolutely nailed it. The theme was obviously family, and it was just incredible to see players, what their families mean to them.”

“We take this for granted sometimes,” Cora said, “and we don’t put ourselves in their shoes. The sacrifices and the time they spend alone, and how hard it is, this whole thing. And we kind of like switched the whole script, like from their perspective what it would mean to win a World Series. And it was good.”

Cora, who said last year he doesn’t intend to be a baseball manager forever, admitted that his own stage of family life influenced Sunday’s theme. When the Red Sox hired him in November 2017, he had a teenage daughter and newborn twin boys. Xander and Isander Cora will turn nine in July. Camila Cora graduated from Boston College last spring. Time is flying by, and their father doesn’t want to miss much more of it.

“The more I do this, the harder it is to get here,” Cora said. “The boys are older, Camila is gone almost, and then you’re like, how (do) they feel, right?”

“Like for us, yeah it’s hard to leave the house, but then when you get here you get into your routine,” the manager continued, “Sometimes it’s hard to communicate. And I wanted to do it that way and then see their perspective, how they see it, how they feel, and it was a good one.”

The result was the latest reminder that Tom Hanks’ character in “A League of Their Own” was wrong. There is crying in baseball.

“I’ve never seen tears in a spring training meeting, coming out of the eyes of our players, but we got it this year for the first time ever,” Kennedy said.

“I thought we nailed it,” Cora said. “The message that I wanted to send, it was right on point.”

Sunday marked Fenway Sports Group’s 25th annual full-squad meeting since purchasing the team in 2002, but Kennedy felt it was unique to the ones that came before.

“Not recency bias,” Kennedy said, “but this was the best one we’ve ever had. It was remarkable.”