What Aaron Boone needs to do on his second contract as Yankees manager

The day-to-day job description of a baseball manager is somewhere between oversimplified and nebulous.

They do more than just write the lineup card; some managers are more instructed by the front office than autonomously choosing who bats second. But it can be hard to know exactly how much more, especially without clubhouse access. A basic summary of their off-the-field job requirements is: Keep the players happy. What exactly that looks like can be hard to pin down, and the meetings that happen with a certain player behind the scenes can be just as vital as deciding how to use that player.

Aaron Boone has three more years to figure this all out.

The Yankees brought Boone back on a three-year deal, with general manager Brian Cashman hailing Boone as part of the solution, not the problem. Now the real work begins, and as Boone stated after the Wild Card game, the league isn’t cowering in fear like they used to when they came to the Bronx.

To get the most out of this new contract, the Yankees’ embattled skipper needs to prioritize a few key elements of winning that have not been there in recent years.

BLEND NEW SCHOOL WITH OLD SCHOOL

The easiest way to describe the Yankees’ offensive production that got hitting coaches Marcus Thames and P.J. Pilittere fired was a reliance on the all-or-nothing approach. The Yankees often seemed to be waiting around for someone to hit a three-run homer, which meant a lot of violent swings that landed in the nothing category.

In 2021, the Yankees ranked 19th out of 30 teams in runs, 23rd in batting average, and sixth in strikeouts. They were, however, first in walks and eighth in home runs. Walks and home runs are good! But so is a nice single every now and then. The Yankees were 20th in singles, and with runners in scoring position — a situation where they hit .238, 26th in the league — they came up with 194 singles in 1,381 plate appearances.

A clear way to pull them out of this funk is to find hitting coaches that can keep the on-base percentage in place while preaching the importance of merely putting the ball in play sometimes, while most importantly, showing the hitters how to do that with regularity.

BETTER BULLPEN MANAGEMENT

This one is much easier said than done, and also the easiest for the armchair mafia to critique every time a reliever so much as allows a grounder through the shift.

But the fact of the matter is still that Boone has not been great at it. Whether it was riding Chad Green until he inevitably hit a rut (the law of averages says that pitching almost every day will do that), showing a reluctance to use Jonathan Loaisiga before the seventh inning, or developing generally strange deployment patterns (Lucas Luetge had a tendency to disappear), there is room for improvement.

PUT EVERYONE IN THE BEST POSITION

This is not brain surgery, though it often required surgical techniques for the Yankees to figure out.

Everybody and their mother expects the Yankees to land a shortstop in free agency before they head south for spring training. That would solve the Gleyber Torres dilemma, as the young infielder’s career has taken a dip in the toilet since the pandemic started. New blood at shortstop solves one Gleyber problem, but with the 24-year-old still under contract for 2022, it creates the issue of figuring out where he plays now.

Second base certainly makes the most sense, but if the Yankees keep Luke Voit around, that means DJ LeMahieu is probably in line for the second base job. Of course, Voit could also be the designated hitter, but that would thrust Giancarlo Stanton into the outfield more often than he ever has as a Yankee. With Aaron Hicks coming back from injury, Joey Gallo still in the mix, and Aaron Judge as the one true constant, there doesn’t seem like a natural fit for Stanton on defense.

Once the front office nails down their 26 guys, Boone then has to perform some alchemy to come up with the best lineups and avoid a situation like Voit’s this year, where he was glued to the bench despite, at times, being the team’s hottest hitter.

SOLVE THE TAMPA BAY PROBLEM

There’s no way for Boone to snap his fingers and have the team handle Rays’ pitching better, but the Yankees simply have to do better than their 10-19 record against Tampa Bay over the last two seasons. They’re not just losing either, they’re getting boat raced.

In their last 29 games, the Yankees have been outscored 145-84 by the Rays, not to mention the crushing loss in the 2020 playoffs.

MAKE SURE JUDGE IS HAPPY

Judge is the best thing the Yankees have going for them right now. It is of paramount importance that they keep him in pinstripes, and one way to ensure that marriage goes smoothly is to wed him to the right manager.

All indications point to the pair of Aarons getting along. Judge only has one more year on his contract before he likely enters the $300 million club, though. If an extension isn’t reached before that deal expires, Boone’s job partly becomes PR peacemaker, as any sort of contract dispute that hangs over the season will become a massive storyline.