It’s not easy being New York Yankees manage Aaron Boone.
Every Yankees loss, the fans on X/Twitter find a reason to dump on the guy. He left the starting pitcher in for too long. The bullpen management was disgusting. What’s he thinking with that lineup?
Well, a new book from veteran baseball writer Scott Miller puts that straight to bed. The book, from Grand Central Publishing is Skipper: Why Baseball Managers Matter and Always Will, a fascinating look into the evolution of the job through baseball history. The first chapter, as it turns out, focuses almost entirely on Boone.
And, in a shocking twist, the Cox correlations are both often and accurate. Thus, when I had the privilege of speaking with Scott Miller about this book, essentially Moneyball but about managers (PS, the movie doesn’t portray Art Howe accurately), I asked how he came to that conclusion.
“You’ve seen the ejections,” he said with a laugh. “The way he’ll go after an umpire and defend his guys. You don’t see as much of that anymore. Go back to Earl Weaver and Sparky Anderson, you see it all the time. Lou Piniella had some great blowups on the field. But today with instant replay, a lot of managers are more chill. But Aaron will pick his moments.”
He’s not wrong. As of now, Boone ranks 4th among active managers and 38th overall with 41 career ejections since being hired in 2018. The only active managers ahead of him are Bruce Bochy (86), Bob Melvin (65), and Terry Francona (51). No one is remotely close to Cox’s MLB-leading 162 career ejections.
Except let’s put those numbers in context. Bochy, a future Hall of Famer, got his first managing job with the Padres back in 1995 and actively worked from then up through 2019 before un-retiring to join the Texas Rangers in 2023. Melvin has managed five teams since 2003. Francona, now managing the Reds, is on his fourth job and got his first managing gig all the way back in 1997.
Aaron Boone has been the Yankees’ manager for less than a decade and is catching up to these skippers fast.
Now, ejections alone aren’t why Aaron Boone and Bobby Cox are similar. They’re two different managers who managed in two different eras, with Boone being at the forefront of the “analytics” managers.
However, look at their respective track records. With the Yankees, Boone has a knack for winning the AL East/otherwise making the playoffs before falling short. Bobby Cox managed the Braves over two separate stints (1978-1981, 1990-2010) and, despite 14 first-place finishes over a 15-year stretch, only won five NL pennants.
What’s more, of his five trips to the World Series, Cox’s Braves were on the losing end four times.
The similarities don’t stop there. Shifting back to the ejections, look back at Boone’s track record. He isn’t one to get arbitrarily angry at anyone, let alone umpires. He picks and chooses when to get his money’s worth, and otherwise goes back to creating masterfully confusing lineups.
“Bobby Cox, Joe Torre, some of the gravitas they had, they didn’t need to rant and rave,” Miller added. “Bobby needed to deliver a message like that, and it wasn’t just a one off in the moment thing.”
Such is the nature of ejections in baseball, fans. A lot of times, the manager gets himself tossed just because; the team is either down bad or the umpire is that infuriating, and it just puts more of a black cloud over an already disappointing game.
But if done correctly, as greats like Billy Martin and Bobby Cox did long ago, and Aaron Boone now does today? A well-timed ejection from a manager can fire up a team, just knowing that their skipper has their back.
It just goes to show that regardless of one’s skill at any job, half of the work is simply showing up for the team.
