Aaron Boone drops baffling explanation for late decisions in Yankees' loss to Rays

It's not easy to consistently win close games, but typically, great teams do it. The 2025 Yankees, on the other hand, are merely pretty good. That's enough to compete in the current version of the American League, but it's not enough to avoid the repeated frustration that comes with entrusting a close game to a manager who struggles to optimize the lack of depth he's been given.

It's everybody's fault. But it just keeps happening. The Yankees have the fourth-worst winning percentage in MLB in games decided by two or fewer runs this year, ranking ahead of only the White Sox, Twins and Rockies. Those are all teams either fighting for the record-setting basement or steering perilously close to the edge of a personal cliff.

Needless to say, Aaron Boone doesn't typically drape himself in glory when he's asked to explain what continues to go wrong in these scenarios, and Sunday presented the first quote of the season that made it appear he was drowning in the spiral.

Again ... admittedly ... it's difficult to juggle a bench when you don't have one. It's tough to find pinch-hitting opportunities that maximize your chances of success when you have four straight less-than-ideal hitters in a nine-man lineup. It's a difficult needle to thread ... but threading that needle is what Boone is paid to do. And, on Sunday, when he sent 30-year-old rookie JC Escarra to the plate down 7-3 with the bases loaded and nobody out, holding onto Ben Rice on the bench, he invited second-guessing ... before Escarra grounded into a double play back to the mound.

Jorbit Vivas frustratingly breathed additional life into the inning, and Rice was eventually used (and walked) before the frame ended with a whimper. So why did Boone lean on a struggling Escarra, then start successfully pinch-hitting once he'd essentially turned off the light? Well ... uh ...

Yankees manager Aaron Boone let "more experienced" JC Escarra bat for himself, started pinch-hitting avalanche after double play vs. Rays

Where to begin? Escarra, a 30-year-old backup catcher/rookie/former Uber driver, is "more experienced" by a hair; he has 29 MLB at-bats, and we love him, and we love his story, but he has 29 MLB at-bats and they've mostly been bad.

For now, his experience dwarfs that of Jorbit Vivas, who started the first two games of this series ... but that's also the Yankees' fault. Vivas was called up last summer in Baltimore, but was inexplicably not used once. He was treated like a ghost. If he'd gotten a trio of starts, or maybe stuck around past the All-Star break, he, too, could have 29 MLB at-bats by now. Perhaps they'd even be good at-bats.

Boone's options were limited on Sunday without a doubt. But he still had two better ones than Escarra at his disposal, and could've used Ben Rice behind the plate if he was intent on staying away from Austin Wells. Instead, he kept Escarra in the game, paid for it, then removed Oswaldo Cabrera, too, ending up with Escarra at third and a shuffle behind the plate anyhow. Instead of admitting he liked Escarra's bat or focused on defense in the ninth over offense in the eighth, he went off on a tangent about marginal differences in "experience" metrics.

Digging out of a 7-2 hole is neither easy nor expected. But, when you have a chance to do so, and close games have been dogging you, you'd better maximize your chances. If you don't, you'd better answer for it succinctly and clearly. The Yankees winning percentages in those two departments are perilously close to those of the White Sox, Twins, and Rockies, too.