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MIAMI — Wearing a T-shirt that featured the face of the former Yankees captain who criticized the current club for making too many mistakes, Aaron Boone played defense.
Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez ripped the Yankees on Saturday in their roles as FOX Sports commentators — Jeter saying “they make way too many mistakes” and Rodriguez asking, “Where’s the accountability” for those mistakes — after a game in which Jazz Chisholm Jr. was doubled off at first base on a popup to second.
“Look, we’re the Yankees, and when we lose games, if it’s in and around a mistake, that criticism is fair,” Boone said Sunday morning at loanDepot Park. “It’s fair game, I guess. At the end of the day, we have the pieces I think to be a really good team and that’s on me and all of us to get the most out of that.
“I would disagree a little bit with the accountability factor. But the reality is we’re focused every day on being the best we can be. That’s how we have to do it. But I understand when it doesn’t happen or we don’t have the record, I think we should have, or certainly people think we should have, that comes with the territory. It’s on us to change that thought.”
Boone indicated that there is more going on behind the scenes in terms of accountability that doesn’t get shown in front of cameras or voiced in postgame press conferences.
The eighth-year manager has rarely pulled a player in-game for making a baserunning mistake, with his standard for benching being if he sees a player “dogging it.”
Rodriguez claimed that if any of the Yankees he played with made a mistake, “we would be sitting our butt right on the bench.”
Boone, whose club entered Sunday 60-51 and in third place in the AL East, said the perception that there is no accountability “maybe sometimes” makes him angry.
“The reality is, I think we should be better than what our record is and that starts with me,” Boone said. “We got to own that. The only way we can change that thought is by playing a more consistent brand of baseball and winning baseball games.”
As for Saturday’s gaffe, Chisholm said Saturday night he would not do anything differently because he believed that Marlins second baseman Xavier Edwards was going to drop the ball purposely — which Edwards confirmed he was thinking about doing — to nail Chisholm at second.
Because of that, Boone stood behind Chisholm’s decisionmaking on Sunday.
“It’s borne out of some thoughtfulness,” Boone said. “He’s trying to make a play. He understands what Edwards was trying to do, we all do. Sometimes you don’t have control of that. Sometimes if they execute really well on that kind of play, they’re going to be able to swap out the runner. I also understand that this is a turf field and landing on the dirt, it’s going to bounce a different way if they do roll the dice with a play like that.
“So Jazz, in a lot of ways, was onto that and trying to make a play. He obviously got a little too far, or his last step put him in a position to where he was vulnerable. At the end of the day, you don’t want to make that out, obviously. But borne out of someone trying to make a play.”
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