Aaron Boone defends his decision not to walk Shohei Ohtani 

ANAHEIM, Calif. – In a vacuum, the move was defensible and even, unquestionably, the right one.

The Yankees had a 3-1 lead in the seventh inning Monday night against the Angels with Michael King on the mound, a runner on first, two outs and Shohei Ohtani at the plate.

Aaron Boone said, given the situation, he never really thought about intentionally walking Ohtani which, again, in a vacuum, is almost straight from the pages of Baseball 101.

Any manager choosing to put a runner in scoring position, the tying run on first and the go-ahead run at the plate is playing with fire, especially late in the game.

But no good rule is absolute, and if ever a situation presented itself to at the very least consider tossing that particular rule out the window, arguably this was the one.

Because Ohtani, well on his way to becoming a unanimous American League MVP, is in the midst of a stretch that characterizing as “hot” doesn’t come close to adequately describing.  

Every Yankees fan, of course, knows what happened.

King, in his words, got “greedy” with a 1-and-2, 97-mph fastball and Ohtani clubbed it opposite-field to left-center, his MLB-leading 35th homer to tie the score 3-3. The Angels went on to win it in the 10th inning on Michael Stefanic’s two-out, RBI single off lefthander Nick Ramirez.

Asked twice if he thought about walking Ohtani, Boone, who did intentionally walk the DH in the fifth inning to load the bases, multiple times said, “No.”

“Not that spot,'' he said. "Look, I did it in about as unique a spot, first and third, as you can in a tie game. But when we have the two-run lead there, the guy hitting behind him is hitting .330 [Mickey Moniak was hitting .326 coming into the game]. So I wasn’t going to put another runner out at second and the tying run at first and the go-ahead run at the plate with a two-run lead there. Now had he gotten to second and we were behind in the count or something, different story. But, no, not in that [situation].”

On the surface, inarguable reasoning, but the problem in this case was two-fold, starting with this: Ohtani, though mostly terrific all season, has been particularly deadly of late. Going into Monday, the DH/pitcher had hit a ridiculous 18 homers in his previous 30 games and 22 in his last 39 games.

And then there’s this: Though Moniak is having a nice season, as one rival AL coach said Tuesday: “Moniak isn’t exactly Mike Trout hitting [behind Ohtani]. Look, it’s not automatic [to walk Ohtani] but the thought has to at least cross your mind the way he’s hitting. He’s not missing anything.”

According to OptaSTATS, Ohtani has hit as many homers (12) in the seventh inning or later over his past 28 games as any other MLB player has hit total during that time (since June 12). That's the most home runs in the seventh inning or later over a span of 28 games in MLB history.

In some ways, this was a case of the shoe being on the other foot from Boone’s perspective. Boone, who before Tuesday night’s game said he was “comfortable it was the right thing to do” in walking Ohtani, watched opposing team managers go through something similar throughout last season during Aaron Judge’s AL-record 62-homer campaign. Those managers were often second-guessed for pitching to the outfielder, asked some form of the question: “Did you think about walking Judge there?”

Phil Nevin, a close friend of Boone’s who was let go by the Yankees after the 2021 season (he was not a favorite of the club’s powerful analytics department) and who now manages the Angels, did not second-guess Boone.

But in talking about Ohtani’s homer, he sounded the way Boone often did last season after yet another big blast by Judge.  

“It was awesome. Just an incredible deal there,” Nevin told reporters. “When your superstar steps up in moments like that and something like that happens, it’s not only what it does for the whole place but what it does for [our] dugout.”

And how crushing it was for the other one.

By Erik Boland

erik.boland@newsday.comeboland11

Erik Boland started in Newsday's sports department in 2002. He covered high school and college sports, then shifted to the Jets beat. He has covered the Yankees since 2009.