Ned Yost poised to pass Dick Howser, Whitey Herzog for wins by a Royals manager

A Ned Yost story.

This is Oct. 27 of last year, and he is about to manage the latest in a monthlong string of most important games of his life. The Royals are in the World Series, something nobody could’ve imagined even a month ago. He is in the World Series, something nobody could’ve imagined, well, ever, all the way back to when he was a career backup catcher who got his first hit five months after his first big-league game.

Yost has been telling people that he is the same as he ever was, but anyone who’s spent time around him knows that’s not exactly true, especially in front of cameras. Something flipped within him when his guys made that epic comeback in the Wild Card Game. He is … funny. Comfortable. Self-deprecating, even.

But now the Royals have lost two in a row, and trail the Giants three games to two. One more loss will end their season. This is exactly the kind of spot Yost has often gone tense, and people are watching how he’ll handle this. Not just the reporters. He doesn’t care much about that. But his players. He cares deeply about that, and he knows they’re watching, too.

When he took this job in Kansas City, Yost promised himself he would stay positive. He would smile. He would never lose confidence, and if he ever did, he wouldn’t let anyone know. He has had to fake it at times, probably more than he’ll ever admit, but right now there is an easy confidence about him, like he just sat down at his favorite restaurant.

“Because I think we’re going to win,” he says.

The Royals prove him right, winning a blowout, 10-0, forcing a seventh game of the World Series. The Royals lost the next night, of course, but along the way Yost went from a dunce in a national newspaper’s headline to manager of the American League champions.

It is the biggest accomplishment of a professional life spent in baseball, but here comes one more. Yost is one victory behind Dick Howser, the first man to have his number retired by the Royals. Eight more wins and he passes Whitey Herzog, the 20th manager inducted to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

The first reaction is to scoff at Yost’s inclusion in that company. Howser won the Royals’ only World Series championship. Herzog won two pennants and a World Series in St. Louis. Yost has never won a division.

But, whatever. Yost isn’t much for reflecting at the moment. He has a job to do, one that he asked only for this year and next to accomplish, and he’s going to attack it with the same relentless spirit that got him this far. That’s what people around him see and, come to think of it, that’s what people who know all three men say they have in common.

“There’s a heck of a lot more similarities than disparities,” says John Schuerholz, who worked with Herzog and Howser in Kansas City, and with Yost in Atlanta. “Their personalities are as different as A, B, and C, but what makes them great are just shades or variations off the same elements — of leadership, communication, clarity of messaging, all of those things.”

The Royals’ run of success has changed their franchise history in so many ways. The TV ratings. The packed stadium. The All-Star votes. Now comes one more, a man whose last name was turned into a synonym for a mistake by some fans, now just eight away from more wins than anyone else in franchise history.

A Whitey Herzog story.

Dennis Leonard is on the mound. This is early in his career, but the Royals already know they have something special. He had good enough stuff, particularly a nasty slider and a fastball that darted into the fists of right-handed hitters. But, mostly, he had belief.

Today, they’d call it swagger. Leonard would go on to complete more games than any Royals pitcher, and that was as much attitude as arm. Al Oliver compared Leonard’s competitiveness to Bob Gibson.

So one night, Leonard gets in a little late-inning jam, and sees Herzog come out to the mound. He knows what’s coming. The pitching coach comes out to calm you down. The manager comes out to replace you. So Leonard is steaming, won’t look his manager in the eye, and instead of handing him the ball flips it in the air.

Herzog was easy to play for. Leonard knew that, even back then. He let catchers call the game, baserunners steal when they wanted, and batters to call for a hit-and-run when they thought it would work. He even promised the coaches would never go to the hotel bar after games. The players could have it to themselves.

But Herzog was easy to play for only to a point. Leonard changed the calculus when he flipped that ball, and damn if Herzog didn’t make that clear when he got back to the dugout.

“I don’t think you can print what he said,” Leonard says. “But, guess what? I never did that again.”

This is Herzog, all charisma and chutzpah, a man naturally gifted in the art of knowing just when to put ballplayers in their place. When he first met Frank White, for instance, the conversation was fairly simple.

“If you can’t bunt, if you can’t hit-and-run, and you can’t play defense, then you can’t play for me,” Herzog told White.

But Herzog trusted his guys, too, and for the most part stayed out of their way. He told them to listen to the scouting report, but make their own decisions based on what they saw in each game.

The Royals won the first four games he managed in 1975, and 12 of the first 15. That was a good team, with a young George Brett and Steve Busby, and an old Harmon Killebrew and Cookie Rojas. The Royals made their first postseason in Herzog’s first full year, and then the next season, in 1977, won what is still a franchise record 102 games.

Herzog treated everyone differently, and made no apologies for it. What works for Hal McRae is different than what works for Paul Splittorff.

Once or twice a summer, when Amos Otis would go in a slump, Herzog had his wife bake Otis’ favorite cake. Worked every time.

A Dick Howser story.

This is 1983, and George Brett is hurt. It’s a broken toe, suffered, bizarrely, rushing to the TV to see Bill Buckner hit. Brett will miss about three weeks. White had batted seventh the game before, and, in a traditional sense, is not as good a replacement for Brett’s spot in the order as McRae or Willie Aikens or perhaps Otis.

But Howser always liked White. Others saw White as a second baseman with hands so reliable you’d trust him to hold dynamite, but Howser saw more. Howser saw a good hitter, too, and thought this might be a chance to get him going. So he put White in the third spot, trusting that he could handle the pressure and figuring he might get some better pitches in front of McRae and Aikens.

White drove in a run in each of his first 11 games in that spot, and the next year his slugging percentage jumped 39 points. Over the next three years, only Steve Balboni hit more home runs for the Royals.

“He single-handedly turned my career around from an offensive standpoint,” White says. “He saw more in me that way than any other manager I played for.”

Howser was a contrast to Herzog. He was introspective, not brash. He played and coached in college, and especially in the context of the day, came across as dignified and studious. He was a grinder, even by big-league standards, and so smart. His emotions stayed balanced, usually, but those who spent time around him also remember what Schuerholz calls “his German hardheadedness.”

Howser didn’t spend too much time on strategy, and he never called meetings. Dan Quisenberry called him a distant general. But he was there, always, relentless, an irreplaceable part of the franchise’s greatest moment.

The World Series title in 1985 changed how everyone on that team is remembered, none more than Howser. That team treaded around .500 for much of the year, right up to the All-Star break. They were remarkably unremarkable, at least when you look at the numbers.

Only one team in the American League scored fewer runs, and the rest of the lineup was so ordinary that Brett was walked intentionally 31 times. That was the highest total in the league since Ted Williams.

But especially in those days, teams tended to take on the personality of their manager, and even now you will hear Brett and White and McRae and the rest of them talk about the unfailing, unshakable, and quiet confidence of that team. They got that straight from Howser, who would usually face a setback with what became something of a rallying cry.

Batter strikes out with the bases loaded? (Spit) on it, the next guy will get it done.

Team blows a lead in the ninth inning? (Spit) on it, we’ll get ’em tomorrow.

Team goes down three games to one in the 1985 World Series? (Spit) on it, we’ll win the next three.

“He never did panic,” McRae says. “Not one time.”

It is much easier to compare Howser to Herzog than it is Yost to either. Those other guys managed many of the same players, and while in different stages, each took over a team ready to win immediately.

When Yost was hired, the Royals were trying to dig their way out of punchlines. Dusty Hughes and Blake Wood pitched in Yost’s first game. Scott Podsednik led off, and Yuniesky Betancourt played shortstop. Eric Hosmer was in Class A Wilmington.

Most of what Yost and those other men have in common is what you would say about a lot of managers. He cares about his players. Works hard. He’s tough, determined, and ultra competitive.

His wife doesn’t bake cakes for the players, like Herzog’s, but you should see the way they laugh when he makes an inside joke. He moved Mike Moustakas up in the order, like Howser did with White, the most obvious in a defining line of decisions he’s made based on extraordinary confidence in his guys.

But there is something else connecting Yost to Howser and Herzog, something both irrelevant to this Royals team and important in ways that transcend whether they can beat the Rangers this weekend.

McRae played 599 games for Herzog, and 632 more for Howser. Only Brett, White, and Willie Wilson played more games for the Royals in those days.

For people of a certain age, McRae is inextricably linked to teams that won so many games, but at some point after his retirement — first from playing, then from coaching and managing — he lost interest in baseball. Forty-five years is a long time to be working in the game, and when he was done, he was done. Time to turn the page, he says.

But then something happened, something he didn’t expect. He started hearing more and more about the Royals last year, particularly in August and then September and of course October. He decided to tune in, the first baseball he’d watched in years, and dang if they didn’t remind him of the teams he played on.

“Rekindled my interest in the game,” McRae says now. “They don’t scare you, but you know they’re capable of beating you. They know exactly who they are, how they win, what they need to do to win ballgames, and that’s a big advantage.”

That interest is more about Lorenzo Cain and Alex Gordon and Mike Moustakas and Eric Hosmer than it is about Yost, of course, but Yost is the manager.

He’s the daily voice of the club, and the one who stuck by each of those players when some thought patience should’ve expired. That has been Yost’s greatest triumph, a confidence that’s eventually proven warranted at every turn, and it is the biggest reason he has lasted long enough to be passing the two greatest managers in club history.

It’s one of many reasons the team is where it is now, not just competing for another playoff spot but doing it in a style that’s made fans of people who otherwise would not be watching baseball — including a certain lifer who now makes his home in Florida.

“Any time I can, every chance I get,” McRae says, one more link between Yost’s team today and the club’s glorious past.

This story was originally published June 6, 2015 at 9:22 PM with the headline "Ned Yost poised to pass Dick Howser, Whitey Herzog for wins by a Royals manager."