The Sense Behind Ripping the Manager
The whole division-series round went just two games more than the minimum. The last team eliminated, of course, was the Yankees, who lost Game 4 to the Red Sox on Tuesday. There’s a whole host of reasons why the Yankees lost the game, and why the Yankees lost the series. But I’m going to remember one or two moments. There was the Eduardo Nunez throw to an outstretched Steve Pearce to record the very final out. I wasn’t at any point convinced Nunez had it in him. And there was also what happened mere minutes before. Craig Kimbrel faced Gary Sanchez with one out and the bases loaded in a two-run game. The count ran full. The call was for a high fastball.
The pitch selection wasn’t surprising. Kimbrel throws a bunch of high fastballs. Sanchez had already swung through two high fastballs. When Kimbrel works in two-strike counts, he throws either a fastball high or a breaking ball low. That’s what Kimbrel always tries to do. Against Sanchez, he didn’t execute. Against Sanchez, he threw one of the worst Kimbrel fastballs imaginable.
Granted, even a bad Kimbrel fastball still gets up there really fast. But Sanchez was ready. A two-strike count is a swinging count. Sanchez made contact and hit the ball in the air. It came off his bat at 107 miles per hour.
The ball settled into an outfielder’s glove. The glove was somewhere over the middle of the track.
Gary Sanchez came that close to an all-time rivalry moment. He came that close to the best moment of this year’s young playoffs. The ball looked almost like a pop-up off the bat, but what happened is a testament to Sanchez’s strength. He very nearly popped a walk-off grand slam.
The launch angle was tracked at 46 degrees. The ball came a few feet short of a homer. At, say, 43 degrees, we’re all having a very different conversation today. The Yankees are alive, and people wonder whether the Red Sox can trust their one shutdown reliever. People wonder what Chris Sale can give in Game 5, after pitching in relief in Game 4. Such a difference in launch angle is just about negligible. Sanchez is responsible for the contact he makes, but Kimbrel is also responsible for the pitches he throws. The Red Sox can consider themselves lucky.
That’s a baseball event. That’s an on-field play, and games turn on just-barely plays all the time. Plays like that stick in my memory, so I won’t soon forget Gary Sanchez almost going deep. But for such a big crowd, there’s another conversation taking place, another story that’s already blown up. As the Yankees pack up and retreat to their homes for the long baseball winter, fans and writers alike are confused by Aaron Boone. In the last two games in particular, Boone made a smattering of curious decisions, and curious decisions don’t go un-critiqued when they happen on the losing side. Especially in New York.
Jay Jaffe wrote here about what happened in Game 3. He also wrote here about what happened in Game 4. The problems were strikingly similar: In both games, Boone seemed to wait too long to go to his deep and dominant bullpen. To make matters worse, in Game 3, the first guy out of the pen was Lance Lynn for some reason. The Yankees roster was built a certain way. The bullpen looked to be a huge October advantage. It wasn’t used accordingly, and, here we are, and the Yankees are done playing. They didn’t hit enough, but who’s to say what happens under different circumstances?
I’ve long been someone who didn’t think about managers too much. Part of that is because I’ve removed myself from team fandom. Part of that is because so much of what managers do is hidden from us. And part of that is because strategic decisions tend to barely move the needle. Fans frequently get on a guy for how he handles a bullpen, and fans frequently get on a guy for when he calls for a bunt, or for how he builds a lineup, but it all makes such a small difference in the odds. Short of conceding a random forfeit, a manager can’t blow a game. Realistically, a manager can’t move the win expectancy more than a small handful of percentage points. Everything is ultimately up to the players. It’s the players who have to execute. It’s the players who determine the outcomes. Every single player in the majors is good. The per-inning difference between one reliever and a slightly worse one is remarkably small.
I’ve long tried to keep the focus on the players. I’ve long tried to steer clear of manager-blaming hyperbole. At the end of the day, I’m most interested in the on-field baseball. I think managers catch too much shit. But I’m starting to come around a little bit. I can see the sense in why managers so often get ripped. I apologize if this is nothing new to you, because this is hardly an earth-shattering perspective. It all comes down to the concept of the unforced error.
It’s true that, by and large, managers can’t affect the game all that much. Not if we’re being realistic. There’s no would-be managerial candidate out there who would constantly bunt with Aaron Judge, or bring in a backup shortstop to be the closer. Managers all make pretty similar strategic decisions. There’s not that much of an opportunity to make a difference.
But the talent on the field — it’s usually close. Especially in the playoffs, when only strong teams remain. And once a game is underway, there’s not much anyone can do about how the players execute. A swing might be timed well, or timed poorly. A pitcher might hit a spot, or miss it. Good plays and bad plays happen. The differences between them are razor-thin. So much can ultimately be chalked up to luck. There was an element of luck in Kimbrel so badly missing with his full-count fastball. There was an element of luck in Sanchez getting just underneath it. Execution is the most important part of the game, of course, and better players execute more often than inferior players, but when a game is going, it’s like it has a mind of its own. The execution is out of the manager’s hands.
What the manager is there to do is put his players in position to have the most success. A game might effectively be decided by a flip of a coin. When a manager makes a bad or questionable decision, that can’t be written off like on-field execution. It’s not about reflexes or muscle memory. It’s not about catching a spike in the dirt. Strategy is consciously decided. As far as pitching changes are concerned, those things are often mapped out hours ahead of time. In the case of this ALDS, Aaron Boone didn’t let a breaking ball get away from him. Nothing slipped. Boone has known for months he has a great bullpen. He let Luis Severino go too long, with Lance Lynn puzzlingly behind him. Then he let CC Sabathia go too long. Boone could’ve and should’ve had a plan for this in advance. He committed entirely unforced errors, hurting the Yankees without having to. No, he didn’t kill the Yankees’ chances by himself. That’s not the point. You expect that a roster will be utilized properly. The Yankees’ players weren’t put in the best positions to have success.
It all could’ve been so easily avoided. And maybe the Yankees lose in four games anyhow. Again, managers don’t swing the odds that much. But when they swing the odds against their own teams, they have to be held accountable for that. The Yankees’ players weren’t given the best chance to win. It’s fundamentally a game of on-field execution, but sometimes a good player is just outplayed by his opponent. Players have good and bad days. Managerial strategy can largely be planned in advance. So there’s no good reason for leaning too long on CC Sabathia. That didn’t have to happen, and Boone deserved to be questioned about it.
It doesn’t have to mean Aaron Boone is, overall, a bad manager. It doesn’t have to mean that at all. The Yankees this year were wildly successful, and this was only Boone’s first season. Maybe, over the course of seven-plus months, he did a lot of work in the background to help keep everybody together. But the job in the playoffs is to press the right buttons. There is no self-destruct button — there are only buttons that move the odds a percentage point or two. Yet if that’s all the difference that can be made, managers should be measured against it. Aaron Boone didn’t do his team many favors. His errors were entirely of his own doing. The luck is all out on the field.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
#BringBackGirardi
Not looking so bad any more, is he?
Never looked bad to me. I thought it was the wrong move then and I haven’t seen anything from Boone to change my mind.
I have to admit that when I saw Sale coming in in the 8th inning, I thought we might be seeing a mistake which would dwarf anything Boone had done. Kimbrel gave up a homer in his last outing and had a catastrophic performance in his next-to-last appearance of the season against the mighty Orioles (0.1 innings, 3 walks, 4 runs), and it was by no means clear to me that Sale wouldn’t be needed for game 5. For an instant after Sanchez hit the ball, I thought it was way out of the park (looking at the replay I think I had that reaction because Kimbrel doesn’t even look at the ball to see what happened). Cora was indeed very lucky he didn’t have to face a game 5 where he’d have to deal with the mess he’d made in game 4.
I thought Cora should have stayed with Sale for the ninth. Sure, it was a gamble, but watching him pitch the 8th, i would have bet an awful lot that he would have been far more effective in the ninth than Kimbrel was. Of course the assumption was that Kimbrel wasn’t going to blow a three run lead, but as long as Sale was getting outs, why not keep him in? Suppose the game had gone into extra innings? Do you pitch Kimbrel in the tenth with any confidence, and if not, who do you have left at that point?
But if i were going to criticize anyone on the Yankees, it would be Stanton. Kimbrel faced seven batters. He walked two, hit one, gave up a single to one, a warning track FB to another, a near infield hit to another. Stanton was the lone K, on pitches far out of the zone. Normally I don’t criticize players for one PA, no matter how high the leverage, but the way Kimbrel was struggling to get the ball over the plate, a K in that situation seemed like a really poor AB. He bailed out Kimbrel. Had he walked, which he probably could have given the pitches Kimbrel was throwing, the Yankees most likely would have won. The only positive thing he accomplished with the K was avoiding a DP, which would have been huge in that situation.
I thought of that too. I thought it was a mistake to bring in Sale in the 8th, but as long as you were going to do that and he did okay, you may as well leave him in for the 9th too. It came down to having very little faith in Kimbrel. Judge had ripped him in game 1 and he had looked so awful just two appearances before that. And I guess the truth is that in a Red Sox-Yankees series, there’s always the feeling that something bizarre is likely to happen. Which it almost did.
Sale was coming off of a 3 day rest and they want him fresh starting game 1 on another 3 day rest.
If you are not going to use your best reliever at 9th inning on a 3 run lead because of extra innings, then I really don’t know what to tell you.
If Sale is coming out of the bullpen then Sale is your best reliever.
I think the issue is that some people see the use of Sale as all or none. If you bring him in for the eighth, let alone the eighth and ninth, he can’t start a game 5. I don’t see that at all. Following his one inning stint, he could have started a game 5, if it had proved to be necessary. What if he had also pitched the ninth? If he had pitched as well as pitched the eighth, there would have been no game 5. It seems to me that the odds of his holding a three run lead for one inning are better than the (increase in) odds of the RS winning game 5 with Sale over the alternative. But that isn’t even the option. Even if he had pitched the ninth, and the RS had lost—which means Sale wouldn’t have pitched the entire inning, probably would have been yanked as soon as he allowed a baserunner—he still could have started a Game 5. He just wouldn’t have gone as deep. How much does it hurt the RS chances of winning Game 5 if Sale only goes 4 or 5 innings instead of 6 or 7? Weigh that vs. the chances he can pitch one more inning without giving up three runs.
I’m inclined to agree about Sale. I think you run the risk of burning him for Game five, but the Sox identity under Cora has been aggressiveness.
Yeah, seeing Sale come in in the 8th worried me, a lot, and if Kimbrel had blown it, then we’d be seeing a LOT of criticism of Cora today, I’d probably be adding to it, because I’d be upset by the Red Sox losing.
But, this is something that makes me dubious about criticism of Boon, because I don’t really believe that both managers who were picked for these jobs and managed 100+ wins are idiots.
How much are we judging by results here? Would anyone be criticizing Boon if CC had pitched out of it in the 3rd? How would we feel if he’d gone to his bullpen in the 3rd and ended up with the overtaxed bullpen blowing it? The Yankees have a very good bullpen, but that’s basically a handful one-inning guys, if he needs someone to go two innings and they blow it, would we be complaining that he should have let CC go longer?
Leaving CC in certainly didn’t work. But, we don’t know that anything would have worked and I’m not convinced that the criticism isn’t based on bad results rather than on a bad process.
The Yankees are (were) not a bullpen of one-inning guys. Chapman is fairly close to that description, but Betances, Robertson, Britton, Green (who Boone foolish overused in a blowout in Game 3), and Holder are all capable of going multiple innings effectively. Of course, they cannot go multiple innings every day so there is still the concern of burning out the bullpen, but if you don’t win Game 4 that’s no longer a concern. You use your bullets when you can. Maybe Happ will get it together the second time around.
What probably should have happened in Game 3 was Green comes in first. He’s strikes out a lot of batters and would have been ideal to try to hold the Red Sox at 3-0. It’s a big ask, but it is doable. If he holds, then you still have a game to try to win. If things go badly, then Lynn comes in with instructions to pitch as long as he can, writing the game off to save the bullpen for Game 4. Boone this exactly opposite for reasons I cannot fathom.
The basic problem here is the Yankees got together a ridiculously good bullpen specifically for these sort of situations – we can’t let them score another run – and when that desperate situation – the metaphorical do-or-die game – manifested Boone seemed very reluctant to use it. There’s no problem with starting CC and see what he had, but as soon as it seemed iffy – which was almost immediately – the exit plan should already have been in motion.
Betances had 66 appearances, for 66.2 innings this year. Robertson had 69 appearances, for 69.2 innings this year. Britton had 41 appearances for 40.2 innings this year.
These are not multi-inning guys.
The Yankees big four are all one inning guys. Between them they’ve gone two innings a combined four times in the last year, and Betances was three of those and gave up runs all three times.
Robertson pitched more than 1 inning 9 times. Betances pitched more than 1 inning 4 times and has a history as a multi-inning pitcher. Britton, coming back from injury and missing most of the season, pitched more than 1 inning 3 times. Granted this was not something that they did regularly in the regular season, but when you have a ridiculous bullpen like the Yankees you don’t need to do that in the regular season. They had Green and Holder to do that 20 and 15 times respectively, both of which Boone burned in meaningless innings in Game 3, apparently so he could have Lance Lynn available for Game 4 or something. If you toss Green into the mix, you can get to 7-8 innings if everything goes well. That’s pretty much what happened in the Wild Card Game in 2017. If everything does not go well, then you are probably going to lose anyway.
In any case, I do not consider Robertson or Betances to be 3 out pitchers. They have shown repeatedly that they can be multi-inning guys, as necessary. Britton is normally a one inning guy, but he is certainly capable of giving more if necessary.
That said, I agree that I would not want to have a situation where the top four guys need to give me 7 innings, but when it became obvious that CC was not on his game – which was obvious by the second inning – it was the better choice. They ended up giving the Yankees 6 innings of 1 run.
I thought the same thing. Cora got lucky.
Here’s the thing about bullpen usage: yes, fans always complain about it, but on the other hand, sometimes they’re right. It’s perfectly fair to concede that managers have a lot of other jobs besides deciding what reliever to bring in when, but all the same, it’s also clear that many fans DO understand leverage better than the managers whose job it is to make that decision. Like many older “baseball men” Boone consistently treated situations where he held the lead as higher-leverage than they really were and situations where his team trailed as lower-leverage than they really were, and this clearly hurt his team’s chances of winning baseball games.
Really really excellent summary of Boone’s thinking (or more accurately non-thinking). I think it ultimately stems from reliance on the traditional reliever statistics of save, blown save, and hold, which can only apply to a reliever who comes in when his team is head, so that if the measure of the effectiveness of a bullpen is how many saves and holds it bas, and how few blown saves it has, it follows that the best pitchers should be reserved for situations then the team is ahead. This doesn’t account for the success of teams like, for example, this year’s A’s, who led the majors with a WPA of 12.50 (and so were in practice the most effective bullpen though not necessarily the best one) but were only 10th in saves, 15th in holds, and 8th in fewest blown saves–but had a WL record of 45-17, the highest winning percentage in the majors.
Did this – “consistently treated situations where he held the lead as higher-leverage than they really were and situations where his team trailed as lower-leverage than they really were” – in fact happen during this series?
The much maligned 4th inning of Game 3 when the Red Sox pushed their lead from 3-0 to 10-0, for example, started with a game leverage index of 0.52 and peaked at an LI of 0.97 for two consecutive hitters. I’d argue there that in that case the real issue is that quite a lot of fans and sportswriters overestimate the importance (i.e., leverage) of a team pushing a big lead to a really, really big lead.
The Yankees were already behind by three runs at the beginning of the inning and so were going to be looking at LIs which were low in an absolute sense until they could come back. In such a situation, the logical approach is to use your best relievers when the LI is RELATIVELY high. Three runs down, an LI of .97 is relatively high, so that isn’t a time you want to use in ineffective Severino or Lance Lynn if you have a number of other better pitchers available. But as per Hot foot’s explanation, Boone didn’t see things that way because the Yankees were behind, so that he perceived the LI as being lower than it was, which is why leaving Severino in and then replacing him with Lynn seemed to be an appropriate choice for him.
I mean LI of .97 is still .97.
Saying it is relatively high considering it is three runs down defeats the whole purpose of having LI.
If this was game 5, then yeah, they should totally throw everything in there, but as great as the Yankees relievers are, they can’t throw 6 innings every game in the postseason.
In the 3rd game of a 5 game playoff series, it doesn’t defeat the whole purpose. There’s no point in saving your best relievers for a higher leverage situation which may well never come.
A point is, though, that using any of those “number of other better pitchers available” in Game 3 does have an opportunity cost to it. It means that one or more of those high leverage arms either aren’t available for Game 4, or they’re available for less work in Game 4.
Lance Lynn’s pLI in that game is higher than any of Aroldis Chapman’s appearances in the Yankees’ entire postseason. It’s actually in the neighborhood of Chapman’s total LI across ALL his postseason appearances. Does it really seem arguable to you that this was a rational way to allocate those innings?
Another excellent point.
Boone’s hook was slower than the Clayton Kershaw eephus.
In 5 post-season games he got 17 innings from his starters. He averaged less than 4 innings a start. I’d really hate to see a manager with a fast hook.
He averaged over 16 outs/game from his starters in the regular season, and 10.2 outs/game from his starters in the postseason. He’s got a good bullpen, but he couldn’t use it entirely on every game.
Great analysis and opinion
Not a huge fan of Boone but he is getting a bad wrap IMO
Yankees scored 1 run in game 3 and the runner who scored reached on an IF hit that probably should have been out if the reviewers didnt take pity on Angel. Boone did not lose that game.
As for game 3 CC had pitched pretty well. Some bad luck on BABIP and hitters really made him work. He had allowed 1 run and had 2 outs facing the weak part of the Red Sox order. The next 2 delivered and it was 3-0 after 3. Surely you expect your offense at YS3 to overcome that with 21 outs to go against Porcello (hardly a Cy Young this year) and a weak Red Sox pen.
Games 3 and 4 were lost by the offense with the help of some bad luck (Vazquez YS3 special and Sanchez just missed GS)
Yankees won 101 games ( incl WC ) getting little from Gary Sanchez, nothing from Greg Bird, 2 rookies (3 at the end) , missing Judge for 7 weeks, sub par year by Gardner, a lesser Stanton, nothing much that was good from Sonny Gray, losing Montgomery to TJS, sub par Tanaka in first half, a sub par Severino in 2nd half , and 33 starts from his 6-12 starters who put up a 5 + ERA collectively and needing a couple of patch jobs in Happ,needing McClutchen and Voit
Lost to a 108 W team that spent 40 million more on payroll. I would say Boone had a good rookie year.
Good analysis in both cases. The Yankees had a successful season even though none of their players were exceptional. Yes, they got a lot out of Torres and Andujar but nobody else exceeded expectations with any consistency and, as you correctly say, many came up short to various degrees. In Game 4 there was little expectation that CC needed to come out before the Kinsler double. Boone could have gotten him before Nunez put another nail in the coffin but it wasn’t an egregious mistake.
I think that they did will despite Boone, not because of him. I don’t know what happens behind the scenes, but I questioned many of Boone’s visible decisions over the course of the year. I’d add the way the team was managed to that long list that you made of things this team has overcome. Their ceiling going forward is absolutely scary.
It seems wrong to devalue the manager’s contribution. Some annually outperform their Pythagorean expectations (like Girardi), some misuse the bullpen (like Torre), some are stuck in the past and hurt their team in almost every game (Dusty Baker anyone?). You make a point of saying how games typically turn on very small differences, so wouldn’t that be consistent with scrutinizing managerial decisions?
If I were part of Yankee ownership/management I would be angry the team’s strength was so misused. Part of the rationale for hiring Boone was that he wouldn’t need the same learning curve because he had been a TV analyst and a player. Clearly that is not correct.
Going to Lynn with the bases loaded is indefensible. This is almost worse than Showalter not using Britton in the last playoff game Baltimore is likely to see in a long time.
“Going to Lynn with the bases loaded is indefensible. This is almost worse than Showalter not using Britton in the last playoff game Baltimore is likely to see in a long time.”
I vehemently disagree, because those two situations aren’t even close. Britton wasn’t ever used in a winner take all game where multiple innings started with the Blue Jays batting with leverage index over 2: namely, each of the 9th, 10th, and 11th innings of a tie game.
Lynn was brought into what was an almost exactly average leverage game situation (0.97) because the Yankees were already trailing by 3 runs. Winning that game was important for the Yankees – as is every game in a 5 game series – but not necessary to win the series. I can buy the argument that Green is a better option in that situation, but saving Green for Game 4 is a lot closer argument than you state in your comment.
What was indefensible by Boone in Game 3 was using Green after the game was already out of hand at 7-0, because that served essentially no useful purpose.
I agree with your last paragraph, but using a starter who has almost no relief experience, in a playoff game against the Red Sox at Yankee stadium, with the bases loaded, and the best bullpen in the game at your disposal seems less than an ideal choice. That situation screamed for Robertson or Britton, or almost anyone else. Instead he picked… Lynn? Come on.
Short series you try to win every game, and a 3-0 lead is not out of reach. The key is keeping it within reach. You pick any of your star relievers, hope he gets out of the inning down 4-0 and go to Lynn to start the next inning without the bases juiced. Using Green or whomever and then not having them available for game 4 simply does not matter with a bullpen that deep. It was a blunder.
Right, I keep hearing people bring up the LI was pretty average in that 4th inning, but at the same time, f-ing that inning up was going to take your chance of victory from something sort of reasonable ~17% at the start of the inning, to remote (at 0-7 it was 3%).
The issue here is if you don’t use someone good now to escape it, there is a very good chance you’re not going to use them later either. I mean, granted you’re down 0-3, but your opponent has the bases loaded with no one out. What is it going to take to get one of your top 4 relievers in the game?
I might actually argue the lack of a move in game 4 was worse simply for the fact that CC is not a particularly good pitcher. Yes, we can’t assume we’ll get 8 innings out of 4 relievers, but virtually everyone available to the Yankees is better than CC on a per inning bases. Plus, he’d already pitched through the order 1 time, and then the 2 and 3 hitters both got on to start the 3rd. You are tied, have one of your worst per inning pitchers on the mound in an elimination game, and it was a two on no out situation still facing some good hitters. It was time to get him out of there.
Additionally, if your argument in Game 3 is you need to save your bullpen for Game 4, then come Game 4 you better throw everything at the wall because it’s do or die and there is no tomorrow if you lose.
What you say makes sense, and I overreacted to the comparison to the Britton situation. Sorry.
Something can, of course, be less egregiously bad than Showalter’s handling of Britton in that game and still be a poor decision. Green over Lynn with the bases loaded – or really probably 1 or 2 batters before the situation reached that point – would have been a better decision.
Dave, no apology was necessary 🙂 we’re all just a bunch of baseball fans exchanging opinions, but thanks.
I think the problem is that in a average leverage situation, the Yankees bullpen is built so that you can use Chad Green and still have plenty left over for Games 4 and 5 between Betances, Britton, Robertson, and Chapman if it doesn’t work out. The point of having a deep bullpen is that you have a bullpen ace available for a spot like that to take a gamble on coming back. Then if by inning 5 you haven’t hit your way back into the game, bring on the Lynn.
We always love having someone to pin as the scapegoat for errors
Meanwhile, over in the National League, both the Dodgers and the Brewers seem to both understand how to utilize their pitching staffs effectively.
Cora can never be second guessed for bringing in Kimbrel. He is THE CLOSER and that is never in question. The 9th inning has belonged to him, and rightfully so, since he came to Boston. With that out of the way let me say that as one of the Red Sox fans on this blog, that 9th inning put this long time fan, who remembers Bucky Dent and Aaron Boone and even remembers 1949, well maybe a wee bit, through the ringer like few things ever have.
One tiny point of contention with Jeff saying that Kimbrel is the Red Sox only shut down reliever. I think more and more people are going to start noticing just how good Ryan Brasier has been and his background story is remarkable. Last season he was pitching in the minor leagues, in Japan!
l think that the general sabermetric consensus–that managers don’t matter all that much–has gone a bit too far. Managers are responsible for keeping the entire team’s emotional state even while also making the best strategic decisions and those two things are often in conflict.
This is why managers like Francona are so good. He makes a lot of great strategic decisions but somehow manages to get his players to buy in. Whatever Hinch is doing with getting his players to buy into the data, it must be similar, and probably Cora too given the Houston connection. And as far as I could tell, Nationals fans would like to have a word with you about Matt Williams about being the anti-Francona in every way.
Ned Yost batted Alcides Escobar leadoff for a while. Aaron Boone can’t manage the bullpen to save his life. Kirk Gibson ordered his pitcher to hit Ryan Braun, which turned a three run homer into a grand slam. Mike Matheny, in addition to potentially being the worst bullpen manager ever, kept running Matt Adams out in left field. Bryan Price was totally unbalanced and incapable of leading adults. I know that it’s not that hard to tell Aaron Judge to go up and swing, but there is a lot more to it than that.
Given his postseason career as a player, Boone should know the dangers of leaving a pitcher out there too long.
Let’s not forget what’s important truly here: the better team (manager and all) won, there’s more baseball to come, and, most of all, I don’t have to see Neil Walker on a baseball field for at least six months.
Good article. I wonder if Boone will be fired and a more experienced manager is brought in. I suspect they regret dumping Girardi over not trusting Sanchez one time.
He’s not being fired.
I’m not a Yankees fan, but the Aaron Boone rip-a-thon has been a little bit crazy the last week. I still can’t believe how much he was criticized after a game his team lost by 15 runs. Sometimes, you just get beaten.
But regarding game 4, perhaps he could have managed it better, but most criticism I’ve seen has centered around him not using his big 4 (Robertson, Britton, Betances, and Chapman) for EIGHT innings in game 4. This has been bandied about as if it was a plan that was obvious. What strikes me is that these guys have pitched 2 innings in a game a COMBINED 4 times all season. And Betances, who did it three times, gave up runs every time. That’s not predictive of failure, but it certainly isn’t predictive of success.
The fact is, asking 4 relievers to do something in one game that each has done exceedingly rarely in their career is just as much of a risk as asking Sabathia to get you 7-9 outs. The Yankees were in an unenviable position, with a thin bullpen, and the worst starter either team was going to use in the series on the mound.
I know we’re past the days of starters needing to go “deep” into games all the time, but if a manager needs to ask 4 relief pitchers to record 24 outs in a game, the manager is very likely in trouble. The Yankees were at a disadvantage last night and lost. Hard to rip the manager that much afterwards.
Also, it wasn’t Aaron Boone that inexplicably left Craig Kimbrel in for FAR too long, and almost gave away the game on a pitch that should have been 10 rows deep. Let’s not be too results oriented in our analysis. Lastly, the ultimate difference in the game, the 4th run the Red Sox needed to beat the Yankees, was yielded by Zach Britton, one of the pitchers that clearly was going to keep the Red Sox down. Even great relievers give up runs.
I suspect that the rip-a-thon here is not entirely the result of Boone’s decisions in the postseason. Apparently a lot of people who have closely followed the Yankees all year have thought he’s been lousy all year, and there’s also the matter of Girardi’s firing one year ago, which was not at all universally accepted among Yankees’ fans at the time and which has looked even worse as Boone hasn’t panned out this year.
The Yankees were great this year despite Boone, not because of him. Now, I don’t see all the behind the scenes stuff that a manager does, but I’ve been questioning his visible decisions all year. He has repeatedly made the “traditional” call over and over throughout the year even when statistics showed it to be the wrong call.
“What I’m tryin’ to say is don’t rip them fuckin’ guys out there. Rip me. If you wanna rip somebody, rip my fuckin’ ass. But don’t rip them fuckin’ guys ’cause they’re givin’ everything they can give.”
Lee Elia
Not defending Boone per se, but so much of this analysis is ex post. I am not sure how many people knew that CC should have been pulled after throwing 2 scoreless innings on something like 30 pitches. I am not going to criticize a manager for trying to get 3 innings out of his starting pitcher. Put another way, had CC went through the 3rd as easily as he did the first 2, I doubt there would be any analyst making arguments that he should have been pulled after 2. Overall, I agree that one of the more glaring mistakes managers make is leaving a starter in too long, but I am not sure game 4 is a strong example (game 3 sure seemed like one).
I would go further–for me the only real wtf?? move of boone’s in games 3 and 4 was bringing in lynn as opposed to a better reliever when he did in game 3. The other decisions he made which have been discussed here, including leaving severino in as long as he did, were questionable but not ridiculous when considered on their own (as i mentioned before, if the yankees had handled one more groumder well and turned a double play on anothet, they would only have been losing 1-0 when severino got pulled). Obviously people who have followed the yankees more closely than i have see this as part of a larger and very serious problem with boone, but that’s another matter.
CC really was not pitching well from the beginning. The best you can say from the first two innings was he was escaping. If this is Game 3, I can certainly see waiting to see if CC can get it together or not, but in an elimination game with perhaps the greatest bullpen ever assembled that is a most questionable strategy.
Next article on Francona?
I was (still am) going to give Boone the benefit of the doubt for the game 3, as it was not the do or die game. and Girardi and Roberts, IMHO, eventually exhausted the bullpen unnecessarily by using good relievers in games they were already behind last year.
However – there was no such excuse for game 4. It wasn’t like CC gave up all 3 runs in a homer. Whatever responsibility Boone had in not getting Severino ready for game 3 and game 4 is squarely on him. For all their faults, Girardi and Torre understood that you can’t worry about hurting someone’s feeling in a postseason game. It sure looks like Boone did that there.
We shouldn’t let Cashman and/or Hal Steinbrenner off the hook either. They didn’t address known problems – Lefty bat, situational hitting and starting pitching. They better spend that money to find Verlander, Cole and JD Martinez and start winning. Otherwise, I’ll officially start missing Hal’s father.
I have seen no mention of it but it sure looked to me like Judge might have caught the HR that was Boston’s 4th (and winning ) run if he had just jumped. He was right there and the ball barely cleared the fence.
In addition to the differences in building a roster for the regular season vs. the playoffs (i.e., “my s**t doesn’t work in the playoffs”), different manager styles are also needed. Boone may have been the right guy (compared to Girardi) for the regular season with his laid back attitude, but maybe he was the wrong guy for playoffs.
His least defensible move was bringing in Lynn in Game 3 into the worst possible situation (bases loaded, no outs, AL MVP coming to the plate) when he had no fewer than 5 better options (Green, Chapman, Betances, Britton, Robertson, not to mention Happ or Tanaka if you really want to roll the dice) unless he was basically just giving up on Game 3 (in which case you just leave Lynn out there to soak up outs). I think what really rubs me the wrong way is that he did not admit that was a mistake (except to blame “hindsight”) and instead of coming back with a better reason, just went home listening to “80s on 8” and coming back cracking jokes. Again, that might play in the regular season, but not in the playoffs. Contrast that with Girardi’s “I screwed up” response after the non-review last year.
Is Boone really off on his own to make bullpen decisions during the game? Is there not a meeting before each game where Cashman or front office reps can discuss when exactly to warm and sub relievers? Or a phone call to the dugout — “take CC out now!” — in the third inning of Game 4? Everyone seemed to know the Yankees were blowing it as it happened, except the entire Yankees Org.