Inside the Empire Page 10

  5

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  CC and the (chin) music factory

  If you’re driving to Aaron Boone’s house in southern Connecticut, Siri will not send you the shortest route from his office at Yankee Stadium. That would be Interstate 95-North (or its service road), known to truckers and troopers as the Highway to Hell.

  Avoiding the traffic torture at exit 4, your phone will direct you to Rye Brook, New York, snaking you through the woods of Westchester County till you’re safely across state lines. Approaching Boone’s hamlet, you will find that nature’s still in charge here. Big, earth-toned Tudors are snugged into the landscape, discreetly peeking out from foliage. Reception gets patchy as you hunt for his mailbox; stands of plane trees are blocking your meager signal. Finally, you spot it, but the game’s still afoot: his house is down a path so bendy and long, it could use its own GPS tag. Negotiating the turns, you arrive in his driveway, where Boone’s already stationed at the wheel of his 2018 Mercedes S 560. Shades on, collar up, his hands at two and six, he asks, “You ready?”

  Though it’s six hours till game time, Boone will be damned if he lets his coaches beat him to the park. Moreover, the way he drives, he needs an early start. His tank of a sedan has 463 horses, but Boone never goes above 55 miles per hour, purring over the potholes on the Hutch. The ride is so plush, it’s frankly sedating, as if smooth jazz had a baby with German engineering. To further narcotize you, Boone dials up The Bridge, the Sirius channel that’s like a vegetative coma set to seventies pop. Poco, Jim Croce, Pure Prairie League—there isn’t a viable sperm cell within a hundred yards of any car tuned to this schmaltz.

  But he’s been gracious enough to give Klapisch some time alone, away from the din and the madding crowd, so, as much as it must pain him, he turns down the volume to a muzzy rumor. For the next sixty minutes, Boone is peppered with questions about the Red Sox, Joe Torre, and his job specs. But the truth is, no grilling can crack Boone’s cone of Zen. Like the shocks on his car and the soundtrack in its cabin, Boone is a tension diffuser. You’ll never hear a power riff from this guy.

  He’s spent the morning as he spends all mornings that don’t precede a day game in the Bronx: padding around the house after his pretty wife, Laura, and their four young children (two adopted). Laura moved the brood here after their school year ended, and the family’s still unpacking, or she is: the kids are busy FaceTiming their friends back in Arizona. So it goes for the progeny of big leaguers. Boone moved six times while he was a player. His current job feels like an anchor, though: the Yanks are out of the business of short-term fixes. Torre and Girardi each lasted a decade; it’d be an upset if Boone didn’t surpass them. His bulletproof calm is exactly what Cashman ordered after the grit-jawed grimness of Joe Girardi. Girardi seemed to seek out things to stress him; Boone won’t give them the time of day. He doesn’t read the papers, doesn’t listen to talk radio, and doesn’t name-check himself on Twitter. “‘Don’t read anything,’ Torre told me when I got to New York,” he says. “I’ve taken his advice.”

  No one should mistake Boone for Torre 2.0, though you really have to see his impression of Joe: he’s got that plodding, hands-in-pockets duckwalk down to a fare-thee-well. (Ditto his take on A-Rod in the box: the pursed pillow lips and the faraway gaze as he searches the stands for admirers. Priceless!)

  Once parked at his desk before a game, Boone spends hours reading situational data, then files it where he needs it—in his head. Everyone, from Cashman to the clubhouse kids, marvels at Boone’s photographic recall. Before the Yankees hired him, they had him take a test in which he was asked to make a lineup using only metrics. Poring over readouts of abstruse numbers—line-drive percentage, contact ratio, batting average on balls put in play—but no player names or lifetime stats, Boone assembled an order that was nearly identical to one the Yanks used in 2018. “It was pretty amazing,” says Mike Fishman, their chief of analytics. “By far the best score of the guys we tested.”

  Jessica Mendoza, Boone’s partner in the booth during his Sunday Night Baseball stint with ESPN, laughed when she was asked about his work prep. She remembers blowout games that dragged and dragged, but there Boone was in the top of the eighth, breaking down strategy for both pens. “I’d give him crap about it, like, ‘Boonie, it’s 8–1, no one cares!’” she says. “It was our job to entertain people, not to win games,” but Boone remained fixed on player matchups. Cashman saw that doggedness in Boone during his six-hour interview with the Yanks. Over the course of those breakout meetings, they threw the works at him, testing his endurance and processing speed. You can do all the pregame cribbing in the world, but it’s useless if your brain’s a beat behind. (To that end, Klapisch was having lunch with Davey Johnson, who managed those bawdy Mets teams of the eighties. Johnson scanned his menu and promptly set it down, then watched Klapisch dither over his choices. “Christ, you’d never last a day as a manager. You can’t even decide what to eat,” he snorted.)

  Before the car ride with Boone, Klapisch called Don Mattingly. “Donnie Baseball” is another guy who got a skipper’s job without any prior coaching experience. Like most players and fans, he thought he could manage a team—until he had to helm an actual game. “If you’re not paying attention and making moves without thinking ahead, I guarantee you’ll run out of players,” he said. “That’s the one thing I learned right away—those little decisions are big later on.” Cashman couldn’t have known how Boone would respond in late-and-close spots like that, but everything about him tested so high that the decision rendered itself. “We know you can get fooled in interviews, but we have a process designed to give the true result,” Cashman notes. “Everything we felt coming out of that room was, This is unanimous. And I can tell you right now: we weren’t fooled. He’s backed it up as real.”

  There was another quality that rang with Cashman in his final assessment of Boone. He clearly, and unreservedly, cares for people; he radiates kindness that can’t be faked. Mendoza gets emotional when speaking of Boone, who backed her to the hilt during a rough stretch. A former US Olympic softball player, she was the first female analyst hired for national baseball broadcasts. The response to her on Twitter was . . . pre-caveman. “It’s the nature of the sport—things that’re out of the ordinary are seen as negative,” she says. “People told him, ‘I can’t believe you work with a woman.’ I’m sure he even heard it from his family. But Aaron would cut them off with, ‘It’s going to be fine.’ He was like a brother to me.”

  In that eyeblink way he has of reading people, Boone sensed when she’d been checking her online feed. He’d tell her, in his best spa Muzak tone, to stop stressing about being a woman and “just talk baseball.” If that didn’t work, he’d stage a little gag for her right before they went on air. As the producer counted down, he’d put his hands over his face and shriek, “Oh, my God, I’m freaking out!” “The only one freaking out was me,” says Mendoza. “But he totally made me laugh and calmed me down.”

  There are people in the world whose aura of peace is a poorly drawn disguise—the handsy yoga instructor; the huckster homeopath; the clerk at the post office whose pace is soooo slow. Few of those folks actually have the serenity they espouse—and fewer still inspire it in other people. But that is Boone’s gift: to be tranquil but alert, and to project that mind-set onto his players.

  During the long car ride, he keeps using the word “culture” to describe the dialectic of his clubhouse. It’s hard to get him to pin down what he means, but it’s probably some combination of these qualities he keeps citing: the good-guy leadership of Sabathia and Gardner; the team-first selflessness of Judge and Didi; the perfectionist tradecraft of Stanton and Chapman; and the energy of the kids. Most of those players’ virtues are hardwired, but Boone gives them the stage for full expression. That very first meeting with the players in Tampa, Boone let them know that he planned to have a ball and that they should expect to as well. You do your work before the games, you s
tudy the data we provide you, and this year’s gonna be GREAT. Puzzled, the players glanced at each other, expecting a shoe to drop. But no, that was it. Class dismissed.

  Under Girardi, the players scurried hither and yon like they were bustling between classes in high school. Joe scheduled every minute of every day and posted the timeline on a whiteboard. Boone does precisely none of that stuff—he delegates those duties to his lieutenants. Marcus Thames, the hitting coach, runs the offense; Larry Rothschild handles the pitching. They run the position meetings before each game, while Boone’s in his office or out on the field, watching and shouting encouragement during drills.

  One day in the summer, he was seen standing in the outfield, kibitzing with Gary Sánchez. Sánchez, the closest thing to a coach-killer on the team, was in the thick of rehab for his groin. (He’d landed on the DL in late June.) Barred from jogging, he was keeping his arm limber, having a long toss with one of the coaches. It was bracing to hear the sharp thwack! of Sánchez’s throws as they hit the glove a hundred feet away. Boone, in his hoodie, grinned like a pre-teen looking on. He was giddily getting off on Sánchez’s arm strength and having himself a hoot at three o’clock. But he was also sending a message to his mood-challenged catcher: I’m here for you, man. I care. We’re in this together.

  A month or so later, Sánchez would test Boone’s faith. In an ugly game in Tampa, Sánchez disgraced himself with two acts of insurrection. In the first inning, he handed the Rays a cheap run by not scurrying after a passed ball. In the ninth, he jogged out a grounder to short with a man on first—and was beaten by the relay throw from the second baseman to first and thus made the last out of the game. The Yanks lost by a run, fell another game behind the surging Red Sox, and were quietly furious at their teammate. He had a history of this kind of stuff, going all the way back to A-ball, where he was suspended for a blatant lack of hustle. No one knew why Sánchez did it, and Sánchez wasn’t saying. After the game, he simply said: “I’m sorry.”

  The Twitterverse lost its mind. Everywhere you turned, there were calls for his head, beginning with a stiff suspension. Beneath the outrage, an undercurrent was heard: Let’s see how that softy Boone handles THIS. But Boone kept the pitchfork types waiting a night—he said he wanted to watch the videotape. The next day the Yankees punted the matter, returning Sánchez to the DL with a groin strain. But Boone still had to face the press before the next game with the Rays. Swarmed in the visitors’ dugout, he stuck to his guns—which, in his case, meant keeping them holstered. While allowing that his catcher had “to do better,” he refused to throw Sánchez to the dogs. “I believe in the player,” he said several times, sounding like a priest standing up for a kid who’d snuck out of Mass to boost a Yoo-hoo. In a firm but even tone, Boone was making it clear that he’d run this team as he saw fit—and that he wouldn’t be doing so through the press. In this era, you only get to keep your job if you win and know how to guard your players.

  And that, essentially, was that. Writers groused in their columns about the “convenience” of Sánchez’s groin injury, then moved on to something else the following day. The incident wasn’t forgotten—nothing is in New York—and would be revived when Sánchez jaked it in the future. But Boone had flipped the script from indictment to affirmation and proved himself a uniter, not a divider. That’s the sort of statement that rings in a clubhouse, not just during the season but beyond it.

  This point is raised because it underscores a truth: baseball has changed a lot, but its core audience hasn’t. In their heart of hearts, the sport’s lunch-pail fans yearn for the bullies who ruled by fear. They miss Big Stein and his back-page fist-shakes at stars who underperformed when it counted. (See Dave “Mr. May” Winfield, for one example.) The sports-chat talkers respected Girardi because they thought he was feared and not liked. When pushed by a player, he pushed back harder, putting Sánchez on blast for all to hear. Girardi’s only flaw, in their eyes, was not being Billy Martin, the wild man who went at Reggie Jackson during a game and punched his pitcher, Ed Whitson, in a bar fight.

  Sports have always been a proxy for something else, but these days baseball feels like a fight between its past and present. Which is precisely what makes a manager like Boone so interesting. He refuses to play by the tough-guy dictums handed down by men before him. Even if he wanted to, he knows it wouldn’t work; these ballplaying millennials wouldn’t stand for it. “If George were still alive, he’d be sued out of baseball,” a Yankees executive observed last spring. “The players these days would have him in court so fast, he’d be glad for a suspension” (from the commissioner).

  Torre survived being soft on players by strenuously seducing the press. (And by winning four titles.) He entertained reporters for a half-hour before games, packing them into the dugout to hear his tales of Bob Gibson till everyone recited them under their breath. But there were methods to Joe’s nostalgizing madness. By gobbling up their time during batting practice, he kept writers from wandering into the clubhouse and getting something good from one of his players. More, he earned credit with most of the beat writers, who were deluded into thinking he liked them. Boone, by contrast, won’t fraternize with writers. He’s never less than genial, but he doesn’t have them into his office or gossip off the record about his boss. The writers seem to like him and are willing to live without the access they had in the Torre years. Affections in this town run thin, however. You had to wonder how the press would treat him if his Yankees punched out early in October.

  There’s one other thing about Boone worth discussing, in part because Boone himself won’t: that day he went in for open-heart surgery in March 2009. Boone was born with a congenital defect called bicuspid aortic valve disease (BAVD); it occurs in about 2 percent of live births. Most aortic valves have three flaps, or leaflets, that meter the flow of blood from heart to aorta. Boone has only two, a condition that can lead to clots (and early death) as the valve calcifies. Patients with BAVD typically reach middle age before they need surgical intervention; Boone was among the few whose valve deteriorated in his middle thirties. At the time, he was near the end of his playing days, a good but not great career spent at third base. (His brother Bret, a three-time All-Star, made the bigger dent playing second.) In a routine physical before spring training with the Astros, Boone was stunned to learn that his heart condition had worsened: he needed surgery—soon—to resection the valve.

  He checked himself into the Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto, California. All his storied clan, and several close friends, flew in to lend support. Bret sat on his brother’s bed the morning of the operation and asked the surgeon, Dr. Craig Miller, what the risks were. Miller told him not to worry, he’d done the procedure hundreds of times. But the Boone brothers were worried: it was an eight-hour ordeal in which Aaron’s chest would be sawed and cracked open. “Aaron was really scared; it was a humbling time for him,” Bret said. “He’d always been a faithful, churchgoing guy, but the operation took it to another level.” The night before he went under, Boone wrote letters to his wife and kids. “We’d just had Brandon, and my daughter Bella hadn’t been born yet. If something happened to me, I wanted them to have those,” he told Klapisch. He entrusted the letters to his friend Ryan Stromsborg, with an injunction (“just in case”), and said no more.

  He’d always been known as a sweetheart in the game: relaxed, convivial, popular around the clubhouse. (Bret calls him “the likable Boone.”) But after the operation—a complete success—his mood went black for a time. “He was depressed and snappy, a very different guy,” says Laura, who was caught unawares. They’d prepped themselves beforehand as best they could—met “a ton of people who’d had the operation, including families whose kids went through it,” she adds—but were blindsided by its aftermath. The thing she’d prized most in him—that he’s “built to stand high pressure”—was tested in full that spring. Eventually, the cloud lifted and Boone was back to being himself, only more so in ways that are hard to name. “The peop
le who reached out to me after the fact—frankly, it was overwhelming,” he says. That “outpouring of care and love” made him appreciative, says his brother. After he recovered, “he was a better husband and dad.” Laura, it bears saying, wound up with her husband’s letters. She kept them, but never opened and read them. No interest, she says now. “They’re too eerie.”

  Boone, as mentioned, is terse about the surgery, but agrees that it reset his sense of scale. Time was, he was a guy who sweated his stats and drove himself crazy during slumps. “I had been that hitter who goes to the park thinking, I need to get a hit tonight,” he tells us. All that worrying did was to freeze him in the box and make a short swoon last longer. “That’s how the game’ll knock you to your knees. There has to be a balance: pour yourself into your prep, then go up to the plate and say, ‘Screw it.’”

  He’s responding to queries about the Red Sox, who, at that point in the season, lead the Yanks by five games. Boston came out of the gates on fire, playing .700 ball in April and keeping up that pace, or close to it, through July. At the All-Star break, they’d put up numbers like nothing in their 118-year span. They had the most wins in history before the All-Star Game (68); were on pace to win 112 games, seven more than their best mark ever; fielded the leaders in every hitting stat that mattered; and started four pitchers with ten or more wins for the first time since Baltimore did it in ’77. Nailbiters or blowouts, day games or night—all they ever seem to do is win.

  This feels, in the scheme of things, grossly unfair, especially to Yankees fans. The Yanks are having their own smash season—winning the second-most games in baseball, threatening the season record for home runs, and redefining excellence out of the pen—but they find themselves hanging off the Red Sox rudder like Tom Cruise shooting a stunt. No matter that they’ve pitched superbly and weathered injuries; Boston is simply better across the board. The Red Sox hit a ton of homers but don’t rely on them; they lead the league in runs and total bases. They are splendid at Fenway and brilliant away. In fact, their home and road splits are almost a match. And unlike the Yankees, the Sox are ruthlessly efficient when playing in their division. On July 31—the day of the trade deadline—Boston stood 29-9 against Baltimore, Tampa, and Toronto. The Yanks were 20-15. Small wonder they keep losing ground to the Sox. They haven’t handled their business in the AL East.