Just a few days after New York Yankees fans were calling for him to be yeeted off the roster entirely, Devin Williams has started looking like ... well, a lot like Devin Williams. The righty got the call in the eighth inning of Friday's 3-0 win over the Tampa Bay Rays, his third appearance since being stripped of the closer's role by manager Aaron Boone. And he's yet to allow so much as a single hit in any of them, mowing through the bottom three in Tampa's order in this most recent outing.
Granted, it's a small sample size, and he still has a lot of work to do to win back the trust he lost while posting an 11.25 ERA across his first 10 outings in pinstripes. But with increased life on his fastball and much better feel for his famed airbender, this is looks much more like the shutdown guy the Yankees thought they were getting over the winter. Not that Boone is surprised: In the Yankees skipper decided to take this opportunity to deliver a message to all the fans and media members who doubted him in his darkest moments.
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Aaron Boone let's everyone know there's no more room on the Devin Williams bandwagon
And things did get pretty dark there for a minute, so much so that Williams was being booed in his home ballpark while Yankees fans openly chanted for Luke Weaver while he was on the mound. So you can forgive Boone if, now that Williams is back on track, he's a little frustrated by how quickly everyone was willing to abandon ship.
Asked after Friday's win about what, if any, difference he's seeing with Williams right now, Boone looked irritated that he was even being made to answer the question.
"The guy's great," Boone said. "That didn't go away because he had a couple bad outings in a new environment."
Of course, "a couple bad outings" is slightly underselling just how ugly Williams' performance was over the season's first few weeks. But they were just that: the first few weeks of a very, very long season. Williams got temporarily demoted because he wasn't getting the job done, but it was silly to think that he'd transformed from arguably the best reliever in baseball into a scrub over the course of one offseason.
But then, this is how baseball works, especially in the Bronx. Fans are prisoners of the moment, unable to take the long view of a 162-game season; coughing up one game that should've been a win is a grave sin, and doing it multiple times is high treason. It didn't matter that the odds pointed to Williams being fine in the long run, especially as the weather warmed up; someone needed to be blamed, and lit up on talk radio.
Boone understands how this game works more than just about anyone — he's survived as Yankees manager for a long time now, after all. But that doesn't mean he has to like it, especially not at the expense of one of his most important players.