A former bench coach for Aaron Boone, Carlos Mendoza, enters this season with more job security than Boone himself has with the Yankees. Now we will find out how someone who has only ever managed the Gulf Coast League Yankees and the Charleston RiverDogs does in New York, when the lights get turned up so much higher than they have been in Mendoza’s entire baseball life.
It is different for Boone, even if he had no managerial experience of any kind — if you don’t count managing from the ESPN broadcast booth — when Brian Cashman selected him to replace Joe Girardi after the 2017 for one reason more meaningful than all others:
Boone was exactly the kind of manager he was looking for to implement his — Cashman’s — vision for the Yankees, even if Girardi had taken the team to Game 7 of the American League Championship Series the year before, as close as the Yankees have come to the World Series since 2009.
Now Boone is on the line for this upcoming season as much as Cashman is, unless you still think Cashman has a job for life with Hal Steinbrenner. Boone, more than anyone, is on the line and in the line of fire if the Yankees aren’t once again a serious team come the fall.
Here is what you must understand about Boone, once a Yankee hero of the fall, and one of the good guys: His job has so often been to be a fall guy around here, just not the kind of fall guy, literally, Yankee fans want him to be. He is the guy who has to stand there and take it, day after day and game after game and season after season, even though he has never deviated from being exactly what Cashman wanted after Girardi.
“Aaron is the guy who has been asked to be a bridge from the world of analytics to the world of someone who believes that this game still has a beating heart,” Buck Showalter said. “He is someone who, because he grew up in the game and played the game, respects how hard it is. And even from the outside, you can see that his players respect him.”
Boone is about to enter his seventh season as Yankee manager, and sixth for one to be played out over 162 games. He is the first Yankee manager in history to win 100 or more games in his first two seasons. Another time he won 99. His lifetime record for the regular season is 509-361. He has done that kind of work at Yankee Stadium, done it in New York where the lights really are the brightest, and done it without ever entering October, not once, with a team regarded as the one to beat.
Cashman’s Yankees have now gone 14 seasons without winning a World Series or appearing in one. Boone has essentially been around for half of that. Maybe Cashman really might somehow survive the Yankees not being a legitimate contender by October of 2024. Maybe Steinbrenner is another owner who doesn’t know much about baseball but does not have an ability to process the kinds of numbers he gets from his famous analytics department, and will continue to ride with those numbers the way Cashman does. Perhaps Steinbrenner is still swept away by all those winning seasons in a row, as if that is now the essential part of the Yankees’ DNA.
But it is impossible to see Boone surviving if the Yankees aren’t still playing ball the last week of October. There is a club option on him for 2025. But it is also impossible to believe the Yankees will exercise it if the team once again falls down before that.
Even with the way Cashman finally started to hear it last season, Boone has been hearing it longer from Yankee fans. Cashman isn’t out front every day. Boone is. Part of the job. Now he is basically working on the same kind of one-year deal that Juan Soto is. The difference between them, other than a whole lot of money, is that Soto will have a job somewhere next season, whether it’s at the Stadium or Citi Field or somewhere else. Boone might have another job, too. Just not here. It’s why he’s worth rooting for this season as much as any of them at the Stadium.
Here is something he said last September, before showing up at spring training this time talking about being “hellbent” on winning a championship:
“I don’t worry about it. It’s out of my hands. I’m completely comfortable with who I am and the things I can control. In my mind, I’m doing everything to head into the offseason prepared to put us in a better position to try and compete for a championship. That’s what the goal is, and until they take that away, that’s my focus.”
Understand: His Yankees haven’t won the World Series. But year in and year out, he has done the job he was hired to do. He still doesn’t get nearly enough credit for his work in 2019, when the Yankees won 103 games despite Aaron Judge missing 60 games and Giancarlo Stanton missing 144 and Mike Ford playing 50 games and Cameron Maybin and Clint Frazier and Aaron Hicks combining for 600 at-bats among them.
Now he finds himself in the last year of that contract he signed after the 2021 season, club option or no. Working without a net. He needs a lot of things to go right, maybe all the way to the Canyon of Heroes. If not, he goes, all this time after he’s the one who went deep in October.
