In 1989, the college rock band Too Much Joy released a cautionary song called “Bums.” “Making fun of bums,” they sang, “bad karma thing to do.” If this is correct then it also almost certainly applies to rooting for someone to lose their job and thereby possibly join the ranks of the downwardly mobile. This poses a bit of a trap, because no doubt there are karmic exceptions for those who use their jobs to harm others, but the whole problem with Yankees manager Aaron Boone is that he’s harmless. What in other contexts would be a virtue is, in the dugout, a massive fault.

It’s tedious, this repetition of a milquetoast manager and good but flawed teams, but the Yankees will be serving the same breakfast again next year. Whenever baseball is next played, Boone will join the list of managers who have been employed by the same team for 10 or more consecutive seasons (beginning in 1900). As Sparky Anderson once pointed out, there are reasons for changing managers even when his results have been perfectly acceptable. He didn’t say familiarity breeds contempt; he said they just get sick of looking at your face, but the meaning is the same. Similarly, a manager who delivers a solid but stagnant product might be valuable in some contexts, but invigoration requires a change for a simple self-evident, almost childish reason: If he coulda, he woulda, but he hasn’t, so he can’t.

That said, it’s not clear that innovation is something that’s even required of managers these days. That it isn’t being asked of the Yankees manager seems obvious from the attempt to give him plug-and-play rosters which are then allowed to drag the team downwards when they don’t work out. Consider third base, a position that didn’t work out for either the Yankees (.215/.271/.358) or the Mariners (.197/.288/.294). For the M’s, the primary problem was their best options kept getting hurt. For the Yankees it was that they didn’t have a best option. The Mariners flailed at the problem, giving six different players at least 10 starts at the hot corner. The Yankees persisted with the McMahon/Amed Rosario platoon except for a couple of brief periods in which McMahon was on the IL. The substitute was José Caballero, a player who enlarges himself in small doses but shrinks with more exposure. That was it. That was all they tried. Was the wide-eyed terror Boone’s, Brian Cashman’s, or both?

Given just how many managers there have been since the start of the 20^th century and how few of them have been granted Boone’s sort of tenure, it’s worth looking at the divergent CVs of those who have received it. First, here are the 24 ten-year men who won at least a single World Series and the year of their tenure in which they won it: