Aaron Boone doesn’t buy that World Series exposed any real Yankees weaknesses

Aaron Boone acknowledged that “everyone’s going to have their opinions.”

He heard injured Dodgers reliever Joe Kelly’s, who said the Yankees were “kicking the ball around and playing Yankee defense.”

He surely heard the opinion of Dodgers infielder Miguel Rojas, who said the Yankees’ “weakness was the way they make outs on the bases, the way they didn’t take care of the baseball, [their] lazy defense.”

Media, social and traditional, frequently cited a lack of execution in the details, from baserunning to fielding, as particularly damaging to the Yankees’ World Series hopes.

Boone’s own opinion:

“I think it’s a story that blew up too much and understandably,” the Yankees manager said over Zoom on Monday, speaking publicly for the first time since the club picked up his option for 2025. “We had a really, really tough inning. But I think if you go back throughout the course of the season … we won a lot of games because of little things that we did well over the course of the year.”

The inning he refers to, of course, is the one that will be remembered forever.

The top of the fifth inning of Game 5 of the World Series included a routine fly ball that was dropped by Aaron Judge; a ground ball into the shortstop hole that Anthony Volpe spiked to third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr.; and a squibber off the bat of Mookie Betts that Anthony Rizzo did not charge, relying on Gerrit Cole to cover first base, which he failed to do.

Given a sixth out in the frame, the Dodgers scored five unearned runs to tie the game in their eventual 7-6 win in the World Series clincher.

Boone acknowledged the horrific inning, said the club “didn’t play well enough in the World Series,” but contended that onlookers who watched the 2024 Yankees often would defend the club’s attention to detail.

“I felt like there were a lot of times that we were winning games because of whether it was a big defensive play, whether it was small ball on a given day,” Boone said, before referencing an Anthony Volpe and Austin Wells double-steal that led to Volpe scoring on a ground ball. “Whether it was a Game 4 where we get a double-steal and a contact read at home.

“Those things happened throughout the year on a regular basis.”

FanGraphs rated the Yankees as the worst baserunning team in baseball. By extra-bases taken — how often a baserunner advanced more than one base on a single or more than two bases on a double — the Yankees were second-worst. (Of course, the Yankees being a slower team played a factor.)

Their 45 outs on the bases ranked in the middle of the pack.

Defensively, the Yankees made the seventh-most errors in baseball but were generally rated as slightly above average by most comprehensive defensive metrics (10th in Outs Above Average, 12th in Defensive Runs Saved).

But the mistakes, in baserunning and with the glove, popped up at critical moments.

Giancarlo Stanton was thrown out at home trying to score from second base in Game 3.

The Game 5 calamity also included a catcher’s interference and a balk on a third disengagement.

As became clear in the aftermath, the Dodgers correctly believed the Yankees’ sloppiness would serve as self-sabotage.

Boone chalked up the October miscues to bad moments in a bad series — and not a systemic issue.

“There’s nothing that we don’t lean into heavily and invest a lot in from a detail standpoint, and we’ll continue to do that,” Boone said, “and also try and continue to get better and evolve where we think we need to.”

There does not appear to be any overhaul coming for a team that often relied on its offense in particular to camouflage deficiencies.

Boone, who himself is returning, said the coaching staff will remain “largely intact” with one or two changes that he declined to reveal.

“The bottom line is: We didn’t play as well as we could have,” Boone said.