The visiting manager’s office at Dodger Stadium is about the size of a small laundry room, and with nine broadcasters in this room before Game 2 of the World Series, Aaron Boone had to step around his toes when he entered. all,” the New York Yankees manager said kindly.

About 18 hours earlier, Los Angeles Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman had belted the first walk-off grand slam in World Series history, an early blow to the Yankees in a best-of-seven series. Boone was asked how he was doing. “I feel good,” he replied flatly.

Yankees fans around the world denounced Boone’s bullpen choices, his baseball acumen and his stewardship of the team – as they have often done in his seven seasons as manager.

After Game 1, Derek Jeter, Boone’s former teammate and now Fox analyst, was among those doing the ripping, questioning Boone’s decision to eliminate Gerrit Cole after 88 pitches. Others criticized Boone’s choice of Nestor Cortes – who surrendered Freeman’s grand slam in his first appearance in 37 days – over reliever Tim Hill.

In his office before Game 2, Boone reviewed his choices, essentially going over his reasoning — and even expressing his own doubts about a decision that wasn’t really raised by fans or media. He wondered if he should have asked Luke Weaver, who had collected 19 pitches at the end of the ninth inning, to at least start the bottom of the 10th inning. “That’s the one…” before his voice trailed off.

With the Yankees now trailing 2-0 against the Dodgers in the World Series, it seems inevitable that when Boone is introduced for Game 3 at Yankee Stadium on Monday, there will be some boos. It will likely be repeated when he walks onto the field to influence the pitching changes. Long before Boone’s tenure, this was the reality for every Yankees manager or general manager. The mob reflex reflects the reaction of an icon of the franchise, the late owner George Steinbrenner: If you lose, every choice you make is destroyed.

The intensity of the response increases the inherent pressure of these front-oriented Yankees jobs, and the cumulative effect can bend or even distort a personality. Billy Martin’s health seemed to deteriorate during his five separate tenures as Yankees manager. When Joe Torre’s book about the Yankees years was published, the criticism of Cashman hardened the general manager – forcing him to do the job more forcefully, instead of trying to calm down, as he often did with Torre. Joe Girardi, Boone’s predecessor, felt responsible for everyone around him because of the looming possibility of layoffs. Looking back, he says he may have put too much pressure on himself.

But some of Boone’s colleagues, as well as his brother Bret, say they believe Aaron has remained largely unchanged over the years in this managerial slow cooker, with his typically positive attitude and determined companionship even at the worst moments.

“It’s almost like he was born to do this,” Cashman said. “He spreads the credit and takes the blame. He keeps a cool head in the dugout, because of his behavior. … This job will harden you and make you do things you wouldn’t do. Sometimes you you along to get along, and you That never happened. He’s still true to who he is. He’s the exact same person we hired.

In a telephone interview before the World Series, Boone said, “I always thought I could handle that going in. I still feel the same way. That’s not to say there haven’t been some tough moments.” or hard times you’re going through – moments when it gets a little lonely. But overall it’s been incredibly rewarding, and for the most part I love it.

Girardi remembers that when he served as bench coach for Joe Torre, he thought he had a feel for the challenges of being a Yankees manager.

“But you really don’t until you’ve actually experienced it,” he said, recalling his stint from 2008-2017 – a period when they last won a championship. “And I think you have to go through both sides to really understand it — the good and the bad. The more you go through it, you understand the pressure the players are under — all the coverage they get — and you understand how important it is to be positive and support the players no matter what happens.”

Because while playing a sport full of failure, the Yankees are often shrouded in negative feedback. They will be cheered at the start of Game 3, and that fervor from Yankees fans could rub off on the opponents. But when the going gets tough for the Yankees, frustration flows freely in the stands — and the person in charge of the lineup and pitching choices will hear it. That was once Girardi, and now it’s Aaron Boone.

“I think he’s doing a great job because he’s always under scrutiny,” Girardi said. “Because that’s the job in New York, unless you win a championship. You could overachieve with a team that people thought was going to win 90 games, and you win 92-93 games – and the answer is, ‘Yes , but they did ‘I’m not going to win a World Series.’”

Cashman said he’s not sure how much Boone listens to talk radio, or whether he absorbs criticism from fans and media. “I don’t feel like it’s guiding him in any way,” he said. “He puts everything he has into (the work) and then lets it go.”

Bret Boone said, “He’s the same guy… He hasn’t changed a bit. As a 51-year-old man, he’s the same person he was when he was a kid.”

Aaron has been ejected by referees more times than any of his peers in recent years, and when these outbursts occur, their mother will call Bret and ask him, “What’s your brother doing?” They’ll laugh together as they see him react through the lens of time the way he did as a kid when Bret — four years older than Aaron — would rob his little brother of Wiffle Ball glory by treating a home run as a foul ball. . Aaron would react the same way he reacts to referees: indignant, with an outward expression that he has been unfairly wronged.

Bret Boone sees a lot of his father in Aaron. Bob Boone, now 76, was respected by teammates during his long career as a player and manager in the big league for being straightforward and reliable.

“High character, honest to a degree,” said Bret, who recalled friends in the game asking him why Aaron Boone, as a player in the winter of 2004, had offered to the Yankees that he had blown out his knee playing basketball — a breach of his contract. “That’s just the way he is,” Bret replied.

Bret said that, like their father, Aaron goes to work very early in the day – “He’s a grinder, just like Dad” – and Bret encourages his brother to get some distance. “Sometimes you have to be late at the yard,” Bret said, “and throw it against the wall and just let the players play.”

But there’s another reason Boone arrives early. He holds being in the park with his colleagues to solve problems. Brad Ausmus is at the end of his first year as the Yankees’ bench coach, and before that he didn’t really know Boone beyond the pleasantries he exchanged as an opponent earlier in his life.

During spring training, he shared an apartment with Boone, and he remembers Boone greeting him over coffee in the morning with the familiar fan chant: “LET’S GO YANKEES.” When they drove to the ballpark together, the music was always the same. “Eighties,” Ausmus said. “It’s always the ’80s.” Stevie Nicks, the Pretenders, Don Henley. Boone has long maintained that if he were left on a desert island and could only listen to one band, it would be Hall and Oates. When Boone drives his daughter Bella, she will eventually ask him hopefully, “Can we listen to my music now?”

In describing Boone, Ausmus’ observation was simple: “He’s kind of a weirdo,” Ausmus said with a laugh.

Boone is friendly and respectful in his conversations with reporters, but the part of him that abhors dishonesty — like those foul balls incorrectly mentioned by his older brother — has occasionally come out. During the American League Championship Series, the Yankees took a lead in the ninth inning of Game 3 against Cleveland when it looked like they were about to take a three-games-to-none lead. A reporter asked a question that seemed to suggest that the Yankees’ staff might have assumed they would win the game: “Do you feel like the bench might have felt, ‘We’ve got this in the bag,’ so to say?”

Boone snapped impatiently, “Come on. No. “Do you have this in the bag?” Stop that.’

Boone de facto has a sounding board. His father stays up to watch the Yankees game, and they talked afterward while Aaron unpacks. He invited Joe Torre to spring training and the two exchange texts. He shares conversations with Jim Leyland, who was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame last summer. He will have breakfast with bullpen coach Mike Harkey.

During the meeting with the broadcasters before Game 2, Boone reiterated some of his decisions in that room. He had thought about taking Cole out after the sixth inning, he said, after conversations with Cole, because he felt the pitcher was close to being called out. He stuck with Cole, and after Teoscar Hernandez led off the bottom of the seventh with an eight-pitch at-bat that ended with a single, Boone went to the mound without making a move to the bullpen, tending to remove Cole.

If Cole had backed out and advocated staying in, would Boone have let him in?

“Maybe,” Boone said. But Cole didn’t, so the manager pulled him after 88 pitches — the decision Jeter scrutinized after the Yankees lost.

In these moments, he leans on that sounding board, on his family – and especially on his own sense of self.

“Through everything, even the lowest moments,” Boone said, “I think I have a healthy perspective,” he said.

Nowadays he’ll need it.