Hunter Wendelstedt ejected Aaron Boone five pitches into the New York Yankees’ day game against the Oakland Athletics.
Yankees manager Aaron Boone is no stranger to being ejected from games. The Umpire sent him out early in Monday afternoon’s game against the Athletics in Yankee Stadium. This is his 35th career ejection.
A fan yelled out something, and Wendelstedt sent Boone out for it. This was just five pitches into the game and home plate umpire Hunter Wendelstedt told Boone in no uncertain terms that one more word and he was out.
In another video, which includes NSFW language, Boone can be heard pleading; “I DID NOT SAY ANYTHING, HUNTER!”
The smoking gun here is that a fan in a blue shirt in the front row can be seen yelling something and that is what caused Wendelstedt to run Boone.
“I didn’t even go after Hunter, I was more upset on the appeal,” he said (via YES Network. “I said ‘Hunter you can call it, too’ and he came back at me pretty hard, to which I didn’t respond. I just said, ‘OK,’ went down and it’s embarrassing. It is a bad — it’s embarrassing.”
Boone also said he would reach out to Major League Baseball about the ejection.
“Aaron Boone is the manager of the New York Yankees and is responsible for everything that happens in that dugout,” Wendelstedt said after the game (via MLB.com). “… I don’t want to eject a ballplayer. We need to keep them in the game. That’s what the fans pay to see. Aaron Boone runs the Yankees. What he said was there was a fan right above the dugout. This isn’t my first ejection. In my career, I have never ejected a player or a manager for something a fan has said. I understand that will be part of a story or something like that because that’s what Aaron was portraying. I heard something come from the far end of the dugout, it had nothing to do with his area but he’s the manager of the Yankees. So he’s the one that had to go.”
Wendelstedt also accepted that Boone “probably’’ did not comment.
However, if there was already excessive talking, threatening to remove a manager after “one more word’’ is generally the right call from the umpire. And then Wendelstedt thought he heard another word from Boone. He made a mistake, but it doesn’t feel like he could have undone the ejection once he realized he was wrong.
