Don't expect Yankees to part ways with Aaron Boone, Brian Cashman
Yankees manager Aaron Boone looks on during batting practice before Game 3 of the ALDS against the Tampa Bay Rays at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday. Credit: Kathleen Malone-Van Dyke
A Yankees team that entered the playoffs with the highest of expectations saw its season end with a 4-3 loss to an AL East rival in the ALDS at Yankee Stadium.
Manager Aaron Boone, emotions still raw from making the rounds in a disconsolate clubhouse, met with the media shortly after midnight to sort through it all.
“We'll continue to work at getting to that point where we're as complete in every department as we can be, offensively, pitching, defense,” Boone said. “They just outplayed us a little bit.”
Later, he would say: “In the end, you don’t move on usually when you can’t get enough big hits in a series.”
One can be forgiven for thinking this came out of Boone’s mouth after the Yankees fell to Tampa Bay on Wednesday night in Game 3 of the ALDS and fell short of winning the World Series for the 17th straight season.
The above comments did indeed come out of Boone’s mouth . . . in early October 2018 after a loss to the Red Sox in Game 4 of the ALDS.
The remarks seem familiar because here is some of what Boone did say, nearly eight years later to the day, after Wednesday night’s 4-3 loss to the Rays:
“We gotta be more complete offensively, defensively, pitching . . . they were a little bit better than us . . . ultimately didn’t swing the bats well enough and put enough runs on the board to move on or to extend the series.”
If there has been a hallmark of Boone’s nine-year tenure, it has been taking clubs into the postseason seemingly with the pieces capable of an extended October run, only to come up short.
Often, as was the case this season — as well as in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2025 — woefully short, as those clubs failed to make even the ALCS (the 2023 Yankees missed the postseason entirely, Boone’s only playoff-less year).
This is not to focus solely on Boone, to whom the fan base has never truly warmed and whose unpopularity has steadily increased by the year.
Spoiler alert: There are no indications that owner Hal Steinbrenner has soured on Boone, who has one year remaining on his contract — or on Brian Cashman, the general manager since 1998, whose contract expires at the end of this month, for that matter.
Does Boone expect to be back? “Yeah, of course,” he said late Wednesday night.
Though that could be read as a manifestation of the arrogance and condescension that occasionally creep into Boone's news conferences, it should be read more as a reflection of working for Steinbrenner. The Yankees' owner is generally loath to get rid of people with time and money left on their contracts, whether it be players, coaches or executives.
That isn’t to say that if Boone’s contract was up at season’s end, Steinbrenner, consistently among Boone’s staunchest supporters over the years, would have any interest in pulling the trigger on a new manager search.
It is not anticipated that Cashman will be going anywhere, either (though one does wonder if the 59-year-old executive, with the organization since his intern days of 1986 and in his current position for nearly 30 years, might at some point tire of the constant slings and arrows that come with the job and call it a day on his own).
No, the kind of changes in team hierarchy that some fans are clamoring for, and were clamoring for well before this most recent October flameout, remain highly unlikely.
Steinbrenner oversees an immensely successful baseball enterprise — success defined as annual postseason appearances, consistently high ratings on the YES Network, and fans — from the late March/early April home opener through the end of September — streaming through the gates at Yankee Stadium, wallets wide open for business, to cheer on what is always one of the highest-paid teams in the game.
Winning the World Series is the goal, of course, and Steinbrenner, unfairly criticized for not being his bombastic father, George, very much wants to add trophy No. 28 to the franchise shelf. Like the vast majority of his brethren now in MLB ownership, however, Steinbrenner is most concerned with “process.”
As long as “the process” — always treated with the utmost secrecy, lest it be subject to scrutiny of any kind — is deemed good and sound and profitable, the results, when measured in the win-loss column, become almost secondary.
That trickles from ownership on down and leads to Boone, in 2018 and then again after Wednesday night’s game, saying things like the team that vanquished his was just “a little bit better.”
The Yankees, ever sure of their “process,” again were simply victimized by inconvenient injuries, a bad bounce, unable to get that elusive “big” hit, etc.
So no need for true organizational self-introspection. No introspection that goes beyond throwing a member or two of Boone’s coaching staff to the wolves, or concluding that an additional “war room” or two is needed behind the scenes for better implementation of said “process.”
Better that than acknowledging that the 2018 Red Sox were more than “a little bit better” than that year’s Yankees.
Just as the 2026 Rays were significantly better than the 2026 Yankees — both in the regular season and the postseason.
And on it goes.
Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.
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