Boone deserves credit for Yanks' resilience

It was always Aaron Boone who had to take most of the questions after another bad loss for the Yankees this season, really take all of it, because that’s always the job for the manager, and especially the manager of what had become such a disappointing Yankees team. Boone kept calling them “gut punch” losses, and promising the Yankees would come back, even though by the time the Yankees had suffered another late-inning collapse against the Mets on the fourth of July, they were 41-41.

A week after that, and after they’d managed to win a few games, the Astros came from five runs behind in the bottom of the ninth inning at Minute Maid Park and finally finished off Boone’s Yankees when Jose Altuve hit a three-run homer off Chad Green.

“It’s another gut punch,” Boone said that day, his default response by then. “But we have to rally from the adversity.”

There was a day at Fenway Park when Domingo Germán was pitching a no-hitter through seven, before the Red Sox came all the way back in the eighth inning. And another game against the Red Sox, when Brooks Kriske threw four wild pitches in the 10th inning, and the Yankees suffered another bad loss. One time against the Twins, both Josh Donaldson and Nelson Cruz launched home runs in the ninth inning against Aroldis Chapman, and the Yanks got flattened again.

Boone not only became the face of those losses. He became the one who took most of the blame for the way the Yankees were playing. Somehow, though, the Yankees never fell all the way out of things in the American League East, before their general manager, Brian Cashman, remade the team at the Trade Deadline, principally with Anthony Rizzo and Joey Gallo. But that hasn’t happened in a vacuum, which is why it’s time for Aaron Boone to get some credit for helping to hold things together until reinforcements did start to come over the hill.

And it is more than that with Boone, who never got much credit even while becoming the first Yankees manager to win 100 games in his first two seasons. He actually has done his very best work since the Yanks got better at the Deadline, and all you have to do is look at what has happened since the Field of Dreams Game in Iowa last Thursday night, when Aaron Judge and Giancarlo hit two-run homers in the top of the ninth inning to bring the Yankees back from being down, 7-4, against the White Sox before Zack Britton gave up Tim Anderson’s memorable walk-off, two-run shot into the cornfield.

The Yankees went back to Chicago after that and won two close games over the weekend. Then, they beat the Angels in a make-up game at Yankee Stadium on Monday night. Now, they have swept the Red Sox, who had won 10 of the first 13 games against the Yankees this season, and passed them in the standings.

And look at how the Yankees have won these games. Chapman was still on the COVID-19 injured list when Britton threw the home run ball to Anderson. Gerrit Cole, their ace, was still sidelined because of COVID-19. So was Jordan Montgomery at the time, and Gary Sanchez and Rizzo. The Yankees sure had been hit by COVID-19 again, and they had others on the sidelines besides Cole. But since the Field of Dreams Game, Boone has had the following pitchers save games for him: Green and Wandy Peralta and Albert Abreu and Jonathan Loaisiga, who looked like Mariano Rivera, as he got out of bases loaded and nobody out against the Red Sox in the first game of Tuesday’s doubleheader sweep for his team. Lucas Luetge got his first save Wednesday night after Boone had him replace Chapman, who returned from the injured list.

And here the Yankees are right now, still five games behind the Rays in the AL East, but looking like the hottest team in the world. They have survived all the gut punches, again and again, and it really is past time when the manager, who is the biggest lightning rod of all for New York sports teams, gets his fair share of the credit for that.

Boone absolutely did get the help he needed for a flawed team -- no serious left-handed presence until Rizzo and Gallo -- from his general manager. But look what he’s done since he got that help. And by the way? Boone’s record is now 305-200 as manager of the Yankees.

Before the Yankees started to win, Boone handled the losing, the slide toward the .500 record, about as well as anybody could, with as much grace as Joe Torre used to show when things went off the rails for Torre’s Yankees. Give Cashman all the credit in the world for pulling off those trades. Still: You can’t talk about where the Yankees are and the way they are playing and have played over the past month without talking about the manager, who was supposed to be in more trouble than his team.

"We had some tough games against [the Red Sox], really competitive games in a lot of cases," Boone said Wednesday night after the sweep was completed. "At times, we weren't playing our best baseball. I feel like we're a better and different team now.”

Yeah. Better team. Different team. Same manager.