Yankees' ceiling lower if flaws aren't fixed
Yankees manager Aaron Boone watches Game 5 of the World Series at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 30, 2024. Credit: Newsday/Howard Schnapp
Joe Kelly wasn’t on the Dodgers' World Series roster, so he saved his fastball for the offseason.
You’ve probably heard about how the reliever fully undressed the Yankees on the "Baseball Isn’t Boring" podcast last week: They had an easy road to the World Series, they can’t field, and he implied their superstars didn’t play hard.
When Aaron Boone was asked about it on a Zoom conference call with reporters Monday morning, he took the high road. He said Kelly’s comments bothered him “a little bit, but you know what the bottom line is? We didn’t play as well as we could have . . . I’m very proud of what we do as a group and obviously there’s always areas to get better.”
The problem here, though, is that Kelly is at least partially right. And now Boone, whose contract option was exercised for 2025 but doesn't extend beyond that, might have one last season to excise the fundamental flaws that exposed the Yankees in a disastrous fifth inning of Game 5 and eventually led to the champagne celebration in their visiting clubhouse. Sure, he wasn’t the one making the mistakes, but he is the one that sets the tone, and even a deep October run isn’t going to blot out the specter of that series and that game.
And if he doesn’t, this will be his legacy, warranted or not.
Now, it’s not fair to imply that guys like Aaron Judge and Juan Soto — the Dodgers are actively courting the latter, by the way — are lazy. But there’s truth to some of Kelly’s other criticisms, and now is not the time to get defensive about how that unpleasant message was conveyed.
According to FanGraphs’ baserunning metric, the Yankees were the worst in baseball at a value of negative-16.9 runs below average (someone go tell Kelly the Dodgers were second-to-last). And sure, the Yankees are a categorically slow team, but baserunning is also about awareness, judgment, and third-base coach Luis Rojas not sending a lumbering Giancarlo Stanton to get thrown out at home in Game 3 of the World Series.
FanGraphs had them ranked as the fifth least-clutch team in baseball, a calculation based on how players do in high-leverage situations. On average, they were a good fielding team but were routinely exposed at second base and rightfield, based on Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR quantifies a player's entire defensive performance by attempting to measure how many runs a defender saved). If you’re not into advanced metrics, that’s fine — just go watch that fifth inning again, which was riddled with the type of bad fundamentals and mental cramps that would have had Billy Martin lathering at the mouth.
Because of this, the 2024 Yankees will be remembered as a very good team that was flawed in often preventable ways. That’s a tough way to operate when you play in the same universe as the Dodgers, who dominated so fully, they routinely “ceded” playoff games to preserve their bullpen for when it mattered more. (Yes, really. Dave Roberts had no problem letting relievers wear one when things weren’t tipping in their favor and said as much in postgame news conferences).
Boone said Monday that the “the sting of not finishing it off stays with you forever,” and you better believe he meant it. But maybe a little worryingly, it seemed like he didn’t feel like the issues that felled the Yankees were inherent to the team’s season-long identity.
“I think [the Game 5 misplays were] a story that blew up too much and understandably,” he said. “If you go back and look at the storylines throughout the season, I felt like there were a lot of times we were winning games whether it was a big defensive play, whether it was small ball in a given day . . . Those things happened throughout the year on a regular basis. We won a lot of games because of the little things that we did well over the course of the year.”
He's right, of course. The Yankees didn’t win 94 games by hitting the ball really hard and doing nothing else at all. And there were certainly instances where they used small ball to their advantage. But so do a lot of other teams. What counts is doing it in the last game of the season — of doing it so consistently, that it doesn’t matter that you’re playing in the biggest game of your life.
For what it’s worth, Boone said on Monday that there was “nothing we don’t lean into heavily and invest a lot in from a detail standpoint.”
He added: “We’ll continue to do that and also try to get better and evolve where we think we need to.”
Forget where the Yankees think they need to get better. Get better in ways Kelly can't criticize, because he's not the only one who thinks this way.
Starting Tuesday, there are 91 days until pitchers and catchers report to spring training. That’s three full months of introspection. The big knock against this Yankees era is that nothing really changes: The personnel stays the same, they generally play well, but just not well enough to win a ring. For many, the team picking up Boone’s option was another indication that next year will be more of the same.
Boone, though, has at least one more shot to change the narrative — to prove that even if situations don’t change, people can. If he wants his managerial legacy to be more than almost-but-not-quite, it has to start now.
Laura Albanese is a reporter, feature writer and columnist covering local professional sports teams; she began at Newsday in 2007 as an intern.