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He knows, of course. He understands. As much as anyone who will be inside Yankee Stadium on Wednesday night, Aaron Boone is intimately familiar not just with the noise of October, or the pressure, or the color and pageantry and history entwined with The Bronx, but with the powerful potential of redemption.
The special specter of salvation.
“It’s certainly one of the great privileges of this sport to play in games like this,” the manager of the Yankees said Tuesday afternoon, as the first ribbons of bunting were being spread across the various decks at the stadium, as his team and the Oakland Athletics prepared for the splendid task of the one-game, win-or-be-gone wild-card play-in game.
“The real season,” he said, “starts now.”
Fifteen autumns ago, Boone was in one of the worst places in his baseball life, even as he was physically engaged in one of the great adventures of his career. By the early morning of Oct. 17, 2003, Boone had made 34 plate appearances in the postseason, he’d scratched out only five hits, and he’d gotten benched for the decisive Game 7 of the ALCS against the Red Sox in favor of Enrique Wilson.
Of course, then Boone got an at-bat in the bottom of the 11th inning that night.
So yes: He knows that throwing Luis Severino at the A’s might seem a curious choice given the immediate reality of his 5.67 ERA over his last 14 starts (including a brief and brutal 2 ²/₃-inning stint against Oakland exactly four weeks earlier in which he allowed six runs and six hits) and the longer memory of his troublesome start in last year’s play-in game, when the Twins torched him for three runs and five baserunners in only a third of an inning.
He understands that writing Gary Sanchez’s name onto the lineup card might seem a stubborn selection given Sanchez’s nightmarish .186/.291/.406 season on offense and the fact he has proven to be profoundly unreliable behind the plate all year (including that Severino start on Sept. 5, when he was charged with two passed balls and easily could have earned two others).
“I think he’s equipped in so many ways to handle this, equipped with amazing stuff and the ability to dominate big league hitters,” Boone said of Severino, who despite his second-half struggles still turned in a solid season (19-8, 3.39 ERA, 220 strikeouts in 191 ¹/₃ innings).
Sanchez?
“He will be my catcher,” Boone said. “I’m very confident in him, and that he and Luis will be on the same page and give us the best chance to win [Wednesday] night.”
So Boone enters his first postseason game as a big-league manager with his hole cards already flipped, no tricks, no ruses, realizing that if either decision goes awry he’ll only hear about it for the next six months, minimum.
On one level, he is playing the percentages: The probability that lurking inside Severino is a throwback night to May or June, when he looked like the best pitcher in town, even in a town that also included Jacob deGrom, and the possibility Sanchez can shake off the fog of 2018 and recall what he was in 2016 and 2017, both sides of the ball.
On another, he is charging himself with delivering the same kind of managerial message that, once upon a time, Joe Torre supplied him with. Torre knew a slumping player when he saw one, which is why he’d benched Boone for Game 7 in ’03. But he also knew the difference between misery and mastery can be a single pitch, a solitary swing.
Before Boone stepped to the plate in the bottom of the 11th, Torre shared something Ted Williams had told him years before, when Torre’s mechanics and confidence were similarly askew: Don’t worry about crushing the ball, just focus on serving it to right field.
“And then,” Torre said, “you never know what might happen.”
Boone sent a forever rocket into the left-field stands at old Yankee Stadium instead, engraving his name in the litany of autumn heroes hatched from the ominous clouds of doubt. He has two more candidates for that list working for him Wednesday night. He can make them look awfully good. And they can make him look awfully smart.
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