Aaron Boone, the passive-aggressive manager of the New York Yankees, relies heavily or repetitively on what is generically known as filler words, or discourse markers, during post-game press conferences.

As in the 2025 MLB season, just for fun — although fun may not be the precise operative term — this blog is tracking Boone’s “interesting” communications style after a loss, particularly now that the Yankees have hit a rough patch in the second half of June 2026.

Subconsciously or not, Boone (a.k.a. Boonie, in keeping with the MLB tradition of adding “ie” for nicknames) relies heavily on those distracting and/or equivocating filler or buffer words/phrases.

These generally constitute a holding pattern or gap-filler before he, or some similarly situated person, utters the next sentence.

[Parenthetically, Boonie frequently refers to his players with the ie convention, which is cringe.]

Everyone uses filler words to some degree, but Boone is such an “awesome” public speaker that he has elevated the tendency to nearly performance art.

As you can see from the pie chart below, which again reflects his elucidation after Yankees losses only, Ya Know continues to dominate, but Obviously is making a strong move to override I Mean.

The Other category primariiy includes I feel like or I felt like.

This pie chart will be revised as the MLB season moves forward. Check back for updates.

As a footnote, these totals are somewhat of an approximation.

They are compiled from the portion of the press conference broadcast or streamed by the YES network or subsequently posted on YouTube by YES.

YES frequently cuts away from the Aaron Boone presser, however, and sends it back to the studio before Boone finishes answering questions from the media.

And at times, YES appears to only upload a portion of the presser to YouTube.

In short, many more Ya Knows, I Means, and Obviouslys may have escaped aggregation/curation (and again, wins aren’t included in this compilation at all).

It’s worth mentioning, too, that the Boone fillers can be deployed in the stealth mode, so it’s necessary to listen very closely to what he’s saying during the pressers, as painful as that can be.

Separately, it insufferable enough that the sports media sounds like they’re rhetorically walking on eggshells when posing questions to the Yankees manager.

Boone makes it worse by tending to be an excuse machine for his team’s poor play when it occurs.

For example (and paraphrasing here), if a pitcher has a bad outing, it’s because he had good stuff, but threw one or two bad pitches and/or left a few over the zone, etc. If Yankees batters fail to drive in runs, they nonetheless hit the ball hard but directly at an opposing fielder. If the Yankees defense makes an error, it’s because the ball took a bad hop. Rinse and repeat.

It’s commendable that Boone backs up his players, but he takes it to the next level, which suggests, e.g., that the front-office, analytics-nerd cohort rather than the manager is in charge.

More often than not, the field manager throughout MLB has become just a figurehead.

This blog is tracking Boone’s excuses to some extent, so check back for a compilation of the “best” ones.

Since the American League Least is so mediocre, the Yankees are almost guaranteed to make the playoffs, a scenario which is understandably quite annoying for fans of every other MLB team, including those organizations that aren’t big spenders on free agents and whatnot.

For the television and streaming networks, moreover, only the Yankees and the Los Angeles Dodgers seem to have any relevancy.

The MLB post-season tournament is such a crapshoot, though, so Aaron Boone — with or despite all his pandering and tedious corporate speak — may end up having the last laugh.