Nobody ever wondered who was writing Bruce Bochy’s lineup card, and Bochy walked away from the game with a losing record. Over twenty-eight seasons and three organizations he went 2,252-2,266, finishing fourteen games under .500 for his career, and he still collected four World Series rings on the way. Not once in all of that time did anyone suggest the front office was filling out the card for him.
The question doesn’t attach itself to Dave Roberts either, and the Dodgers have pushed further into data-driven baseball than the Yankees ever have. Roberts scripts his bullpen and yanks starters the moment a lineup comes around for the third time, and nobody in the sport has ever called him a puppet for it.
It attaches to exactly one manager in Major League Baseball. Aaron Boone is in his ninth season in the Bronx, he has won at a .584 clip across the first eight of them, and the accusation has never once let go of him.
It surfaced again on Friday, this time from a man who played for him. On his podcast Get It Done League, which he co-hosts with Russell Martin, Josh Donaldson recalled asking Boone why he was appearing on Jomboy Media so regularly during Donaldson’s time in New York. Boone told him he wanted to control the narrative. Donaldson’s read on it now is that the narrative wound up controlling Boone. He went on to describe what it was like to sit there as a player and watch his manager get “talked into playing this guy over this guy” by an outside voice.
The target is the least interesting part of it. What Donaldson actually described is a manager whose lineup decisions were understood by the men playing for him as having originated somewhere other than his own head, and that understanding is the water everyone in that room swims in.
The defenses sound like indictments
The most damaging version of this arrived eleven months ago from the most respected living Yankee, and he was trying to help.
On October 8, 2025, Toronto finished the Yankees off in four games in the ALDS. During the FS1 postgame show that night, Derek Jeter set out to take some heat off Boone, saying that Boone sticks up for his players and absorbs more criticism than he has earned. Then, in the middle of defending him, Jeter said he was fairly certain Boone is “not the one that’s calling every move that they make” during games, while acknowledging he had no inside knowledge of it. Alex Rodriguez went after the roster instead, calling it “one of the worst constructions of a roster I’ve ever seen” and pointing at a group carrying three left-handed-hitting catchers and five designated hitters.
Jeter wanted to move blame off the manager, and the only route he could find was to say the manager isn’t running the team. A defense that has to strip a man of his authority before it works isn’t much of a defense.
Cashman went on WFAN eight days later and said the claim wasn’t true and that he had never picked a lineup in his life, noting that both men had picked the Yankees to win the World Series on Fox roughly forty-eight hours before Fox turned on them.
Then in February, Boone went on the same station and got the same question. He said it wasn’t true and that the pregame meeting doesn’t work the way people imagine it does. He described Cashman as a general manager who isn’t “in the weeds on the baseball stuff.” Audacy titled the episode around Boone finally putting the matter to rest, and seven months later Josh Donaldson picked it right back up.
Andy Martino of SNY once corrected the record after a playoff loss, insisting Boone had gone against the analytics staff’s preferences that night, and Chris Kirschner of The Athletic answered the same question in a Reddit AMA by saying Boone and his coaches have complete liberty over how they run a game. That is an enormous amount of energy spent on something nobody thinks to ask about most managers, and no manager’s authority survives being vouched for this often.
He was hired to be this
None of it came from fans inventing a grievance; it came out of the process that produced him.
When Cashman interviewed him in November of 2017, Boone had been a television analyst since he stopped playing in 2009 and had never coached or managed at any level of professional baseball. By his own account at the time, the interview leaned heavily on his analytics background and his ability to communicate.
MLB.com later reported what happened inside that six-hour session. Boone’s favorite exercise was being handed real statistical profiles with the names stripped out and asked to construct batting orders from them. His performance, according to that reporting, “secured the vote of the analytics staffers,” who came away convinced he would fit the new-school environment they worked in.
He got the job by passing an audition the department administered, and the man he replaced had just taken this franchise to Game 7 of the ALCS. An organization that hires a manager on those terms forfeits its right to act puzzled when the sport spends nine years asking who is actually deciding.
The results don’t rescue either of them
The Yankees are carrying a tax payroll of roughly $336.7 million this season, third-highest in baseball. They have not won a World Series since 2009, a drought that reached sixteen seasons last October and now ranks as the second-longest the franchise has endured since it took the Yankees name in 1913. They have reached the Series once in that window, in 2024, and lost it in five games.
Boone has gotten them to the postseason in seven of his eight completed seasons, which is harder than his critics tend to allow, and he is 25-27 once he gets there. He sits at 81-61 this year, second in the American League East. Baseball Reference puts their odds of reaching October above 99.9 percent and their odds of winning it all at 8.1 percent.
Cashman has been running baseball operations since 1998, this is his twenty-ninth season, and he needs one more win to clinch a twenty-ninth consecutive winning year. That streak is a genuine accomplishment and it is also the thing that keeps rescuing him. A single championship across the last seventeen seasons, produced by an organization that has spent near the top of the sport in nearly all of them, is not a record that should survive on the strength of never finishing under .500.
The style hasn’t delivered either
The entire premise of going all-in analytically is that the aesthetic cost is worth paying, and nobody in the Bronx would complain about a parade route built on strikeouts and home runs. So look at what the third-largest payroll in the sport has produced.
Through 142 games the Yankees are hitting .234 as a team with a .311 on-base percentage and 193 home runs. They have struck out 1,310 times and collected 1,097 hits, which means they have walked back to the dugout on strike three more than two hundred times more often than they have reached base with a hit.
All of it adds up to a 99 OPS+, which is the statistical definition of league average. Austin Wells is hitting .186 while catching most days and Ryan McMahon is at .218, and neither has lost his job over it. Trent Grisham has 18 home runs attached to a .211 average, which is the philosophy rendered as a single stat line. This is the roster the front office assembled playing the style the front office believes in, and it has produced an average offense at a championship price.
Both of them belong on the seat
Jon Heyman reported last month that the Yankees intend to bring Cashman back for a thirtieth season. His contract expires after this year and the extension is being treated around the league as a formality. Boone is signed through 2027, which means that once Cashman is re-upped, Cashman becomes the man who decides whether Boone stays.
How that arrangement functions was on display all summer. The front office declined to add bullpen help before the August 3 deadline, four relievers have gone down since, and Boone has spent September auditioning arms he was never given and then explaining at the podium why the seventh inning fell apart. The decision was made upstairs and every consequence of it has been absorbed and answered for downstairs.
Boston offers the contrast worth sitting with. The Red Sox fired Alex Cora in April, twenty-seven games into the season, with time still left on an extension that ran through 2027, and this was the manager who had delivered them a World Series in 2018. They decided a 10-17 start was reason enough. The Yankees have watched nine years and a single pennant go by without changing anything.
So put both of them on the seat and be honest about the fork this organization has backed itself into. If Boone genuinely makes these decisions, then he owns nine seasons that produced one pennant and a losing record in October, and he should have to answer for that. If he doesn’t make them, then the man who does has gone sixteen seasons without a championship while outspending nearly every organization in baseball, and he has never once had to stand at that podium after a Game 1 loss and explain a single move.
Somebody in that building has been getting away with this for a very long time, and the fact that nobody outside it can say with confidence which of them it is may be the most damning part of the arrangement.