The New York Yankees will never win a World Series with Aaron Boone as their manager. We know this as a fact, a truism on par with the sky being blue and the sun rising each morning and the worst people on earth rushing to the aisle immediately after an airplane lands. For the past nine years, Boone has led the Yankees to winning records in the regular season. For the past nine years, he’s completely embarrassed himself in the playoffs. We have no further questions. We’ve seen enough.
On Wednesday, the Tampa Bay Rays beat the Yankees 4-3, completing a three-game sweep in the AL Division Series. New York didn’t lead for a single moment the entire series. The Yankees were held to one hit in Game 1, made four errors in Game 2, and pinned their hopes in Game 3 to a fan who nearly awakened the ghost of Jeffrey Maier. Ben Rice looked like the best hitter on the planet, Cam Schlittler battled his ass off, and Anthony Volpe won back a lot of the fan base. Other than that, more or less everything was a disaster.
“We’ve got to be more complete offensively, defensively, pitching,” Boone told reporters after the Yankees were eliminated. “We did really good things this year, but ultimately not good enough to beat a really good Rays team.”
The fault for this loss doesn’t lie solely with Boone. He is not responsible for Ryan McMahon botching a routine ground ball to third base, or for Jazz Chisholm Jr. chucking the ball approximately 12 miles wide of first base when trying to turn a double play. Boone is not responsible for Max Fried giving up a soul-crushing homer to Victor Mesa Jr., or for Austin Wells making a baserunning blunder so egregious that it caused every Yankees fan to do a Looney Tunes–esque spit take the instant he rounded second. And that’s to say nothing of the most obvious excuse at Boone’s disposal: New York was without its best player, Aaron Judge, who missed most of the season with a fractured rib and has been out since September 16 while recovering from a calf injury.
But all of the micro-failures shouldn’t take the focus away from the big picture. The Yankees face-planted in the playoffs again, just like they always face-plant in the playoffs. The particulars change, but the script remains the same.
The Yankees now head into an offseason facing a very familiar set of questions. They can chalk up their latest flop to the playoffs being a crapshoot. Or they can finally own up to the fact that their organizational philosophy is crap.
Aaron Boone signals toward the bullpen during the eighth inning of Game 3
Boone holds the MLB record for the most playoff games managed without winning a World Series. Do you know how outrageous that stat is? Baseball has been around a long time, and there have been lots of people over the years who simply couldn’t get over the hump. But no one has ever been as good at being just good enough to lose as Boone is. In this respect, he stands alone.
Boone’s playoff failings are even more damning if you broaden the scope. There are only 13 MLB managers ever who have worked at least a decade consecutively with one franchise without winning a World Series. Four completed their tenures before 1950; two (Terry Francona and Lou Piniella) had won championships with other teams before being hired into those jobs. And one of the members of this group is Kevin Cash, the Rays manager who very well could come off this list within the next couple of weeks. It’s one thing to give managers a grace period. It’s another to treat their positions like Supreme Court appointments. In what other aspect of society are we growing more patient, not less?
There are two managerial archetypes that tend to succeed in modern baseball. The first is the tactical genius. The managers who have an innate feel for the game and instinctively push the right buttons in the biggest moments. The second is the culture builder. The managers who foster a clubhouse atmosphere that’s able to withstand anything, who exude resilience and whose teams persistently fight.
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Boone is neither. His tactical shortcomings have a lore of their own: Severino vs. the Red Sox. Ottavino vs. Springer. The Deivi Garcia gambit. Nestor in Game 2.
But the Yankees’ culture under Boone is even worse. Boone may not be to blame for the specific mistakes the Yankees made in the ALDS this postseason, but he is to blame for his teams making the same types of mistakes, year after year. When the first-inning debacle was unfolding in Game 2 against the Rays—New York committed three errors in a span of four batters—the entire baseball world was cracking jokes about the fifth inning of Game 5 of the 2024 World Series. It’s not just that we’ve seen this movie before. It’s that this is the only movie Boone ever puts out.
Part of why Boone has retained his job until now is because he unquestioningly follows the blueprint that general manager Brian Cashman and the front office want him to execute. He’ll read whatever you put on that teleprompter, even if it includes Trent Grisham leading off. He does exactly what he’s told.
But at some point, absolute loyalty can’t be enough. Results have to matter. Failure has to matter. That the Yankees have just one World Series since Y2K has to matter. At least, so you’d think.
To some, the Boone conversation has become a litmus test for the power of analytics. The numbers say starting McMahon over Volpe is a good idea. It’s not on Boone that it didn’t shake out that way. In this line of thinking, either you understand how baseball works, or you base your analysis purely on vibes. In scientific terms: Are you a stock market boyfriend or an astrology girlfriend?
But that’s a false dichotomy. The Yankees’ strategy isn’t working, but that’s not a fatal flaw in and of itself. Good leadership isn’t just about vision. It’s also about adaptation. The part of the Boone experience that has continually been the most maddening is that when his plan goes awry, he doesn’t know how to adjust. That has repeatedly cost the Yankees, in ways big and small.
The most representative part of Game 3 came in the bottom of the eighth inning. Boone pinch-hit Paul Goldschmidt for Luis Garcia Jr. because of their splits against lefties, and Goldschmidt reached first on an error to lead off the inning. New York was trailing by a run, and this was one of its last chances to pull even. The 39-year-old Goldschmidt is one of the slowest players in the majors, so it seemed like a glaringly obvious spot to insert a pinch runner.
Paul Goldschmidt hits a single against the Tampa Bay Rays during the eighth inning of Game 3
Boone had already burned Chisholm as a pinch hitter for Jose Caballero the inning prior, so he didn’t have a speedster waiting in the wings. But instead of accepting this, finding a plan B, and tapping someone with league-average speed like Heliot Ramos to run the bases, he let Goldschmidt stay in the game. Two batters later, rookie shortstop George Lombard Jr. grounded into a force out that would’ve been an infield single if the runner on first had been half a step quicker. Instead of having men on first and second with one out, the Yankees had a man on first with two outs. An inning later, their season was over.
Whether that will be the final memory of Boone in New York will be decided soon. Maybe this really will be the end, in part because we’re approaching year 10, and in part because there’s been some recent tension between Boone and Judge. If the manager has lost the support of his best player, that counts for a lot.
In any event, we know enough to know: It’s not going to happen, next year or ever. The Yankees’ vision doesn’t work. We’ll see whether they’re finally ready to accept that and move on.