The Tampa Bay Rays beat the New York Yankees 4-3 on Wednesday night to sweep their American League Division Series in three games. The Yankees scored five runs in the series. Their captain, Aaron Judge, sat out both playoff rounds with a calf injury. In Game 3, umpires called infielder Anthony Volpe's drive a game-tying home run. A fan had reached over the left-field wall, and replay overturned the call. The Yankees haven't won a World Series since 2009. Manager Aaron Boone just finished his ninth season. He's made the playoffs eight times and the World Series once, but he hasn't won a title. He has one year left on his contract. Asked whether he expects to be back, Boone said, "Yeah, of course. That's for another day."

Boone Has Earned Another Year

His players say he kept a battered team in contention, and his boss still backs him.

The captain is firmly on his side. Judge said after the game that Boone "puts us in the right position to go out there and succeed." Judge missed 100 games this season, he said, and Boone still got the team into the postseason. "He's definitely had our back," Judge said.

This may have been his best season. SNY writer Anthony McCarron wrote that Boone "probably did one of his finest jobs" this year. The team won 93 games even though Judge and stars like Max Fried, Gerrit Cole, Giancarlo Stanton and Cody Bellinger missed long stretches. McCarron also noted that Joe Torre and Casey Stengel are the only other Yankee managers to reach the postseason in eight of their first nine seasons. And he pointed to upcoming labor talks. A lockout could shorten the offseason, he wrote, and leave a new manager little time to learn his players.

His boss backed him hours before the final game. General manager Brian Cashman called Boone "a really good manager" before Game 3. "We're here for a reason," Cashman said, adding that Boone is "certainly" part of that.

But Nine Years Without a Title Is Enough

Columnists and fans say the same October collapse keeps happening, and the manager is the one constant.

The same manager keeps losing in October. Newsday columnist David Lennon wrote that "October failure has been the hallmark of his Bronx tenure." He said "no manager worth his pinstripes" has held the job this long without a title. Lennon wrote that "something has to change, and the manager deserves to be in that conversation."

Nine years may be too long for one manager. CBS Sports baseball writer Mike Axisa wrote that "stability becomes stagnation at some point," and that the Yankees are "rapidly approaching that point, if they're not there already." Under Boone, the Yankees are 7-0 in playoff series against teams with worse records and 1-8 against teams with better ones. "Messages get stale and a new voice is needed," Axisa wrote.

It's time to try someone new. Columnist Ian O'Connor wrote in The Athletic that the Yankees should move on from Boone. He predicts they won't. The fans in the right-field bleachers agreed, chanting "FIRE BOONE!" as the team left the field.

Still, Blame The Players And The Roster

Others blame the players for the errors and weak hitting, and say firing the manager won't fix that.

The manager didn't make those errors. The Yankees made four errors in their Game 2 loss, three of them in the first inning. Michael Kay calls Yankees games for the YES Network and hosts a radio show on ESPN New York. On Tuesday, the day before Game 3, he said on the show that you can blame Boone for pitching changes and lineups. But he said the errors in the field "can't be on Boone. It's gotta be on the players."

The players say it's on them. Yankees pitcher Cam Schlittler said Boone "might take the blame for the way we perform, but at the end of the day, it comes down to us."

The roster needs fixing first. Judge was hardest on the front office. "We're the Yankees," he said. "I feel like they should go all in and do what they need to do." Asked if the team had gone all in, he said, "It's tough to say."

Where This Lands

Judge and McCarron say Boone got a beaten-up team into the playoffs and earned another year. Cashman calls him a really good manager. Lennon, Axisa and O'Connor say nine Octobers without a title make the manager part of the problem. The fans in the bleachers agree. Kay and Schlittler put the errors and the losing on the players, while Judge is asking ownership to spend. Owner Hal Steinbrenner makes the call, and he hasn't spoken publicly yet. CBS Sports reports that Cashman and Boone will answer questions at a season-ending press conference in the coming days.

Sources