Whoops! Yankees' Boone mistakenly changed pitchers with no one warming up
One of the main criticisms the New York Yankees faced when they hired Aaron Boone this winter was that the rookie manager might find himself over his head from a tactical standpoint.
It's a good thing for Boone, then, that these Grapefruit League games don't count for anything.
Boone made his first mistake in the dugout during Saturday's contest against the Mets, and it probably left him a little red in the face afterwards. Yankees reliever Dellin Betances had finished his day's work in the fourth inning and immediately adjourned to the clubhouse, with Adam Warren scheduled to take over in the fifth. The only problem was that when Boone officially made the pitching change, Warren wasn't wasn't warming up - and that forced the Yankees to have Betances scramble back into uniform.
By rule, because Warren wasn't warming up when he was called to pitch, Boone's error forced Betances to pitch to one more batter.
"I was talking to the guys, getting undressed, and I think Warren wasn't ready. They came in and said, 'Can you please go back out?'" Betances told Peter Botte of the New York Daily News. "I put my stuff back on.
"It was just kind of awkward going back out, but we got through it."
"I thought I was going to (warm up), but then we never heard (from the dugout), so I never started warming up," Warren said.
Making things even more embarrassing for the rookie skipper was that this all happened as Boone was doing an in-game interview on the Yankees' TV broadcast.
Boone then stonewalled about the screw-up. “We had issues.” Terry Bevington of the White Sox did this once in a real game. Signaled to the bullpen, got to the mound, nothing happened. Nobody was warming.
— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) March 10, 2018
Boone acknowledged his gaffe afterwards, calling it a "miscommunication" that he said won't ever happen once the games begin to count in April.
"I feel like it was pretty aberrational, if that’s a word," Boone said. "It was an inning that I was on with the booth upstairs and just the rhythm of spring training. I don't see that being a situation that would really happen in a real game. I just think the timing of getting all the relievers in was a little out of whack.
"But it was a little weird. All of a sudden I have to take off the headset (and ask), 'Where's our pitcher?'"