Boone a savage in dugout for Yankees
Bomber manager has done the best job in baseball
That rant Aaron Boone directed at the home plate umpire on Thursday afternoon because he didn’t like the way balls and strikes were being called, one that would earn him a one-game suspension, was pretty great. Just not as great as the job Boone has done managing his team so far. It is the best managing job in his sport, by about as much distance as the Yankees are putting between themselves and the field in the American League East.
Boone does this coming off a rookie season when his team won 100 games. Now it looks as if the Yankees will win even more than that this time. Brian Cashman placed a very large bet on Boone when he picked him to replace Joe Girardi, after the Yankees had made it all the way to Game 7 of the American League Championship Series against the Astros in 2017. In the process, Cashman placed an even larger bet on himself, not just replacing a manager who’d come that close to putting the Yankees in the World Series, but replacing him with a guy who had never managed a game anywhere in his baseball life.
Nothing like it had happened around here since Yogi Berra lost his job after the Yankees lost another Game 7, of the Series, in 1964 to the Cardinals. Yogi had never won a Series as a manager. Girardi had.
But Cashman decided he wanted someone else to manage Aaron Judge, the most
popular young Yankee since Derek Jeter was a young Yankee, and the other talented young guys he had assembled at the Stadium. So he hired Boone, the home run hero of Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS against the Red Sox, the guy who made one of the most famous October swings in Yankee history, at the old Stadium, in the bottom of the 11th against Tim Wakefield.
He came back to manage the Yankees, who won an awful lot of games last season. They just couldn’t get three off the Red Sox in their division series after getting a Wild Card game off the A’s. There was the notion after that series that not only had the Red Sox outplayed the Yankees in those games, that Boone had been outmanaged by Alex Cora, especially when he didn’t get Luis Severino out of there in Game 3 fast enough before the Red Sox ended up scoring two touchdowns and a couple 2point conversions.
But what was forgotten at the time was just how close the race in the AL East had been, even against the best Red Sox team of all time. You know that the real separation between the two teams came when the Red Sox swept a four-game series from the Yankees at Fenway in August. And even with the way the Red Sox threw the Yankees down a flight of stairs in Game 3 of the division series, you also know how close the Yankees were, because of a bottom-of-the-9th rally, to pushing the thing to Game 5.
The Red Sox won 108 in the regular season of 2018. The Yankees might come close to hitting that number the way they are going. They might do this even though Severino still hasn’t pitched an inning this season, and Dellin Betances hasn’t pitched an inning, and Giancarlo Stanton has just one home run and has hardly played at all. They have done with despite 20 guys being on the Injured List. They have done this despite Judge having played only half their games.
Boone can’t do what he’s done if Cashman wasn’t having — to here — the best year he’s ever had as a GM. The Yankees aren’t where they are without DJ LeMahieu and Gio Urshela and Luke Voit, whom Cashman picked up last year. But Boone has taken Cashman’s Irregulars and put them with his healthy regulars and came into the weekend not just with the best record in the division and the best record in the league, but the best win-percentage in baseball. You simply can’t do a better managing job than this.
Look at it another way: In Boone’s first 257 regular-season games managing the Yankees, the team’s record is 16295.
“He is very good at his job,” Cashman told me on Thursday night. “His dad has to be very proud.”
Boone is a proud baseball name. His grandfather, Ray, played his first big-league game in 1948 and his last in 1960. Bob Boone, Aaron’s father, was a catcher in the big leagues for nearly 20 years, and later managed the Royals and the Reds. Now Aaron Boone comes out of the broadcast booth and does this kind of job managing the New York Yankees.
He has to finish the job, of course.
Reggie Jackson
always talked about how you’re only measured at Yankee Stadium by whether or not you can get 11 games in October (or 12, if you’re a Wild Card). So they all have to finish the job: These players, this general manager, this manager.
It really was a terrific show from Boone the other day, before and after he got tossed, when he was talking about his hitters being “f—king savages” and telling the ump to “tighten this s—t up.” So far this season, the manager of the Yankees doesn’t have to tighten anything up. Guy’s been a bit of a savage himself in the Yankee dugout. Sometimes good guys finish first.