The Aaron Boone "MEH!" Syndrome

All day yesterday, I secretly grinned at the idea that the Yankees, baseball's most WASPY, white-bread, autocratic, banker-blowing team - (as opposed to the Redsocks, who are simply the whitest) - might hire Hensley "Bam Bam" Meullens as manager. What hope it would inspire! A black manager of the Yankees! A guy who speaks five languages! A fellow named "Bam Bam," who knows exactly what it's like to have been a touted Yankee prospect. How could we not be New York's darlings - America's team - in 2018? How could it not become a watershed moment in Yankee history?

Well... so much for that. And selling Meullens as "runner-up" doesn't cut it. (Worse, it smacks of tokenism.) Hal Steinbrenner had a chance to change the Yankiverse forever. He climbed to the precipice, looked out at a new future, and then turned around and walked home to grope his golden calves. Instead of a groundbreaking moment, a belated leap into this new millennium, we chose another suburban-born, stock-issued GQ model, a network talking head whose brother belongs on Fox News, if not Info-Wars, all of which is slightly less status quo than bringing back Joe Girardi. We chose Aaron Boone... a big, resounding "MEH!"

And it dawned on me... this is why you don't hold a public "American Idol" competition when hiring a manager. If the Yankees had signed Aaron Boone two days after Girardi's firing, I'd still be cheering. Now, we will always compare him to Bam Bam or Carlos Beltran, or Chris Woodward, or all the others... and wonder what might have been. It won a few back pages, but this reality TV show process didn't do Boone any favors. Cashman ought to think about that for next time.

But... wait a minute... I need to back up here. I cannot go into a frenzy on this. Last time I screamed bloody murder over a managerial hiring, his name was Joe Torre. Remember the tab headline: "Say it ain't Joe?" Alphonso - back in his pre-blogging days - was absolutely apoplectic. We felt as if old George had pissed down our throats - firing Buck Showalter to bring in a cheese sandwich. Later, when St. Joe was replaced by Joe Girardi, it seemed a great move; Girardi looked like an organizational breath of fresh air. (And let's face it: he had some damn good years... just not lately.) The upshot here: None of us should hold it against Aaron Boone simply because he is not nicknamed "Bam Bam." And let's give him benefit of the doubt.

Still, I cannot dismiss a lingering sense that the Yankees are more concerned with on-camera skills than dugout instincts. Considering that Larry Rothschild remains pitching coach, and we will surely sign some strategy wonk with managerial experience, Boone's key responsibilities will be to appear in post-game news conferences, on Suyzn's "Manager's Show" and to host weekly half-hour gab sessions with Meredith Marakovits, where they visit pizza parlors and creepy weirdos who collect model trains. Boone is a professional talker. He's at home in front of the camera.

Once again, I wonder if this is a move more to placate YES - majority-owned by Rupert Murdoch and more highly valued than the richest team in baseball. This move will please the YES front office fraternity gropers, and put the Yankees one more generation away from their greatest ever in-game technician: Billy Martin. Nobody could ring more from a team than Billy, yet he had so many personality disorders that you couldn't sell his TV show without hiring Alan Dershowitz to handle the legal defense. He was the classic example of a pre-TV era manager. Today, they look less for a Billy Martin than a Ryan Seacrest. Remember Donald Trump's early boasts about finding a vice presidential candidate "straight from central casting?" Well, we just hired our Mike Pence. 

So, we got our guy. Make no mistake: As of now, I'm rooting for Boonie. (His brother Bret can stay home.) This is no time for disunity. Long may Aaron III reign! But, ahh, what might have been...