A BOONE TOWN NOW!
Aaron pushes all the right buttons in Yank playoff debut
Aaron Boone’s first season as the Yankees manager is officially not a failure. Quite the contrary.
And now, it has a decent chance to be a smashing success.
Boone and the Yankees got past arguably the most dangerous hurdle of the postseason, the one-and-done wildcard game, Wednesday night at Yankee stadium, beating the Oakland Athletics 7-2 and propelling themselves into a best-of-five showdown against the Boston Red Sox in the ALDS beginning Friday night at Fenway Park.
“That wild card game is no joke,’’ said Aaron Judge. “It takes years off you.’’
The strain is especially tough on a manager. Before the game, Boone had a difficult choice to make – who to start in the single-elimination game? – and an even more difficult choice to make once the game was in progress. Both of them worked as better than even he could have expected.
For the first choice, he went with Luis Severino, the nominal ace of his staff, with 19 wins this season, but a pitcher who had struggled mightily over the second half of the season and never worse than in his Sept. 5 start against the Athletics, in which he allowed six runs in 2-2/3 innings.
Boone passed up J.A. Happ, his most reliable starter since the All-Star Break, and Masahiro Tanaka, to roll the dice with Severino, and the 24-year-old righty did not crap out, holding the Athletics hitless through four innings, although he did struggle with his command, walking four.
Meanwhile, Judge had staked his team to a 2-0 lead with a first-inning home run, a lead that Severino made stand up. But when Severino allowed singles to the first two hitters of the fifth inning, Boone knew it was time to make another move. The choice he made, Dellin Betances, was nearly as risky as starting Severino, given Betances’ trouble with holding runners on base and his occasional penchant for wildness.
But Betances made Boone look like a genius, too, retiring all six batters he faced and striking out three of them. Betances stranded the runners in the fifth, striking out Khris Davis, who led the AL with 48 homes runs, to end the inning, and pitched a 1-2-3 sixth. He wound up getting the win.
“That was the ballgame right there,’’ Judge said of Betances’ two innings. “The game is rarely won in the ninth inning. It’s won in situations like that.’’
And by the decisions dictated by those situations. “Dellin is a stud,’’ Boone said. “I told him before the game, you may be who I go to in the fourth or fifth inning if it’s a part of the lineup I want you facing in that spot. I just felt like he was the guy.’’
And even his less prominent moves worked out well. Luke Voit, who rapidly supplanted Greg Bird as the Yankee starting first baseman after being acquired around the trade deadline, has batted in the bottom third of the Yankees order in 22 of the 35 games he’s started. But Boone penciled him in fifth for the wild-card game, which placed him in exactly the right spot in the Yankees sixth inning – at the plate with runners at first and third, one out and the Yankees leading to a still-slim 3-0 lead.
Voit battled A’s reliever Blake Treinen for eight pitches, fouling off three straight two-strike pitches before driving the ninth pitch off the right-field wall for the two-run double that broke the game open. And another move, pulling Miguel Andujar, who had committed a throwing error to give the A’s a fourth-inning base runner, after the fifth inning in favor of the defensively-superior Adeiny Hechavarria, paid off almost immediately when Hechavarria made a spectacular snag of Marcus Semien’s liner leading off the seventh.
“I’m just having the time of my life, man,’’ Voit said in the champagne-soaked Yankees clubhouse. “This team has more fun than any team I ever played on. We know we can do this.’’
Voit came over from the St. Louis Cardinals, where he was a part-time player, and expected the same role here. He was even demoted for 10 days in early August after getting off to a slow start as a Yankee.
“I knew I could play this game,’’ he said. “I always knew I could hit. And luckily enough I finally got the opportunity and it’s doing wonders for me.’’
The victory insured that not only would Boone’s team advance to the next round of the postseason, it also saved him the ignominy of having managed a 100-win team whose season lasted just one game longer than that of the Baltimore Orioles, who lost 115 games.
It also bettered the rookie season of his predecessor Joe Girardi, whose 2008 Yankees won just 89 games, finishing third and missing the playoffs for the first time in 13 years.
Asked before the game if a loss to the Athletics would reduce his team’s fine season to a failure, Boone said, “Ah man … we’ve had a really successful season to this point, but we’re with the Yankees to chase down that ultimate prize and we feel like we have a club that’s capable of doing that and we get to find out if we’re good enough starting tonight. I’ll let everyone else kind of decide those kinds of things. We’re pouring into tonight with the expectation that we can get out of here with a win.’’
Girardi's Yankees, of course, came back after that disappointing 2008 season to win the World Series the following season, and made the postseason in six of his 10 seasons.
Boone has a long way to go to match that record, but he's off to a good start.
His Yankees are still alive in October, and he deserves more than a little bit of the credit.