Former Kansas City Royals manager Tony Muser was an old-school grouch who famously said his players should drink less milk and more tequila. He was fired in 2002. Tony Pena predicted his team would win the division; he then jumped into a locker room shower in full uniform. He was fired in 2005. Buddy Bell was so jaded he told reporters after a game that he never said it can’t get any worse, because it always did. He was fired in 2007. Trey Hillman’s pregame routine included a light unicycle ride along the outfield warning track, presumably his way of avoiding the clubhouse, where his players openly mocked him. He was fired in 2010.
Then, along came Ned Yost. When the Royals hired Yost as their manager, he seemed destined to become Numb Ned, the inspiration and star of the #Yosted Twitter hash tag, aficionado of the first-inning bunt, and enthusiast of the hunch pitching change. Early on, Yost followed the path his predecessors had carved out: he lost games, bristled when reporters questioned his decisions, lost some more games, said weird but bizarrely philosophical things about baseball (“There is no third baseman tree!”), and… uh… lost some more games.
Yost played his part perfectly, even when the Royals started to win games in the second half of the 2014 season. A series of late-season managerial blunders almost cost the Royals a spot in the postseason but, for the first time since 1985, the Royals did make it to October, facing off against the Oakland A’s and Jon Lester in a wild card one-game winner-take-all playoff. Nursing a one-run lead in the sixth inning, Yost played his hunch and put Yordano Ventura, a rookie starter with essentially zero relief appearances, in against Oakland’s Brandon Moss. Moss crushed a fastball into the seats, putting the A’s up two runs, and then scored two more. It seemed Yost would fulfill his destiny to become Numb Ned, and that soon the Royals would be looking for their next manager.
And then, something curious happened. Facing insurmountable odds, Numb Ned stopped being so numb. Or at least his hunches, bunt calls, and optimism started to pay off. The Royals came back to beat the A’s in an epic twelve-inning circus, barreled through the Angels and Orioles in sweeping fashion, and came within a Madison Bumgarner of beating the San Francisco Giants and winning the World Series.
Now, a quarter of the way into the 2015 season, Yost’s Royals, despite numerous injuries and suspensions, occupy first place. Decisions that looked fated to become #Yosted hash tag one-liners have worked to perfection (batting hacker Mike Moustakas second? Only Yost could have predicted he was the second coming of Wade Boggs). The Royals play the game with a reckless, and sometimes arrogant, attitude that can only be a reflection of the guy who manages them.
Maybe Ned Yost is numb; perhaps his hunches and small-ball tendencies will run the Royals out of luck and out of the 2015 postseason. But for now, Ned Yost is the prefect manager for arguably the American League’s best team. And with such poor competition coming before him, Yost is already the best Royals manager in a generation.
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