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It’s hard to believe that upon Opening Day 2026, Aaron Boone began his ninth season as Yankees manager. He is just the seventh in franchise history to get that many years behind the bench and relatedly is also the seventh with at least 1,000 games managed. The only
six skippers in front of him are Hall of Famers Joe McCarthy, Joe Torre, Casey Stengel, and Miller Huggins, who comprise the top four. Two-time champion manager Ralph Houk is also ahead, as is Boone’s predecessor, 2009 champ Joe Girardi.
That’s the name of the game for Boone, however. Including Billy Martin behind him, he’s the only member of the Yankees’ top eight managers to never win a Fall Classic. Even with young guns like Cam Schlittler and Ben Rice ascending, captain Aaron Judge’s perhaps-closing prime is a signal that if Boone doesn’t win in 2026, it might never happen. Boone’s had a championship in mind since taking over in 2018, but if he’s ever going to pull out all the stops to make it happen, it’s now.
So with all that in mind, how do you think Boone has fared thus far? To his credit, no one in the American League has a better record than the Yankees at 46-31, a .597 winning percentage that has them at about a 96-win pace. They’re two games ahead of the overachieving Rays and FanGraphs says they have a 77.7-percent chance to take the division. In a sense, it feels somewhat like 2024, when the Yanks won Boone’s only pennant in a similarly underwhelming AL field, pacing the Junior Circuit with 94 victories before taking out the Royals and Guardians in the postseason.
If they follow a similar pace, then they can at least get back to the Fall Classic after a disappointing Division Series crash-out in 2025, at which point they can then try to rewrite the script in wake of haunting 2024 World Series memories. Irresponsibly looking ahead, it’s worth noting that while New York leads the AL, three National League teams have better records at the moment: the Braves, Brewers, and those same Dodgers, who dispatched them in 2024 and then repeated as champions in 2025 against the Toronto club that sent the Yanks packing early.
That’s a long way to go from now, and the Yankees will surely have some roster differences by the end of September. Still, by the weekend, the Yanks will have hit the halfway mark to 162 games with their 81st regular-season contest. So it’s as good a time as any to take the pulse on Boone (similar to how we do monthly with GM Brian Cashman) and get the pulse.
So give Boone a grade! It’ll be interesting to see where the consensus falls on the skipper.
