Aaron Boone joined BT and Sal in studio on Tuesday to take the guys on in a special edition of Pull Your Card, but first, he relived the painful World Series defeat against the Dodgers, which ended in disaster after a comedy of errors in the fifth inning doomed the Yankees in their quest to get the Fall Classic back to Los Angeles for game six.
For Boone, now months removed from his first World Series appearance as a manager and approaching spring training, the pain still hasn’t worn off.
“No, I don’t think you ever get over it,” Boone admitted. “It’s kind of one of the first things – when you’re talking with the team after the game…it’s gonna hurt forever.
“When you’re closer in a lot of different ways, the ending sticks with you forever.”
The Yanks fell behind 3-0 in the series after coming oh-so close to taking the series opener in LA, before Freddie Freeman took Nestor Cortes deep for a walk-off grand slam. Many questioned the decision to bring in Cortes over southpaw reliever Tim Hill, but Boone says his lone reason for a second guess wasn’t in relation to a Hill/Cortes debate.
“I don’t know if it’s regret,” Boone said. “The decision for me was not Tim Hill versus Nestor. While the inning ended with Freeman, who, going into that series before he went off in the series, felt very much like a shell of himself coming out of the NLCS. He could barely walk in the NLCS. I think the time off certainly served him well. So the calculus for me was 2-3 hitters. I knew Cortes, we felt like was a better matchup going into that game against Ohtani…we had to get two outs, we’re probably not going to double up Ohtani with his speed, and I liked the matchup of Nestor against Ohtani and especially Betts. Once the ball takes Verdugo into the outfield and moves up the runner, then I’m gonna take my shot with Freeman against Nestor.
“The one thing was, do I keep Weaver in the game? You would lose him in game two and then have an off day, so there was a case to be made there….but then it’s, do I get to the finish line with him and I go to someone else anyway, and he’s down a couple days probably. That was the biggest think that I still, to this day, I’m like, ‘I could have gone with Weav.’”
Boone’s captain, Aaron Judge, likely considers his dropped fly ball in the fifth inning of game five as his big World Series regret, but Boone has no worries that the Yankee superstar will put it behind him and have another monster season in 2025.
“We just keep it moving,” Boone said. “The one thing Judge does so well year in and year out, he’s this perfect teammate and perfect competitor.
When you play in the game and live in the game…you understand the ups and downs of it all. I’ve never witnessed someone handle the day to day – the 0-for-4 one day and 2-for-4 in another – better than him…he just gets the life and the grind of it all.”