The Yankees’ Relentless Pursuit of Inventing Ways to Lose

By Jorge Guajardo  

The 2024 World Series Champions are the Los Angeles Dodgers. The team that maintained the best record in baseball with arguably the best player in the game in Shohei Ohtani. Yet, as the dust settles on yet another disappointing season for the New York Yankees, the narrative should be unmistakable: this loss is on manager Aaron Boone. 

It took 15 years for Yankees fans to finally get a chance to see their storied franchise in the World Series again. 15 years of hope and anticipation were wiped away after a brutal yet entertaining five-game series that was filled with sloppy play and bone-headed decisions that eventually cost the Yankees a legitimate shot at the ultimate prize.  

Make no mistake, the Yankee players are responsible for their feeble playoff performances as well, but Aaron Boone's – and General Manager Brian Cashman’s – fingerprints are all over this despondent performance that had not one but two of the greatest choke jobs in the history of baseball.  

 It’s harder than ever in baseball to pin wins and losses on a manager. Long removed are the days of Billy Martin, Pete Rose, Tommy Lasorda, Tony LaRussa, Joe Torre, and Terry Francona. Days where a manager’s impact was tangible and visible. 

Yet Boone, with the same inconsistencies that defined his playing career, found inexplicable ways to lose with a team that had not one but two of the greatest hitters in baseball and another hitter who is only overshadowed by Babe Ruth in playoff performance.  

Boone’s playing career was as up-and-down as his managerial one, filled with the same kind of highs and lows that have haunted the Yankees since his tenure as manager began, and the same kind of boneheaded decisions that have cost him dearly, like when he tore his ACL during the 2004 off-season playing a pick-up basketball game. A decision that got him released by the Yankees after they traded for Alex Rodriguez.  

Where’s the parallel? How about bringing in a pitcher during extra innings in game one, with a bad elbow, who hadn’t pitched in five weeks to save the game and face one of the deadliest line-ups ever constructed? A pitcher with no career saves, a starter thrown into the fire in the ninth inning from the bullpen. Aaron Boone mercilessly marched Nestor Cortes to his doom and all he did was give a wincing smile when Freddie Freeman sent Cortes’ first pitch into orbit.  

Yankees fans, however had seen that movie before. All summer Boone stubbornly refused to relieve Clay Holmes of his closer duties, a move that led to Clay Holmes tying the all-time record for blown saves in a season with 14. There are tangible and visible effects that a manager can have. 

The Yankees never truly recovered from that blow delivered by Freeman, and Boone’s reluctance to adapt his bullpen strategy, among other things, only compounded their problems heading into the rest of the series. To top it all off this meltdown happened while approximately 15.8 million viewers watched, according to Sports Video Group only a Thursday night football game has topped that viewership this fall. It is safe to say that when the world was watching Boone reached his melting point. 

Boone’s playing career was highlighted by one of the most clutch and memorable hits of all-time, his game-seven walk-off homerun off of the late Tim Wakefield and the hated Red Sox, that sent the Yankees to the World Series only for him to follow that up by hitting .143 against the Marlins and watch them win a title at Yankee Stadium, unlike this year Sinatra was not crooning New York New York in the background.  

For the 2024 Yankees, the results were similar. New York fielded two of the three best hitters in the game, Aaron Judge and Juan Soto, only to negate that with two of the worst in Anthony Volpe and Alex Verdugo, and it didn’t stop there. Boone refused to bench his rookie catcher – who ended up dipping well below the Mendoza line – batting .098 in the postseason at one point, up until last the soul-crushing moments of the World Series.  

No Yankee fan was safe from Boone’s relentless strategy-less approach. No Yankee player had a chance to escape the looming doom that was seven years in the making after Freeman’s “grand slam heard ‘round the world.” One might have thought there was no way the Yankees could reach more profound depths of despair.   

Yes, it may have seemed impossible, but Aaron Boone is not to be trifled with when it comes to inventing ways to lose. He put forth and fostered a culture that produced the worst base-running team in the league, the worst-positioned outfield in the league, the Dodgers foamed at the mouth at the prospect of winning a World Series by simply making the New York Yankees play baseball. A more scathing indictment of a team does not exist.  

Play baseball they did, poorly. No greater example in sports exists of how simply executing and doing your job will win you the day than the fifth inning of game five which will forever live in infamy.  

It’s likely Boone’s greatest work during his time as Yankees manager. The culmination of years of not holding players accountable, not coaching them up in any meaningful way, or even instilling confidence and ease in them. There wasn’t a single mound visit during that game five fifth-inning implosion, when the fate of the championship hung in the balance. 

No, it turns out teaming him up with GM Cashman to construct head-scratching line-ups, constantly playing players out of position defensively, and frequently mismanaging the bullpen is a recipe for disaster. That fifth inning is the perfect example and the fruit of Boone’s labor as manager.   

American League MVP Aaron Judge took his eyes off the ball to peek at the runner on first, Volpe’s rushed throw in the dirt followed by Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s weak attempt to pick the ball at third, and then first baseman Anthony Rizzo’s and pitcher Gerrit Cole’s unfathomable lack of simple execution which ended with Rizzo, who was six feet away from first base, simultaneously watch Mookie Betts reach base – unbothered – and Cole grimace with anguish. Rizzo is now a free agent. 

“Well, that’s baseball Suzyn,” A term coined by legendary Yankees broadcaster John Sterling is something Yankees fans have heard throughout the years but holistically more so during Boone’s tenure. Yes, that is indeed baseball under Boone’s watch.  

And yet after that fifth-inning collapse, the Yankees still had a chance to win, and do what no team has ever done in World Series history, force a game six after being down three games to none. Still, the Yankees found ways to lose. Loading the bases after using bullpen arms who had been cooked by Boone, – thanks to his refusal to use guys like Marcus Stroman, and Nestor Cortes in more traditional long relief roles – and subsequently giving up two sacrifice flies to let the Dodgers take the lead and complete the largest-ever comeback in a game in World Series history – For those keeping score at home that’s five unearned runs and two sac flies – That’ll win a World Series game. Again, interminable losers. 

The Yankees, the ultimate “what-if” team left 43 men on base, hit .200 with runners in scoring position on the biggest stage in baseball, and somehow managed to keep the run differential for the entire series to within one. The final run count being 25-24 in favor of the Dodgers. Boone and Cashman would see that disparity and think that the series was up in the air, ripe for the taking yet somehow the Yankees squandered any and virtually every opportunity to bring home their twenty-eighth world championship away. 

Before Boones antics Dave Roberts had been maligned in southern California frequently. Even the 2020 COVID bubble championship couldn’t shield him from criticism and in fact there was talk among fans that if he didn’t get it done this year he should be canned.  

Yet, Boone now stands alone as the only manager ever to accomplish such daunting feats and somehow, he is now only rivaled by his championship-winning predecessors Joe Girardi and Joe Torre as the longest-tenured managers in modern Yankees history, to highlight that further no Yankees manager has ever made it to a sixth or seventh season as manager without winning a championship. Aaron Boone has.  

Yankees fans now armed with retrospect can see the patterns emerge from the ashes of failure, it’s been seven years of this non-sense, seven years of Aaron “It’s right in front of us,” Boone mercilessly destroying the hopes and dreams of Yankees fans everywhere, every year. Seven years of inconsistent line-ups, puzzling defensive positionings, terrible bullpen management, and horrific baserunning. What’s more, is that the Yanks are to bring Boone back for, at the very least, one more wild ride.  

Nothing is guaranteed in sports, and much of the bad juju that haunted the Dodgers and Dave Roberts were exercised this fall against a team that was more than willing to oblige, but now the narrative has changed Roberts has gone from the hot seat to two-time champion and the Dodgers have gone from perennial under-achievers to dynasty in the making.  

The Yankees find themselves at a threshold, this could have been the one chance that four surefire future hall-of-famers like Cole, Judge, Soto, and Giancarlo Stanton have to win it all in pinstripes, somehow, they made it all the way to the end despite Boone’s shenanigans. However, as it stands right now the Yankees face the abyss, the reality of playing under Boone’s orchestration for another year only means they’ll not only have to beat the teams they play but also overcome the lunacy conjured up by Boone and his senseless tactics.