Aaron Boone came down out of the broadcast booth last season and into a different kind of seat, as hot a seat as there is in professional sports, managing the New York Yankees. Boone, who once hit one of the most famous home runs in Yankees history -- against the Red Sox in the bottom of the 11th of Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series -- was now asked to manage the Yanks to the World Series the way he’d hit them there once.

The Yankees had come as close as you could come to their first World Series since 2009 without getting there the year before, when Joe Girardi was still the manager. They were ahead of the Astros, 3-2, in the 2017 ALCS, having just won three straight games at Yankee Stadium. Then they stopped hitting when the series went back to Minute Maid Park. The Yanks didn’t survive Games 6 and 7. Neither did Girardi.

At that point, Brian Cashman, New York's general manager, took a very big swing himself on the guy who’d made that big October swing against the Red Sox years prior. The Yankees proceeded to win 100 games last season, but they couldn’t get past the Red Sox in the playoffs. Rather than making it back to the Fall Classic, they backed up a round instead. As soon as the season was over, people were anxious to see how Boone would do in Season 2.

“Even for someone as bright as Aaron,” Joe Torre said Monday morning, “he found out when you make that move down from the booth, the game gets a lot quicker. And guess what else? You can’t say, ‘Let’s go to commercial.’ You’ve got to stay ahead of it.”

Torre had done plenty of broadcasting work before he became the Yankees' manager in 1996. But he had also managed the Mets, Braves and Cardinals. Of course, all Joe Torre did once he got to the Yanks was make history, winning four World Series in five years, as historic a streak as anything the Yankees had seen since winning five World Series in a row from 1949-53. In the process, Torre was more than just the Yankees' manager. He was one of the very best and most valuable leaders in all of sports.

Torre knows more than most about the stage at Yankee Stadium, about the city in which Aaron Boone works, about the seat Boone now occupies. He knows about the job, one Boone has done rather brilliantly one-quarter of the way into his second season, having seen 16 guys and some of his very biggest stars on the injured list so far.

“I spoke to him a couple of weeks ago,” Torre, who is now MLB’s chief baseball officer, said Monday. “And I told him that what I thought the best thing about what he’s been doing is that I can see him going on his instincts. In a situation like he’s been in, you have to combine your feel for the game with the analytics. As important as the numbers are, this is still a people business.”

Then Joe Torre chuckled and said, “And man, has he been doing what he’s been doing with a lot of new people.”

Aaron Judge is hurt, and there is no telling when he will fully recover from a left oblique injury. Giancarlo Stanton has been out with a strained left shoulder, though he is getting closer to a return to the Yankees, with a rehab assignment in Class A Tampa set to begin Monday night. Miguel Andújar, one of the kid “booster rockets” about whom Cashman spoke last season, is gone for this season because of surgery to repair a torn labrum in his right shoulder. Didi Gregorius had Tommy John surgery on his right elbow last season and is still recovering. Luis Severino -- he was Boone’s ace last season, even if he didn’t pitch like one in the playoffs against the Red Sox -- might not be back until midsummer, if then. Aaron Hicks, the starting center fielder, just rejoined New York's lineup this weekend.

With all that, and all the other injuries, through Sunday’s rout of the Rays, Boone’s Yankees had gone 20-7 after an 8-10 start, vaulting them to first place in the AL East.

Cashman has helped Boone mightily and consistently, adding guys like Gio Urshela, Cameron Maybin and even Kendrys Morales, who showed up last week and immediately began hitting home runs. But Boone has done some job managing his team, even if it hasn’t been the team he thought he’d be managing at the start of the spring.

“I know people talk about October,” Torre said. “It’s the Yankees. They’re always gonna judge you on October. But the playoffs are always going to be a crapshoot, whomever is managing the team. We were lucky enough when I got there to have all that early speed in the late '90s. But even then, I knew what a crapshoot it all was. I knew there were going to be speed bumps at that time of year. And obviously later there were.”

Torre also spoke about Boone’s high baseball IQ as a player. He talked with great admiration about the work Boone has done over the last month especially. Out of everybody watching the job Boone has done with the Yankees this year, perhaps Joe Torre appreciates it best. He knows the job, so he knows what he is seeing. And what he is really seeing is this: No one is doing a better managing job this season than Aaron Boone.