Aaron Boone’s press debut at Yankees spring training proves nothing will change

Aaron Boone, ladies and gentlemen! Always delivering information that New York Yankees fans don’t want to hear and, you know, it was funny that some of us thought for a second that 2022 would be different for this team.

The Yankees have countless holes on their roster when you consider a multitude of factors: vacancies, poor performance, lack of reliability, potential tenuous relationships, etc. The list is long. On the surface, there is no shortstop, and more pitching help is required. Everything else can be debated, so we’ll make this easy.

Players are trickling in to spring training in Tampa where Boone just spoke to the press for the first time, answering a ton of questions after spending the lockout largely silent. Unsurprisingly, the lack of assertion was there as were the cookie-cutter statements about winning.

The counter-argument here would be that Boone is playing the Yankees’ hand close to his chest and not revealing any important information. Maybe they’re going to make moves! But this is just more of the same we’ve heard from the Yankees’ skipper even when they clearly do not have enough on the current roster to be a top contender. They might be fourth place in their own division.

For starters, Boone all but officially took the Yankees out of the shortstop conversation, revealing that Gio Urshela is the starter at this very moment.

Is there a problem with that? Not really, since someone has to start during spring training, though some understandably might not be happy about it. But it means that they’ll upgrade somewhere else, right? First base, third base, outfield?

Yankees manager Aaron Boone addressed the media and it was underwhelming

Wait a second … Gleyber Torres is in the mix for the shortstop competition? What did the lockout do to the Yankees’ front office? Did the Red Sox send conspirators to work there and upend the operation? If the Yankees even think about putting Torres back at shortstop in any capacity, they will show the fans they have learned nothing.

As for other moves in free agency or on the trade market? Again, this could be a ploy, but here’s the phrase fans have heard all too often even when it’s been clear the team does not have enough to win.

Well, at least not every possible move wasn’t ruled out! There’s always Brett Gardner…

But then we’re being contradictory! We can win with what we have but fans are “prematurely” evaluating the offseason and winter despite the fact the Mets just traded for arguably the best available starting pitcher on the market, the Jays deepened their rotation with Yusei Kikuchi, and the Dodgers have made an offer to Freddie Freeman.

The Yankees? They re-signed Joely Rodriguez almost four months ago … and that’s it.

But there’s still a large sect of Yankees Twitter promising us that the team is going to land Carlos Correa even though we’re only being fed meaningless updates about the team’s apparent tepid interest in the star shortstop. Yup, every team is “interested” in Correa because of how good of a player he is. Doesn’t mean every team can meet his demands, and there’s no evidence to suggest the Yankees will.

Some fans might call this a big old whiny article. And you could be right. But at the same time, nobody is asking Aaron Boone to feed us lies just to make us feel better. All anybody ever asked was for these pressers to not be more of the same, and it’s obvious the Yankees or Boone didn’t take that hint after 2020 and 2021 when the two sides agreed to a three-year contract, which now seems like it’s going to be interminable.

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