World Series – Los Angeles Dodgers v New York Yankees – Game 5 / Sarah Stier/GettyImages
It’s become increasingly common to read a surprisingly scathing indictment of Yankees’ manager Aaron Boone from embedded writers with clubhouse sources. Somehow, that trend doesn’t appear to be forcing Boone any closer to the edge; Andy Martino was the first to note he’s expected to return, and it would be hard to imagine he’d do so as a lame duck without an extension.
Still … if Joel Sherman’s column that essentially laid out the various reasons the Dodgers were super psyched to take advantage of the Yankees at the margins doesn’t change anything, what will?
According to Sherman, the Dodgers entered this World Series matchup knowing that, if they put the ball in play against the Yankees, New York would fold under pressure.
The knew the Yankees had a thin grasp on the game’s fundamentals at best. They didn’t know how to take leads. They didn’t know how to position their outfielders, which seems impossible for a team with such a massive analytics department. Jazz Chisholm, not a third baseman by trade, was often caught standing around in the wrong place (more an indictment on Brian Cashman’s slapdash plan, but that’s neither here nor there).
Essentially, what Sherman’s been ranting about all year — which has long been nodded at and acknowledged by Yankee fans, but not the Yankees — came to a head under the spotlight, and the Dodgers knew it would. Un-basebally teams make un-basebally plays.
Yankees eviscerated by column that showed Dodgers knew all their simple weaknesses
The worst part (and it’s all bad!), perhaps, is the insinuation that, in contrast to Mookie Betts and the Dodgers rigorously drilling simplistic tenets of the game like caroms off the right field wall, the Aaron Boone Yankees coast a bit. Sherman made a fine point to emphasize how often the Dodgers work on the game’s routine wrinkles. Boone, in the aftermath of Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rizzo’s dueling brainlock, noted that, “From a PFP standpoint, we’re pretty good.”
Again, Boone was satisfied by failure, ascribing it to a random occurrence. Betts, and the Dodgers, never seem satisfied in pursuit of perfection. Even after having their season ended by a ghastly broken link in the PFP chain, Boone assumes it’ll all work itself out.
On the other hand, the Dodgers’ only assumption this series was that Boone’s Yankees would somehow find a way to screw it all up, no matter the circumstances. Nailed it.
