The Yankees exercised their 2025 option on Aaron Boone on Friday, meaning that, for now, he will get a one-year now-or-never referendum about his future on the job. But the truth is, if this is the only step they intend to take with Boone, that would be a bad idea, regardless of which side of the Boone Spectrum you fall on.
The only way Boone’s tenure as skipper could be any more uncomfortable than it’s been the last few years is to add “lame duck” to the list of adjectives used to describe him by his detractors. But that’s where we are now, and until and unless the Yankees decide to extend him, that’s where we will be.
We do not live in a gray age, and so there is nothing gray about Aaron Boone — except, perhaps, for the few strands that have crept into his hair over the course of seven years as the Yankees manager. There is very little neutral ground surrounding him. Ask a Yankee fan about Boone, the one guarantee is that you will not get this answer:
“I haven’t really thought about it.”
Aaron Boone will be back managing the Yankees next season.Robert Sabo for NY Post
If you are pro-Boone — and your humble narrator has been from the start, and continues to be — you begin with the fact he has averaged 95 wins in each of the six full seasons he’s skippered. You’d add his being 6-for-7 on playoff appearances. Maybe you could mention the steep pile of Hall of Fame managers who trail Boone’s .584 winning percentage so far. Or that his approval rating in his own clubhouse is strong, never a given in pro sports. It’s easy to manage the Yankees to the playoffs? Tell that to Joe Girardi who, remember, missed them in 40 percent of his 10 terrific years as manager.
If you are anti-Boone, the first stake in the ground is Boone’s playoff record: 22-23, which is also 7-19 if you delete October games played against the AL Central, which seems to be part of Yankee Analytics these days.
There are other yard signs: his Pollyanna-ish public non-rebukes of his team, which may or may not be responsible for the Yankees’ substandard baserunning and occasionally maddening lapses in baseball IQ — the fifth inning of Game 5 being the Hope Diamond of this argument.
Brian Cashman and the Yankees have a decision to make on Aaron Boone.JASON SZENES/NEW YORK POST
(EDITOR’S NOTE: If you are anti-Boone, you vote “may” on all of this.)
Most starkly: He has not won a championship.
And Yankees managers bear that burden, always. The Yankees have had Hall of Fame managers win titles (Miller Huggins, Joe McCarthy, Casey Stengel, Joe Torre). They have had excellent managers who fall just below that rung who have won titles (Ralph Houk, Billy Martin), and very good ones who’ve won them (Joe Girardi). They’ve even had a couple of ham-and-eggers who’ve guided them to the finish (Bucky Harris, Bob Lemon).
Until he wins one, Boone is locked in the same room with names like Buck Showalter and Dick Howser and Lou Piniella, all of whom were winning managers and found plenty of success elsewhere, but never did make it to the finish line with the Yankees holding a Commissioner’s Trophy.
Aaron Boone has yet to win a World Series as Yankees skipper.Jason Szenes / New York Post
Those three, in particular, are mostly remembered fondly, especially Howser — though Howser, specifically, suffered from some of the same issues Boone deals with. He was tough and demanding behind closed doors — but mostly affable and good-natured publicly. He did not rip players, ever — though they felt his wrath privately. And he made a few ill-fated choices in the 1980 ALCS that doomed him.
In Howser’s case, it wasn’t a mass of fans who turned on him as much as one fan — George Steinbrenner — who did. He fired Howser, quickly called it the worst decision of his career and as a penance waited 16 years before his next championship.
A similar karmic fate wouldn’t befall his son Hal — for one thing, next year will be 16 years since the last title — even if Hal was a fraction as reactionary as his old man. Which he isn’t. Which he’s proven so often over the years that sometimes he gets boiled in the same kettle as Boone. Which explains the type of patience that wishes to reward Boone for a first World Series appearance since 2009.
But it’s still only a half-measure. Without a full-boat extension, the grumbling will grow loud at the first four-game losing streak, louder still at the first in-game maneuver that goes south and will be deafening if there arises a crisis mid-summer.
New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone walks to the dugout in the fifth inning of game two of the ALCS against the Cleveland Guardians at Yankee Stadium, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2024, in Bronx, NY.Corey Sipkin for the NY POST
As one Boone dissenter said to me Friday: “I just have a numb dissatisfaction. This feels less like a team that you should try to run it back with, though if [Juan] Soto goes elsewhere, Boone will have the 2023 team again. What’s he going to do with that?”
The criticism will be less elegant than that the deeper Boone goes in his lame-duck year.
(Unless they start 50-22 … oh, wait, right …)
An extension won’t quiet the detractors, it’ll just keep Steinbrenner in that kettle alongside his lieutenants. But at least it would wash away a little of the gray.
Source : nypost.com
