Boone ‘needed to fight,’ but picked wrong pitch

Yankees manager Aaron Boone said he felt embarrassed by his theatrical display during an argument with plate umpire Laz Diaz after he was ejected during New York’s loss to the host Chicago White Sox on Monday, the Associated Press reported.

Boone said he talked to MLB Senior Vice President of On-Field Operations

Mike Hill on Tuesday. He would not reveal details of their discussion.

“I don’t like doing that,” Boone (pictured imitating Diaz), said Tuesday. “But I also felt like I needed to fight with what was happening in that game.”

Boone was tossed by Diaz after Anthony Volpe got called out on strikes against reliever

Bryan Shaw to begin the eighth inning on Monday. He then made the most of his American League-leading sixth ejection.

At one point before he left the dugout, he yelled: “Laz, what the (expletive) are we doing. What are we doing?” Boone then ran to home plate and went into arm-waving theatrics.

The manager bent down and drew a line in the dirt with his finger at the edge of the lefthanded batter’s box, demonstrating where he thought the pitch was, and then mimicked Diaz emphatically calling strike three. A picture of that mimicry was on the front page of the New York tabloids, something else Boone probably was embarrassed about.

Boone said he heard from “quite a few” of his fellow managers, adding it was “a lot of funny stuff, mostly.”

By some accounts, Diaz missed quite a few strike calls in the game. But the pitch that finally set Boone off was clearly a strike.

According to UmpScorecards on X (formerly Twitter), Diaz missed just two pitches that were in the strike zone that he called balls, a 98 percent accuracy score.

But 17 of the 50 called strikes were really balls, only a 66 percent accuracy rating. The major league average is 88 percent.

UmpScorecards also lists an Overall Favor, and it estimated that Diaz’s calls favored the White Sox by 1.59 runs, one of the largest numbers you will see.