Ranking Aaron Boone’s best ejections as Yankees manager

Sometimes, the best ejections aren’t the ones where the manager gets boiling mad. Boone’s stern lecture to Ed Hickox in this August tilt with the St. Louis Cardinals was a perfect takedown of a strike zone that had been hurting both teams. And he barely had to curse or raise his voice to get his point across.

The calm, swaggering walk Boone takes to the plate, punctuated by the chewing gum toss, said all he needed to say before he even opened his mouth. He made concise points, illustrated with his gestures where Hickox had been wrong and walked away. Hickox may have only said five or so words the entire time, almost as though he knew exactly how much he’d messed up.

So while this particular ejection might not have had the most views or the juiciest quotes, it’s a perfect way to start these rankings. Aaron Boone will let you know exactly how and when you messed up, and it’s hard for anyone to tell him he’s wrong about it.

4. July 15, 2022 vs. Red Sox

If you’re the manager of the Yankees, you have to get ejected every now and then when you face off against the Boston Red Sox. In a rivalry that historically bitter, it pays to get the guys in the dugout fired up from time to time. And Boone had a rant for the ages when he was thrown out of a heated late-innings battle between the two teams in July of 2022.

A consistent theme of a great Aaron Boone ejection is picking a key phrase and sticking to it. Boone certainly delivered here. “It’s not too late,” was his constant refrain while cussing out umpire D.J. Reyburn.

At one point, he also let Reyburn know Red Sox catcher Christian Vázquez was laughing at him for consistently calling strikes on pitches below the zone. It was a tirade disguised as a motivational speech, which is a Boone specialty.

This wasn’t the most memorable ejection in terms of antics, but it delivers high entertainment value once the lip-reading comes into play. Telling a Major League umpire the baseball equivalent of Robin Williams’ “It’s not your fault,” quote from Good Will Hunting will delight Yankee fans and cinephiles alike. The Red Sox went on to win the game, but Boone won the night.

3. August 7, 2023 vs. White Sox

If you’re making the list based on visible theatrics, this has to be number one. We rely on internet lip readers like Jomboy himself to give us the full context of most Boone ejections. But when the skipper went to berate Laz Diaz for his bad zone in Chicago, everyone saw exactly what he was talking about from the Oscar-worthy performance Boone put on behind the plate.

Any manager can draw a line in the dirt to illustrate how far a pitch was off the plate. But Boone keyed in on Diaz’s exact punch-out call and mimicked it to a T. And all the while, he made one of the funniest, most sarcastic faces you’ll ever see from a man whose job is to take heat from the New York media and fans.

It wasn’t the highest-stakes game and it didn’t deliver the most memorable lines, but one could still easily argue this was Boone’s virtuoso performance. There’s a clear separation between the top three and the rest of the list and this easily could have taken home the crown.

2. Monday vs. Athletics

There has rarely been a more perfect setup for a hot mic situation than Monday’s game against the Athletics. It was a smaller crowd, given that the two teams were playing a day game, and it was also the only MLB game going on at the time.

So when Hunter Wendelstedt had the misfortune of mishearing who told him what a bad job he was doing from the first base side of the field, he instantly became the number one villain on Yankees Twitter.

Though it’s clear Boone didn’t deserve to be ejected here, it may well be remembered as the greatest ejection of his career by the time all is said and done. To be thrown out of a game without opening your mouth is a remarkable accomplishment, or at the very least, a testament to how absurd it is that there are no consequences for an umpire’s decisions. And YES Network did an incredible job of storytelling, continually going back to the replays when they found more context.

Is it recency bias to rank this moment as high as second, or does it deserve to be number one because of its uniqueness? We’ll have to see how it ages, but for now, the top spot has to go to a moment we know will live on forever. That’s why…

1. July 18, 2019 vs. Rays

Everything about this moment was sheer perfection. The hottest of hot mics. Boone’s stern insistence that rookie umpire Brennan Miller “bear down.” DJ LeMahieu’s almost empathetic insistence that the pitch was well outside. Brett Gardner’s sarcastic applause when Miller tossed Boone. And the line that will live on forever, “my guys are f***** savages in that f***** box.”

There’s nothing big leaguers love more than knowing their manager has their back. And not only did the players witness Boone having theirs that day, but so did the entire baseball world, instantly magnifying Boone’s street cred. Getting tossed from the game is supposed to be a punishment, but a smart manager can turn it into a galvanizing moment for the whole team, which is exactly what Boone did that day.

And not only that, but this moment changed everything for the baseball landscape. It launched Jomboy Media as a household name, helping the YouTube channel grow from 2,000 subscribers to over 300,000 in just two months.

It gave the fans a rarely seen insight into the game’s most salacious discussions that are usually seen, but not heard. And perhaps above all, it showed us for the first time what we have come to know en masse: Aaron Boone is the king of getting his money’s worth.