Pitchers and catchers. In the dead of winter, seven months away from our next NFL Sunday, those are the three sweetest words in sports.
Pitchers and catchers report Wednesday to the New York Yankees’ facility in Tampa, where Aaron Boone will open his ninth spring training camp. Cats are supposed to have nine lives, not Yankees managers, and yet Boone remains in dogged pursuit of his first World Series ring.
He comes from a distinguished baseball family, one of four big leaguers from three Boone generations to make at least one All-Star team. But the Yankees manager is also a 52-year-old husband and father with a pacemaker who talks about his perspective, his family and his faith. A few seasons ago, while we were discussing his support system in a Fenway Park hallway, Boone choked up when he spoke of his love and appreciation for his wife.
“As big as this is, being manager of the New York Yankees, and as important as this franchise is to me,” Boone said that day, “there’s also a part of me that can separate enough and say, ‘This is my job. This is a game. This is baseball.’ So there are things that grant you perspective all the time, whether it’s something major that’s happened in the world, in our life. … I always look at this as I’m here temporarily.”
Boone will be at peace the day he’s no longer in pinstripes. In fact, he said he would’ve walked away from the Yankees after his fourth season, 2021 — and would’ve been totally fine with it — if he hadn’t landed a contract extension that demonstrated management’s belief in him.
Now the record shows Boone has led the Yankees to the World Series as a player (with that walk-off Game 7 homer against Boston in 2003) and as a manager (by winning seven of nine playoff games in 2024). He stands 200 games over .500 in his first eight regular seasons leading the club, and he is seventh on the franchise’s all-time victories list (697).
How many people can say they’ve accomplished things like that?
But — and you knew this But was coming — Boone is a good (and sometimes very good) manager at a time when good (and sometimes very good) is no longer cutting it.
The Yankees have long been defined by greatness, a standard Boone has failed to reach. General manager Brian Cashman, entering his 29th season on the job, has done some of his finest roster-building work of the post-dynasty years in handing Boone a club capable of winning its first title since 2009.
Running it back with a team that tied Toronto with an American League-best 94 victories yet lost to the Blue Jays in four Division Series games?
It makes sense when you add a returning Gerrit Cole and account for expected performance upgrades from last summer’s trade deadline acquisitions on the athleticism, defense and bullpen fronts.
“I’ve been openly willing to challenge anybody that we don’t have a championship-caliber roster and team,” Cashman said after re-signing Cody Bellinger.
The Yankees could enter the 2026 postseason tournament with a four-man rotation of Max Fried, Cole, Carlos Rodón and Cam Schlittler, backed up by the likes of Will Warren, Luis Gil and Ryan Weathers, and with an offense built around an all-time great slugger, Aaron Judge, who led the majors last year in homers (274) and runs (849).
“We think we’re really good,” Boone said.
Of course, he also said last fall that he was managing his best Yankees team to date, a team that didn’t even advance to the ALCS.
“It’s hard to win the World Series,” Boone said after his elimination. “I’ve been chasing it all my life.”
With dignity and grace, too. Boone speaks for the record multiple times a day, eight months a year, and almost never commits an unforced error. Try it sometime. It ain’t easy.
The players swear by his calm, cool and consistent approach, and by his willingness to take one for the team. A year after Boone covered for a gassed Cole in Game 1 of the 2024 World Series loss to the Dodgers and absorbed a brutal pounding from the media, I asked him why he didn’t come clean about an ace who had told him he had no more to give.
“That’s my job,” Boone said. “My job is not to save face or make myself look good. That’s not who I am. … I don’t want to ever just go out and defend myself just to superficially satisfy the masses. That’s not leadership.”
That’s not the manager Judge has endorsed at every turn.
The captain will turn 34 in April. He has a good chance to surpass Mickey Mantle’s home-run total of 536, and no chance to catch Mantle’s World Series ring total of 7.
Judge just needs to win one before it’s too late. If Boone can’t help him get there after nine attempts, then someone else should get a chance to try.
Cashman would prefer to give his manager a full decade, just like he gave Joe Girardi a full decade. The difference? Girardi won a championship in Year 2, buying himself some time. Though Boone won 203 games in his first two seasons in the Bronx, he lost in the playoffs to the Red Sox and the Astros.
Boone’s postseason winning percentage (.481) is 103 points lower than his regular-season winning percentage. Joe Torre, four-time champ, had a postseason winning percentage with the Yankees (.618) that was 13 points higher than his regular-season winning percentage in those 12 years.
Once a win-or-else juggernaut, the Yanks have become a win-or-else-we’ll-get-’em-next-year bummer. They have claimed one World Series title in the last 25 years, and more than anyone, Hal Steinbrenner has to answer for that.
When his old man George was running the show, the Yankees represented the sport’s signature superpower, no questions asked. On Hal’s watch, the Dodgers have snatched that trophy and run away with it. It’s high time for Hal to catch up and make the Dodgers pay for the way they humiliated the family business during and after that 2024 smackdown.
To prevent a Dodgers three-peat, Cashman might have to make some midseason moves to improve the bullpen, and Boone might have to push some button, somewhere, to drive his team to another level. The manager’s part is a lot easier said than done.
Asked by ESPN New York Radio’s Michael Kay about his quest for a championship ring, Boone said, “That’s really the one and only huge thing that does gnaw at me. … Working like heck to fix that and to change that, but I understand that it’s attached to me.”
Yes, it’s attached to him for one more season. Aaron Boone is an easy guy to root for, and a good (and sometimes very good) manager who can win a lot of games for the next franchise that hires him.
This much is also true: Boone needs to be great in 2026 and end up on a float in a ticker-tape parade. If not, it will be time to hand over Judge and friends to someone else.