Aaron Boone has plenty of reasons to smile when the Yankees head to Wrigley Field. He also has one very good reason to remember his first visit there in a hurry.
Boone said his first trip to the Friendly Confines came in April of 1981, when his father, Phillies catcher Bob Boone, took Aaron and his older brother Bret on a Montreal-to-Chicago road trip before school. Aaron was eight, Bret had just turned 12, and the day did not go smoothly.
“Wrigley was a day game, obviously, and I was out in the outfield, probably literally 20-30 minutes before the game and Bret’s hitting me flyballs with the fungo. He hits one.
I lose it in sun. It hits me in the head.
I’m down. I’m out.
Literally out.
“The Phillies, some of their bullpen guys are starting to come out and they think I’m messing around. I wasn’t. Keith Moreland ends up coming out there and carrying me to the training room.
“What I remember is them saying, ‘Don’t fall asleep. You’ll get a concussion if you fall asleep.’
That’s where we were (in concussion knowledge) in ’81. But, yeah, I lost one in the sun and was down for the count as an eight-year-old and recovering in the training room 10 minutes before game time.”
Even after getting knocked out cold as a kid, Boone never lost his affection for Wrigley.
That part stuck. So did the success he had there as a player. Boone said he liked the place, and the numbers back him up: a .344 batting average with seven home runs in 33 games at Wrigley during his big-league career.
The Yankees’ manager also knows the ballpark has a habit of producing memorable moments. The history between the Yankees and Cubs there is loaded, starting with Babe Ruth’s called shot in Game 3 of the 1932 World Series. Boone brought up the famous blast off Charlie Root, the one that sent the Yankees to a four-game sweep and back-to-back championships, while noting the old debate over whether Ruth truly pointed to center field or was simply gesturing while talking to Cubs players.
Whatever the truth, the result is part of the ballpark’s lore.
The Yankees and Cubs have only met at Wrigley in a handful of years since then. In the 1938 World Series, the Yankees won the first two games in Chicago on the way to baseball’s first three-peat, with Game 2 featuring a late Joe DiMaggio home run off Dizzy Dean.
The next Wrigley meeting between the clubs came in 2003, when the Cubs won the first interleague series there and kept Roger Clemens from collecting career victory No. 300.
In 2017, the teams played an 18-inning game that featured a combined 48 strikeouts. And in 2024, Cubs World Series hero Anthony Rizzo returned to Wrigley with the Yankees.
This weekend adds another chapter. The Yankees are in Chicago for their first full week in the city, which started with a split in a four-game series against the White Sox on the South Side. Now they move to Wrigley for the classic weekend setup: day game, night game, day game.
Boone knows the routine well, and he knows why people love it.
“Always an amazing atmosphere,” he said. “The Friday day game’s great into the Saturday night game … It’s obviously one of the great venues in Major League Baseball.”
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