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Yankees Thoughts: Aaron Boone Blows Chance for Sweep

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The Yankees missed an opportunity to pick up a game on every team in the playoff picture, losing to the Twins 4-1. Here are 10 thoughts on the Yankees.

1. It’s no coincidence the Yankees’ starter pitched into the seventh inning and the offense scored six-plus runs in the first two games of the Twins series and the Yankees won both. Aaron Boone looks like a genius when he doesn’t have to think. Pitch well, hit well and play clean baseball and Boone doesn’t get to be a part of the equation. It’s the best kind of baseball there is.

That’s what I wrote after Tuesday’s blowout. Take Boone out of the game and the odds of the Yankees winning increase dramatically. Allow Boone to interject himself into the outcome with in-game decision making and you get the kind of result the Yankees suffered on Wednesday with a 4-1 loss. A complete missed opportunity to make up ground on everyone in the standings as the Blue Jays, Red Sox, Mariners and Guardians all lost.

2. Instead of pulling one game closer to the Blue Jays, Red Sox and Mariners and one game further away from the Guardians, the Yankees ran in place in what was a wasted game against an inferior opponent.

Prior to Wednesday’s game I wrote:

The Yankees will go for the sweep on Wednesday night, and in order to pull it off, they will need to beat the Twins’ best starter in Joe Ryan. The active Yankees have only faced him a couple of times in their careers and their numbers against him are weak. Cam Schlittler will need to match Ryan for as long as he can because after scoring 15 runs over the last two nights, Wednesday has a Yankees offensive no-show written all over it.

The Yankees had opportunities to get to and beat Ryan, Schlittler did his job matching Ryan for the five innings he was in the game and the offense no-showed, scoring just one run on five hits in the game.

The Yankees stranded Trent Grisham on second with no outs in the first when Aaron Judge couldn’t get him over for someone to get him in. (Judge was hitting .394/.490/.779 before Boone kept him out of the starting lineup for the only time all year on June 12 in Kansas City and he’s hitting .235/.373/.536 since.) Ben Rice led off the second with a single and was also stranded. Cody Bellinger took Ryan deep for a solo home run in the third, but Schlittler gave it right back in the fourth. The game remained tied at 1 until the sixth when Boone got his hands on it.

3. The Yankees couldn’t have asked for a better pitching situation heading into Wednesday’s series finale: They had won the first game of the series by four runs and the second game by eight runs to allow their bullpen and elite relievers to rest, and with a scheduled day off on Thursday they could unload their top arms on Wednesday and still have them all for Friday in St. Louis. So knowing all of that, why was Yerry De los Santos the first guy out of the bullpen in a 1-1 game on a night when all of the Yankees’ playoff competition had already lost?

“[Schlittler] set us up,” Boone said, “especially going into an off day with a rested-up pen and felt like we could get there.”

So Boone knew of the advantageous spot the Yankees were in after Monday and Tuesday and after Schlittler pitched five innings of one-run ball on Wednesday and he still made the choice to go to De los Santos.

4. De los Santos is a nice, back-end-of-the-bullpen arm, which is how he has been treated all year. In April, May and June he only pitched in blowout wins or losses. He was sent down in mid-June and when he returned in late July, he continued to be the last or one of the last options out of the bullpen. He was sent down again after all the moves were made at the trade deadline since there was no longer room for him with all of the new relief acquisitions. So De los Santos wasn’t good enough to be a Yankee on August 1, but now two weeks later, he’s good enough to pitch in the sixth inning of a 1-1 game with playoff position jockeying on the line. Not only that, but he was called on to face the 2-3-4 hitters in the Twins lineup.

5. Mark Leiter Jr. to Camilo Doval to Luke Weaver to David Bednar was how the plan should have unfolded. I would have even used Weaver in the sixth there with the scored tied and the 2-3-4 hitters due up. Not Boone. Boone went with De los Santos and it went about as well as expected. He faced three hitters, they all reached and they all scored and when the book was closed on him the Yankees trailed 4-1. Only after De los Santos didn’t retire any of three batters he faced and gave up a two-run double did Boone go to Leiter Jr. So Boone was willing to go to Leiter Jr. in the sixth inning, he just thought he would try to steal an inning with De los Santos before going to his best relievers. Not only did Boone turn to Leiter Jr. with the Yankees trailing by two rather than tied, but then in the eighth he went to Doval with the Yankees trailing by three. So he would rather have Leiter Jr. and Doval pitch with the Yankees trailing than in a tie game.

6. The Twins didn’t score for the rest of the game after getting to De los Santos because the Twins suck. If they were ever going to score it was going to be with their 2-3-4 hitters up. The Yankees didn’t score for the rest of the game either because that’s what they do against the league’s best pitchers like Ryan. And once Ryan was out of the game and the Twins turned to Kody Funderburk and his 5.73 ERA and Justin Topa, the Yankees had already given up as they had just one baserunner against those two in 2 1/3 innings of relief.

7. Boone had to manage one game in the series and he couldn’t even do that. It’s games like that for why he should have lost his job long ago. Not because he has never seen one of his players perform poorly in eight years, not because he exaggerates his evaluations and straight up lies about injuries. It’s because he has spent his entire life around baseball, and not just baseball but Major League Baseball, and still manages as if he were introduced to the game a week ago.

8. It’s hard enough for the Yankees to overcome their top-heavy offense, their shaky rotation, their inconsistent bullpen, their running the bases like drunks as John Sterling said during last year’s World Series and their defensive miscues, but to have to overcome their own manager in any close game too? It’s too much. It’s why no matter how well the team plays or how clean of a game they provide, it’s exceedingly hard for them to win big, close games. (Look no further than Games 1 and 5 of the World Series, the two biggest games of Boone’s managerial career.)

9. So instead of arriving in St. Louis feeling good after a series sweep and tied with the Red Sox in the loss column and two games behind the Mariners in the loss column and a game up on the Guardians in the loss column, the Yankees are in the same spot as they were before Wednesday’s game with one more game erased from the schedule: the third wild-card spot. And they are only in that spot because the Guardians have two games in hand. The Yankees and Guardians are tied in the loss column and if the Guardians win those two games in hand, the Guardians become the third wild-card team since they have a better record against their own division than the Yankees.

10. A missed opportunity in a season full of them. In an era full of them. The Yankees have lost that same game countless times under Boone in which he can’t properly utilize his bullpen because he’s always trying to steal an out or an inning to save an arm for a situation and a game that may never come. Keep managing for tomorrow and there won’t be a tomorrow after Game 162 for the Yankees this season.

Last modified: Aug 14, 2025