It won’t add any wins or rings to his resumé, but Aaron Boone now has history on his side.
During Game 1 of the 2019 ALCS, the Yankees were upset with a whistle coming from the Astros dugout, thinking it may have been part of Houston’s sign-stealing program. Astros manager A.J. Hinch called it “a joke” while blasting the allegations and later had to clear the air with Boone.
A previous investigation had cleared the Astros of wrongdoing in the 2019 ALCS, but after Houston was hit with serious punishments Monday for their 2017 sign-stealing program, Boone was reportedly feeling justified for his concerns.
“I know that (Boone) feels a little vindicated about some of his suspicions,” Buck Showalter said Monday night on YES Network’s “Yankees Hot Stove.”
Asked about his conversation with Boone, Showalter said it was a “just a text.”
“I don’t want to get into any of that, but I did mention it because I know during that time he was pretty vocal about some of it and was kind of ridiculed by some of the Astros people,” Showalter said. “So I think looking back on it, I know that the Yankees fans so to speak … I know it bothers me. Think of all the people that it touched, people that lost their jobs. I’ve heard from a lot of them who are quite upset about it.”
Hinch, who laughed off the Yankees’ accusations in October, is now out of a job after he and general manager Jeff Luhnow received one-year suspensions and then got fired by Astros owner Jim Crane.
MLB has asked teams not to comment on the Astros punishment, according to the Dodgers, so it’s unlikely Boone will ever make his true feelings on it public. But the Yankees manager said in December he was hoping the investigation would lead to “a more fair game.”
“Obviously some of the stuff is eye popping, eye opening,” Boone said last month. “We will see where it leads. We know obviously Major League Baseball is taking it seriously and going through a thorough process of talking to a lot of people and really trying to get to what truly happened, didn’t happen, what was going on. Hopefully in the end, the result is a better game, a more fair game between the lines. That’s something that we should all want to strive for as a sport. Hopefully this process goes a long way in making sure that that’s the case.”