Aaron Boone's return to Yankees captures harsh reality for Mariners' manager search

The New York Yankees have chosen to keep Aaron Boone, and the general read on the decision is that it's an outrage that was totally expected. Bringing Boone back is a safe play, for reasons that include one that should resonate with the Seattle Mariners:

With the MLB lockout looming, this is a lousy time to be in the market for a new skipper.

Some were outright lobbying for Boone to get the boot following the Yankees' sweep at the hands of the Tampa Bay Rays in the ALDS. There were also team legends airing frustrations with the modern culture of the Yankees, which is ultimately impossible to disconnect from the manager.

So, why keep him? Well, there is the career .583 winning percentage. And the eight playoff berths in nine years. And how respected members of the Yankees' clubhouse (most notably including Aaron Judge) have Boone's back. He also had a year left on his contract, so perhaps Hal Steinbrenner and Brian Cashman resorted to "Might as well" thinking.

Yet even if the Yankees aren't saying so publicly, local and national media outlets alike have identified the lockout as an obvious reason to keep Boone. Once the lockout goes into effect on December 1, there will be a communications blackout between team personnel and players until there's a new CBA and the lockout is lifted. Suboptimal for any new manager, and doubly so for anyone who would have had to get into the good graces of guys like Judge in the wake of Boone's exit.

The Yankees chose not to start a clock that is rapidly ticking for the Mariners

To be clear, none of the above should be mistaken for an argument that the Mariners would have been better off keeping Dan Wilson in their manager's chair. He deserved to lose his job, and the nice thing about not making the playoffs is that it allowed the Mariners to get a head start on searching for his replacement. The Yankees did not have that luxury with Boone.

All the same, we're now less than six weeks from the lockout and the resulting communications blackout, and the Mariners still don't have a new manager. The process may not resolve itself today, tomorrow or before the end of the week. According to Jim Bowden of The Athletic, the Mariners are "hoping" to have a new manager by the end of October.

If so, the new skipper is only going to have four weeks to get to know the organization and his new players. It's a tall order. Even if Mariners players are more receptive to a new manager than Yankees players might have been, they have notably stressed communication as a key factor for their next manager. For that, a long stretch where communication will literally be banned is not ideal.

The elephant in the room is whether the Mariners might have benefited from firing Wilson earlier. It's hard to imagine how it would have made things worse for a team that finished 76-86. Whoever they chose as their interim manager might have proven to be a good fit, a la Chad Tracy, Andy Green and Don Mattingly in Boston, New York and Philadelphia, respectively. If not, at least they could have started their replacement planning process earlier.

Sans some sort of time machine, we'll never know. The only hope now is twofold: that the Mariners get it right, and that the lockout somehow proves to be much ado about nothing.

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