A baseball manager is not a football coach. He can’t treat an MLB Sunday loss in April like an NFL Sunday defeat in September, not when he has to lead his team on a grueling 162-game journey that isn’t best served by dramatic changes. humor that define pro football.
The adjustments are not so extreme and the reprimands are not so explosive. But right now, with the Tampa Bay series leaving their Yankees between 5 and 10, Aaron Boone is starting to look like one of those friendly NFL coaches whose teams rarely seem willing to play.
Why did the image of Pat Shurmur cross my mind?
We quickly move on to the waiver clauses needed for your prototypical early-season negative baseball column: Boone’s 2019 Yankees started 6-9 and finished with 103 wins. The coach gathered back seasons of more than 100 wins. Boone has not only shown that he knows what he’s doing and that he can handle the roughest edges of New York with relative ease, but he’s also shown that his form of leadership gives way to the human touch that Brian Cashman wanted in Joe’s relief. Girardi. Exposition A: Boone’s support for Aaron Hicks’ decision to play a game after another police officer shot an unarmed black man in Minnesota.
Oh yeah, and the former third baseman was tough enough to hit one of the biggest homers in Yankee Stadium history.
But the only thing that matters today is that there are another 29 teams in the major baseball leagues and that the Yankees have a record worse than 28. Despite a payroll of about $ 134 million bigger than Tampa Bay, the Yankees have allowed the rays to establish their permanent residence in their large markets. The Rays have taken six straight series from the Yanks and won 15 of their last 18 regular-season games and eight of their last nine in the Bronx. If they are seen again in the postseason, a year after the Yanks were bounced off the ALDS, the Rays will feel almost invincible entering this series.
Kevin Cash will surely feel that he owns the not-so-intangible edge of the excavation.
Boone could not even be rescued by his $ 324 million ace in the hole, Gerrit Cole, whose ten bouts left 39 innings 6 ¹ / ₃ per year, more than any Yankee ever after four booted. Cole was Cole, and yet he wasn’t good enough to keep his team from losing the fifth straight.
Boone even received prior assistance from Jay Bruce, who suddenly announced his retirement and got everyone in the building (the players, the coach and the media) to talk about another nice guy. with a history of meritorious service to the game. In other words, talk about something other than God’s abandoned state of Bruce’s last team.
That didn’t help either. The Yankees entered this game 23rd in the highest base percentage, 24th in runs, 25th in total bases and 28th in OPS, and responded with a total of two runs in three hits in the 4-2 defeat. “When we manage to throw a hammer,” Boone said, “you have to take advantage of it. … And we’re not doing enough right now.”
Worse, the Yankees ’amateur play on the field did nothing to support the idea that Boone’s team was mentally prepared to compete at the highest level. Hicks, the expert golfer, committed a double bogey in one play and a bogey in another, costing his starting pitcher, while Clint Frazier once inexplicably threw the ball to Cole instead of second base. . That’s why most of the 10,606 bleachers booed loudly when the final outing ended. Not only were they unhappy with the loss, but with the way the local team behaved during the loss.
“We’re getting punched in the mouth now,” Boone said. He has a day off Monday to figure out how to convince his players to start punching him.
Boone said he would consider “shaking some things.” The most obvious move is to get Hicks out of the three holes, regardless of what the analytics say about his upkeep. His 0 for 4 reduced his batting average to .160 and his OBP to .236, and the numbers, along with his defensive breakdowns, have earned degradation.
But if Boone decides to keep his lineup intact and simply reproduce his team’s inspiring words from Bruce about what it meant to wear the stripes (however brief), he should go on videotape.
Either way, Boone has to understand that this start-up horror film isn’t just about the stumbling and bustling stars of Yanks.
This is very important for the paid man to make sure that these stars meet his billing.