The Yankees Have No Accountability With Aaron Boone as Manager

The Yankees Have No Accountability With Aaron Boone as Manager

by Sal Maiorana

August 10, 2023

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Sal Maiorana, a friend of the site, will be sharing some of his thoughts on the Yankees here on SSTN.

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The Yankees lost two of three to the White Sox, one of the worst teams in MLB, a team that sold half its roster at the trade deadline. Folks, these are end times for the men of Aaron Boone as they are now 59-56 and 5.5 games out of a playoff berth.

It’s deplorable how this team has played in 2023, and this dreadful series is yet another indication of just how far this franchise has fallen.

I just noticed this on Monday morning, after the last newsletter went out, but even dated by a few days, I thought it was an ideal topic to lead off with today since there’s really not much left to talk about with this Yankees team.

Last Saturday, Boston manager Alex Cora benched Alex Verdugo because he showed up a couple hours late to the clubhouse before the Red Sox game against the Blue Jays. Verdugo apparently has done this before, so Cora benched him. Earlier in the year, Cora benched him for not running hard on the bases so clearly, they have an issue with each other.

I bring this up to augment my complete lack of respect for Aaron Boone as a manager. Last Sunday, Giancarlo Stanton was in the lineup, one day after jogging home from second base and getting thrown out by half a mile, a play that was as bizarre as any we’ve seen this year. Stanton just flat out jogged, apparently because he’s terrified of pulling a leg muscle. The guy is chiseled in stone, but he’s so fragile that he can’t score from second base on a single to right-center because if he tries to run hard, his legs are going to explode.

Yet after the game, Boone completely let him off the hook, essentially saying that when he’s not running in a straight line - meaning when he has to round a base - things get really difficult for the 34- and going on 54-year-old Stanton. “Sometimes between when he’s going straight line and sometimes if he gets his steps not timed up right, he gets himself into a tough spot,” Boone said.

Unbelievable, not only the fact that that’s probably true, but that Boone didn’t come right out and say that Stanton has to be better than that. In typical Boone fashion, rather than calling out Stanton for being incapable of performing the most basic of baseball skills, running, the milquetoast manager, as he always does, makes excuses.

On Sunday, he changed his soft stance ever so slightly by saying, “Wasn’t a great look” but then he continued on with the nonsense by doubling down on, “but nothing other than him just making sure he doesn’t put himself in a dangerous position with the amount of things he’s had lower-body wise the last several years.”

Cora would have benched Stanton on Sunday for that play. Cora would have benched many Yankees this season for some of the baseball buffoonery this team has exhibited. I think many other managers would have, too. But here again, this is another reason why Boone is such a terrible manager. He’s a glad hander, a soothe sayer, a participation trophy kind of guy who tries to spin everything to the positive even when it makes him look like clueless and weak.

And because of that approach, there’s no accountability for the Yankees. They make idiotic base running mistakes, brain fart fielding blunders, and that’s on top of the incredible ineptness of their offense, yet Boone sits in front of reporters twice a day - before and after the games - and just makes excuses.

No one’s feet are held to the fire on this team; no one gets called out publicly even though that’s exactly what the situation has called for on numerous occasions, Stanton being the most recent. Everyone just goes along making their millions, losing games and then having the delusional gall of following the manager’s lead and telling us that everything is OK, they’re gonna get it figured out. My favorite line is, “We know we have talent in this clubhouse.”

If it was 2017, yeah, there’s talent in that clubhouse. Now, it’s a bunch of old, broken down veterans who can’t hit and can’t run, augmented by a number of scrap heap pickups who have never been and never will be key components on an MLB roster, and a few younger players who clearly aren’t what the Yankees thought they would be when they drafted or acquired them.

There are no exciting players on this team right now, and there sure don’t seem to be any in the farm system, no one you can point to and say, “That guy is going to be a star.”

Don’t tell me it’s Anthony Volpe, or Oswald Peraza, or maybe No. 1 prospect, outfielder Jasson Dominquez who’s struggling to master Double-A pitching at Somerset, or No. 2 prospect, catcher Austin Wells, who is still kicking around in the minor leagues and is already 24 years old.

Where is the Yankees’ Ronald Acuna Jr., or Elly De La Cruz, or Juan Soto, or Julio Rodriquez, or Adley Rutschman, or Gunnar Henderson, or Luis Robert, or Wander Franco. I could list a hundred guys here and I still wouldn’t get to a current Yankee. It’s just sad, and it reminds me of the late 1980s when those teams began to get old and it led to some of the worst times in franchise history in 1990 and 1991.

Watching the 2023 Yankees, that’s the feeling I’m starting to get. Unless they make massive changes in the offseason, this is not going to be much better in 2024.