The New York Yankees had a great season. They won 100 games and finished with the third-best record in baseball.
But after losing to the Red Sox in four games in the ALDS – and dropping Games 3 and 4 in the Bronx, including a 16-1 embarrassment in Game 3 – the Yankees are left wondering what went wrong.
Yankees fans, meanwhile, have a theory: Aaron Boone.
How big of an advantage was Alex Cora for the Red Sox?
"That's a tough one," MLB Network analyst Preston Wilson said on Taz & The Moose. "I will say it looks like Cora may have seemed a little more at ease. Both teams are great teams. Both teams won 100 games. But at the time, you could tell that Alex seemed a little more at ease."
Of course, it helps that the Red Sox had the best record in baseball, didn't have to play in the Wild Card, had home-field advantage in the ALDS, and never trailed in the series.
"It's tough when you're Aaron Boone," Wilson said. "You get handed the keys to not a Lamborghini; he got keys to a space shuttle. And you're asking him to be a first-year manager under those expectations, a team that almost went to the World Series – there's so many layers to why Aaron Boone could have just crumbled under every second of pressure.
"(I'm not saying) it was too much for him," Wilson continued, "but that's a lot to expect for a first-year manager. Alex Cora, the market is a little different, but I think (winning a World Series) with the Houston Astros the year before, maybe those expectations are a little bit softer for him because he's been there."
Cora won a World Series with the Red Sox as a player in 2007 and as a coach with the Astros in 2017. He, like Boone, is a first-year manager. But expectations for Boone may have been higher – especially in a place like New York.
"No matter what anybody says, unless you've been there in that capacity, that's a totally different deal," Wilson said. "A lot of that may have to do with your support staff. A manager sometimes is as good as the guys he has that he can delegate power to. Maybe it's a case where sometimes the ability to delegate power to the people you trust lessens some of your responsibility and it takes a little bit of onus off of you as a manager. I think Alex Cora had a lot of things benefitting him in those aspects."
