Ned Yost reflects on Royals’ rise, a vast 90-foot contrast and when 2015 title sunk in
As a recent retiree amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, Ned Yost seldom leaves his Georgia farm these days.
So his hair has sprouted out longer than it has in years, making him feel like he’s “reverting back to the Sixties” at age 65. And that’s part of what makes for an apparent spectacle when he does venture out with double masks applied over his face.
“I walk into a store looking like Jesse James,” he said Monday, laughing and adding that it looks akin to “a hippie bank robber.”
Meanwhile, it’s the honest work of the 700-acre farm that fulfills him. On this day, he woke up at 6 a.m. to sip coffee, then gardened a couple hours before firing up the weedeater around the lake. Then he put up some spikes in response to birds nesting around the front porch, paused for lunch and cranked up the tractor for mowing.
Even in retirement, he still likes to feel by the end of the day that he’s accomplished something. Speaking of which …
Busy as he might be staying, the newfound time and distance from baseball in the first spring since he retired as manager of the Royals has made for some clarity on his greatest professional accomplishment: navigating their rise out of decades of darkness into the supernova burst of 2014 and 2015.
More specifically, together they transformed losing in Game 7 of the World Series the year before into a triumph that captivated the region and reverberated as a statement that sports futility has an expiration date no matter how permanent it can seem.
As exhilarating and reassuring as 2014 was for so many, it proved just a staging area for the transformational achievement.
“The vastness is wider than the Grand Canyon,” he said.
One way of measuring that: Recalling the Kauffman Stadium rally for the Royals the day after the loss to the San Francisco Giants, with Alex Gordon stranded at third base, Yost figured there were maybe 10,000 people there for the consolation occasion.
In 2015, of course, there were hundreds of thousands of people at the parade in Kansas City. Without bogging ourselves down over whatever the discernible actual number was, Yost’s contrast resonates.
“There were 850,000 people in 2015,” he said. “So the difference between 90 feet was 840,000 people. It was crazy to me, the difference, in winning.”
Just as Yost saw coming with the Chiefs after their tantalizingly close grasp on a Super Bowl berth a year before beating the 49ers in February. The perspective Yost called “like a mountain lion (tasting) blood” was something he imparted to Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce and Dustin Colquitt last summer.
In the case of the Royals, the collective soul and clout was bolstered by additions along the journey such as Wade Davis, Kendrys Morales, Edinson Volquez, Alex Rios and others — along with Ben Zobrist and Johnny Cueto midseason — but largely cultivated over years.
By a nucleus of Alex Gordon, Eric Hosmer, Salvador Perez, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain, Yordano Ventura, Alcides Escobar, Greg Holland, Danny Duffy, Kelvin Herrera, Luke Hochevar, Jarrod Dyson, Christian Colon and others who shared so many ups and downs.
Even as each struggled mightily at times, crucial to their ultimate success was the overriding belief conveyed by general manager Dayton Moore and his front office and Yost.
“You have to allow them time to develop,” Yost said.
All of which was part of an accumulated group temperament that made them something more than the sum of their parts. Something that was amplified and accelerated by the 2014 World Series.
“I think before they thought they could win; now, they knew they could win,” Yost said. “It’s a whole different level of confidence.”
Which as much as anything else accounts for how and why they would do the preposterous in coming from behind in eight of their 11 postseason victories in 2015.
“They leaned on each other,” Yost said. “They trusted each other.”
They also trusted Yost, in part because of his own willingness to grow from a rigid inclination.
As the team was surging in those years, players noted how he eased up in exchanges with them. Or through such gestures as allowing clubhouse celebrations with strobe lights and a fog machine that once might have made his head explode.
Yost is a disciple of Bobby Cox in Atlanta and was part of five World Series teams, including the one that won in 1995. Cox, Yost said, was “very particular” about respect for the game, from the uniform to broader appearance to comportment and hustle and view of the opposition.
So … so was Yost, who grew up when coaches yelled and screamed and “you just kind of took it” and figured on doing better next time.
Against the grain as it was, he adapted. He ceded more control to his coaches, whom he credits for everything, and loosened the reins in the clubhouse … and seemingly within, too.
“At times it got to be a point where (I) would stifle their personality a little bit,” he said, before coming to understand “if you allow them to be themselves, you’ll probably get the most out of them. And I think that was the lesson I learned more than anything else.”
This all catalyzed a critical mass in 2015, on a team that arguably was further galvanized by the anguish of Moustakas and Chris Young losing parents during the season and Volquez’s father dying just before his son was about to start Game 1 of the World Series.
As much as it all seemed meant to be in hindsight, the journey was across such a tightrope at times.
Never more so than in Game 4 of the American League Divisional Series against the Astros. Down 2-1 in the best of-five series, the Royals trailed 6-2 going into the eighth inning.
In the past, Yost has said he had a flickering thought of what he might say to congratulate Houston manager A.J. Hinch.
Then Rios led off the inning with a single, Yost recalled, “and it just, like, snowballed. Here we go: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” Five straight hits led to a five-run eighth and a 9-6 win that paved the way to a Game 5 victory back in Kansas City and a berth in the ALCS against Toronto.
After never feeling comfortable while his team beat the Blue Jays in six games, it was on to the World Series against the Mets and on trajectory to the clincher in Game 5 — a crazy blur of a game that featured Hosmer’s (calculated) mad dash and Colon’s RBI single to put the Royals ahead for keeps in the five-run 12th.
“It sounds a little stupid, but it got to the point where I was like, ‘OK, lets quit scoring runs,’” Yost said, recalling he wanted to just get Davis in and get it over with.
After Davis did just that, Yost remembers his joy for then-owner David Glass, who died in January.
And he remembers leaving the clubhouse just as the champagne was popping and going to sit at his desk in the opposing manager’s office at Citi Field.
He looked up to see Moore on the couch. They looked at each other and smiled, Yost said, calling the feeling not “extreme exhilaration” but more of an “exhausted feeling of accomplishment.”
When they finally left the stadium around 5 a.m., Yost had had some champagne and whatever else to drink and didn’t feel so well after his hour or so of sleep as they got ready to head home.
Really, though, he was numb in more ways than one, not quite having a substantial sense of the meaning of this yet.
Up front on the bus on the way to the airport, he had his feet propped up and the air blasting on his face trying to make himself feel a little better when his phone rang.
Figuring it was MLB’s Joe Torre, the only person who calls him with no caller ID showing, he picked up.
“Yes, is this Ned Yost?” the voice on the other end said.
Yeah, he said, this is Ned.
“Would you please hold for a call from the president of the United States?”
Uh …
“I’m like, ‘Yeah,’” he said. “And it was Barack Obama. He was calling me to congratulate us and invite us to the White House. And that was the first time I felt like, ‘OK, maybe we’ve done something really, really special here.’”
But hardly the last.
Suddenly, here were the fans along the highway back from KCI and the helicopters overhead and thousands waiting at the stadium and the parade and the actual White House visit.
Five years later, it’s an accomplishment people still thank him for and forever part of his legacy ... even as he is content to till and fertilize and hunt closer to home now.