Olney: How Aaron Boone copes with baseball’s most pressure-packed job

The visiting manager’s office in Dodger Stadium is about the size of a small laundry room, and with nine broadcasters stuffed into this space before Game 2 of the World Series, Aaron Boone had to step around toes as he walked in. “Hi, y’all,” the New York Yankees manager said pleasantly.

About 18 hours before, Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman had clubbed the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history, an early body blow for the Yankees in a best-of-seven series. Boone was asked how he was doing. “I feel all right,” he replied evenly.

Around the world, Yankees fans lambasted Boone’s bullpen choices, his baseball acumen and his stewardship of the team — as they have often in his seven-season tenure as manager.

After Game 1, Derek Jeter, Boone’s former teammate and now a Fox analyst, was among those to do the ripping, questioning Boone’s decision to take out Gerrit Cole after 88 pitches. Others criticized Boone’s choice of Nestor Cortes — who surrendered Freeman’s grand slam in his first appearance in 37 days — over reliever Tim Hill.

In his office before Game 2, Boone reviewed his choices, matter-of-factly walking through his reasoning — even volunteering his own doubt about a decision that hadn’t really been raised by fans or media. He wondered if he should’ve asked Luke Weaver, who had accumulated 19 pitches by the end of the ninth inning, to at least start the bottom of the 10th inning. “That’s the one…” before his voice trailed off.

With the Yankees now down 2-0 to the Dodgers in the World Series, it seems inevitable that when Boone is introduced at Yankee Stadium before Game 3 on Monday, there will be a refrain of boos. It is likely to be repeated whenever he walks onto the field to affect pitching changes. Long before Boone’s tenure, this has been the reality for any Yankees manager or general manager. The mob reflex mirrors the response of an icon of the franchise, the late owner George Steinbrenner: If you lose, every choice you make will be shredded.

The intensity of the response heightens the inherent pressure of these front-facing Yankees jobs, and the cumulative effect can bend or even warp a personality. Billy Martin’s health seemed to worsen during his five separate tenures as Yankees’ manager. When Joe Torre’s book about the Yankees years was published, the criticism of Cashman hardened the general manager — compelled him to do the work more forcefully, rather than try to placate, as he often did with Torre. Joe Girardi, Boone’s predecessor, felt responsible for everyone around him because of the looming possibility there would be firings. Looking back, he says he might have put too much pressure on himself.

But some of Boone’s colleagues, as well as his brother Bret, say they believe that Aaron is mostly unchanged through years in this managerial slow-cooker, with his typically positive demeanor and gregariousness resolute, even in the worst moments.

“It’s almost like he’s born for this,” Cashman said. “He disperses credit and takes blame. He keeps his cool in the dugout, because of his demeanor. … This job will harden you and make you do things you wouldn’t do. Sometimes you go along to get along, and you start to change. None of that’s ever happened. He is still true to who he is. He’s the exact same person we hired. We got one of the good ones.”

In a phone interview before the World Series, Boone said, “I’ve always envisioned that I’d be able to handle that, going in. I still feel the same way. That’s not to say there haven’t been some hard moments or tough times that you go through — moments where it gets a little lonely. But overall, it’s been incredibly rewarding, and for the most part, I love it.”

Girardi recalls that when he served as the bench coach for Joe Torre, he thought he had a feel for the challenges of being the Yankees manager.

“But you really don’t, until you’ve actually been through it,” he said, thinking of his stint from 2008-2017 — a period during which they last won a championship. “And I think you have to go through both sides of it to really understand it — the good, and the bad. As you go through it more, you understand the pressure the players are under — all of the coverage they get — and you understand the importance of being positive and supporting the players, no matter what.”

Because while playing a sport filled with failure, the Yankees are often shrouded in negative feedback. They will be cheered at the outset of Game 3, and that fervor of Yankees fans can wear on opposing players. But if the Yankees begin to struggle, the frustration in the stands flows freely — and the person responsible for lineup and pitching choices is going to hear it. That was once Girardi, and now it is Aaron Boone.

“I think he does a fantastic job, because he’s always under scrutiny,” Girardi said. “Because that’s the job in New York, unless you win a championship. You could overachieve with a team that people thought would win 90 games, and you win 92-93 games — and the response is, ‘Yeah, but they didn’t win a World Series.'”

Cashman said he’s not sure how much Boone listens to talk radio, or if he absorbs the fan and media criticism. “I don’t get the sense that it guides him in any way, shape or form,” he said. “He pours everything he has into [the work], and then lets it go.”

Bret Boone said, “He’s the same dude … He hasn’t changed one iota. As a 51-year-old man, he is the same person as he was when he was a kid.”

Aaron has been ejected by umpires more than any of his peers in recent years, and when these eruptions occur, their mother will call Bret and ask him, “What is your brother doing?” They will laugh together, because through the lens of time they see him responding as he did as a child when Bret — four years older than Aaron — would rob his little brother of Wiffle ball glory by ruling a home run as a foul ball. Aaron would react in the same way he does to umpires: indignant, with outward expression of being unfairly wronged.

Bret Boone sees much of his father in Aaron. Bob Boone, now 76, was respected by teammates in his long career as a big league player and manager for being straightforward, reliable.

“High character, honest to a fault,” said Bret, who recalled how friends in the game asked him why, as a player in the winter of 2004, Aaron Boone had volunteered to the Yankees that he had blown out his knee playing basketball — a violation of his contract. “That’s just the way he is,” Bret responded.

Bret said that like their father, Aaron will go to work very early in the day — “He’s a grinder, just like Dad’ — and Bret encourages his brother to back off some. “Sometimes you got to get to the yard late,” Bret said, “and throw it against the wall and just let the players play.”

But there’s another reason Boone arrives early. He likes being at the park, with his colleagues, working to solve problems. Brad Ausmus is at the end of his first year as bench coach of the Yankees, and before this, he really didn’t know Boone beyond pleasantries exchanged as opposing players earlier in their lives.

During spring training, he shared a condo with Boone, and he remembers Boone greeting him over morning coffee with the familiar fan chant: “LET’S GO YANKEES.” When they drove to the ballpark together, the music was always the same. “‘Eighties,” Ausmus said. “It’s always ’80s.” Stevie Nicks, the Pretenders, Don Henley. Boone has long maintained that if he were left on a desert island and he could listen to only one band, that would be Hall and Oates. When Boone drives his daughter Bella, she will eventually ask him, with hope: “Can we listen to my music now?”

In describing Boone, Ausmus’s observation was simple: “He’s kind of a goofball,” Ausmus said, laughing.

Boone is genial and respectful in his exchanges with reporters, but that part of him that abhors unfairness — like those foul balls wrongly called by his older brother — has come out occasionally. During the American League Championship Series, the Yankees blew a lead in the ninth inning of Game 3 against Cleveland, when it appeared they were on the verge of taking a three games-to-none lead. A reporter asked a question that seemed to suggest that perhaps the Yankees’ staff assumed they would win the game: “Do you feel like the bench might’ve felt ‘We got this in the bag,’ so to speak?”

Boone snapped impatiently, “Come on. No. ‘Got this in the bag’? Stop it with that.”

Boone has a de facto sounding board. His father stays up to watch the Yankees game, and they have spoken afterward, as Aaron decompresses. He invited Joe Torre to spring training, and the two exchange texts. He shares conversations with Jim Leyland, who was inducted into baseball’s Hall of Fame last summer. He’ll have breakfast with bullpen coach Mike Harkey.

In the meeting with broadcasters before Game 2, Boone replayed some of his decisions with that room. He had thought about taking out Cole after the sixth inning, he said, after conversations with Cole, because he sensed the pitcher was close to spent. He stuck with Cole, and after Teoscar Hernandez opened the bottom of the seventh with an eight-pitch at-bat that concluded with a single, Boone went to the mound without making a motion to the bullpen, leaning toward removing Cole.

If Cole had pushed back and made a case to stay in, would Boone have left him in?

“Possibly,” Boone said. But Cole didn’t, so the manager pulled him after 88 pitches — the decision that drew scrutiny from Jeter after the Yankees lost.

In these moments, he leans on that sounding board, on his family — and mostly, on his own sense of self.

“Through everything, even through the lowest of moments,” Boone said, “I think I have a healthy perspective,” he said.

These days, he’ll need it.