Yankees: Joel Sherman’s anti-Aaron Boone rant is amazing

Are people ready to acknowledge that New York Yankees fans aren’t overreacting to the stagnation yet?

Does Joel Sherman hopping on MLB Network and correctly highlighting Aaron Boone’s struggles the second the game goes off script feel more legitimate to you, or no?

It’s not just whiny fans who decry “analytics” as a blanket statement anymore.

It’s professional columnists who are now rightly pointing out that analytics were created to help us more fully understand the situation at hand, allowing managers and executives to develop a feel for the game. That “feel” has been largely absent in Boone this year, as well as the rest of his roster.

On Monday night, Sherman finally had enough and took his anger to national television Tuesday afternoon following Boone’s slow draw on an eighth-inning challenge.

Once again, in the heat of the moment, Boone was robotic, and all he had to show for his protocol was a sad postgame excuse and a bullying accusation.

Yankees manager Aaron Boone got eviscerated by Joel Sherman.

This rant clearly spent many hours, days and weeks bubbling. In fact, Sherman was so aggrieved in the heat of the moment on Monday night that, when he tweeted the first draft of this angry rant, he wrote, “It’s the final out of 8tjj inning.”

I’ve never vibed with him more.

This is nothing new, though. In recent weeks, the New York Post columnist has done a fantastic job pinpointing the many complaints Yankees fans are correctly making, even though they sound like ungrateful overkill to outsiders.

He’s tackled the intangible “staleness” of this current core, still without a World Series and slipping together. He’s also waxed correctly about Giancarlo Stanton’s exit velocity, not as an outright complaint or an argument against no one, but framed properly.

But the idea is not to win valuable carnival stuffed animals for velocity or distance, but baseball games. Of course, hitting the ball hard is valuable — the harder the more likely it lands some place for a hit. Too often, though, it feels like the exchange rate for Stanton and Sanchez, in particular, is “wow” moments interspersed with too many meaningless at-bats. It reflects a Yankee lineup that, even at its best, would be described as dangerous, but not full of good hitters.

On these points and more, we are in agreement.

The Yankees have the most talented lineup in the American League, and there is no reason they should be experiencing a collective three-week slump to begin 2021.

Unfortunately, it seems like far too often, the emphasis is on feats of strength rather than controlling the zone and punishing the opposing pitcher. More times than not, we’re left scratching our head at an in-game Boone delay, a bit of base-running foolishness, or a lineup built to help its opponent get back on track.

The talent is there. The success generally is not. Something is malfunctioning along the line.

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