Aaron *bleeping* Boone?
Last night, word broke that the Yankees have chosen Aaron Boone as their next manager. My first reaction, like so many others (based on what I saw on Twitter) was that Brian, Hal and the gang had their holidays mixed up and thought yesterday was April 1. My reactions after seesawed between amazement and anger. If the most critical factor was that Brian Cashman can trust him because he came clean about tearing up his knee in a pickup basketball game 14 years ago, the team’s standards have dropped precipitously since George died.
Aaron Boone could turn out to be the next Casey Stengel. I truly hope he is. Like Boone, the Ol’ Perfessor was amiable, handled the press well and built a managing career from a bonehead move as a player.
Or, he could turn out to be the next Bucky Dent. Casey, of course, is in the Hall of Fame. Bucky, like Boone, was a middling player who is most remembered for one improbable home run. The Yankees gave him a chance to manage in 1989. It was a disaster, a debacle, an absolute horror show. And Dent had one thing Boone lacks: actual experience managing a professional baseball team.
Boone might also turn out to be the next Bill Dickey. Like Stengel, Dickey is in the hall of fame and has his number retired in Monument Park. Unlike Stengel, it was for his career as a player that he is enshrined. Dickey was the last player-manager the Yankees hired, and also the last manager the Yankees hired without any prior coaching experience. He took over a talented, young Yankee team (with future Hall of Fame players Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Joe Gordon and Yogi Berra) when Joe McCarthy decided he’d had enough of the front office’s meddling and quit 5 weeks into the 1946 campaign. Dickey only managed a third place finish, despite the talent he had on the team, and when owner Larry McPhail made it obvious Dickey wouldn’t be asked back in 1947, he quit with two weeks left in the season.
Hal Steinbrenner is trusting his general manager implicitly with this choice, and both he and Cashman are betting against all logic and history with Aaron Boone. The last rookie manager to win a World Series title was Bob Brenly in 2001, with Arizona. The Diamondbacks weren’t a young team, though. In all of baseball history, only 4 men have won a title in their first year managing: Brenly, Ralph Houk in 1961, Eddie Dyer in 1946 and Bucky Harris in 1924. By the way, Harris is the only man to ever win a World Series despite having never managed or coached a game in his life.
Make no mistake here: Cashman, who never met a statistic he couldn’t recite, knows everything I wrote above and probably a whole lot more about those failures, about how rookie managers tend to struggle even with experienced teams and coaching staffs. He isn’t betting so much that Aaron Boone is somehow magically imbued with enough baseball intelligence to overcome that history and lead this team to a championship.
No, Brian Cashman is betting that his own baseball intelligence and his faith in sabermetrics will win the Yankees their 28th World Championship. What Cashman needed was a mouthpiece, a stooge and (if everything falls apart) a potential fall guy. Boone checks off all those boxes beautifully. Anyone who has actually listened to Boone’s inanity during a broadcast will realize he’s a gleeful idiot. The writers know it; the fans know it. If the Yankees win, it will vindicate Cashman’s belief that systems win, not people. If systems are no better than the people running them… Well, Boone was hired to be a patsy.
Compounding the problem is that the Yankees are, by and large, a very young team. Their projected starting nine will average less than 3.5 years of major league playing experience. Communication with the media is undoubtedly an important skill in New York, and that’s the one area where Joe Girardi was severely deficient. But it isn’t the most crucial aspect of managing. The Yankees are gambling the development of their talented, young core on a guy who has never developed anything except the ability to eat hot dogs at the Little League World Series. But again, Boone isn’t being hired to manage this team. He’s being hired as little more than a pre- and post-game announcer. You can bet everything from line-up decisions to pitching changes will be phoned in from the front office on a daily basis.
Yes, Yankee fans. George Steinbrenner certainly engaged in some serious power tripping when he was alive. But not even George never went on a power trip like the one Brian Cashman is embarking on now.
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