Dodgers' Dave Roberts Says Only Yankees' Aaron Boone Can Relate to Him in MLB

New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone (17) and Los Angeles Dodgers manager Dave Roberts (30) hug before game three of the 2024 MLB World Series at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 28, 2024. | Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts and New York Yankees manager Aaron Boone both grew up in Southern California. They attended rival colleges in Los Angeles — Roberts went to UCLA, Boone to USC — and played opposite each other in the Pac-10 from 1992-94.

Boone was chosen in the third round of the 1994 MLB Draft by the Cincinnati Reds. Roberts went in the 28th round to the Detroit Tigers that same year. Their major league careers overlapped almost perfectly, too: Boone retired with the Houston Astros in 2009, Roberts with the San Francisco Giants in 2008.

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Flash forward to 2025, and the two men occupy similar positions among MLB managers — a small brotherhood to begin with. Being the manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees place them alone in the limelight on an already bright stage.

"He's the one person that can really appreciate what I go through, and I him."

Dave Roberts speaks on his relationship with Yankees manager Aaron Boone and sharing the challenge of leading a "World Series or bust" team.

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"Maybe the guy in the other dugout last October is the only (manager) who can really relate: yankees have the resources, they're supposed to get to the World Series," Bob Costas said in an interview with Roberts on MLB Network that aired this week.

"(Boone) is the one person who can really appreciate what I go through, and I him," Roberts said. "And so, going against one another last year in the World Series I think was great for baseball, great for us, our relationship, and I'll never forget even after that Game 5, he came over and met me in the concourse, and we embraced and talked. He congratulated me."

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"If everything goes well, the players get the credit. And if things go bad, it just falls on the manager, and that's the way it always is. I can really sympathize with him."

Perhaps that's true of managers in every baseball market, but the noise is amplified whenever New York and Los Angeles are involved. Their seats are always a little hotter, their decisions a little more scrutinized.

It's the expected price to pay for managers whose teams run two of MLB's highest payrolls each year. Roberts admitted in a September 2024 interview that the burden of expectations "takes the fun out of it a little bit.”

Perhaps Boone would agree.

Appointed the Yankees' manager in 2018, Boone won 100 games in each of his first two seasons, and got the team back to the World Series last year to end a 15-year drought. His .582 regular season winning percentage is a tick behind Hall of Famer Earl Weaver's (.583).

Yet not a season has passed without some fans calling for his firing. If that sounds familiar to Dodger fans, Roberts knows why.

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