Royals’ Yost has chance to make indelible mark on game against team that drafted him

From the outside looking in, anyway, Royals manager Ned Yost rapidly has morphed from a cantankerous imbecile jinx upon the franchise into a gracious genius who somehow summons only charm to the team.

Even as he has essentially remained the same person but for a tweak or two, Yost has evolved from being a polarizing figure many fans would like to have seen fired from his second managerial job … to one who now has earned his second managerial role with the American League All-Star team by virtue of the Royals’ second straight AL title.

Liberated from the debris of his early years here, Yost is the manager with the most wins in Royals history and almost certainly bound for the Royals Hall of Fame.

But nothing could cement the extreme makeover in perception of him like a triumph in the World Series, which resumes with Game 3 Friday night at Citi Field.

With the Royals leading the Series 2-0, they seek to become the 43rd team in 54 tries to go on to win after starting with such an advantage.

Fittingly enough, Yost’s ultimate transformative moment looms against the Mets, the organization that ushered him into professional baseball in 1974 and later allowed him to be exposed in the Rule 5 draft that enabled him to finally get to the big leagues with Milwaukee.

If the breakthrough in Yost’s managerial career in the last year seems to have been remarkable, the tone of persistence and desire that made it happen was set nearly as soon as Yost stepped through the improbable portal from junior-college baseball in California to Mets rookie ball in Batavia, N.Y.

Uncertain of what he wanted to be, really, Yost knew only that he desperately wanted to excel at something.

When he decided it would be baseball, as a catcher, he would invest every fiber of his being in it.

That’s what Billy Connors, the Royals’ pitching coach during the 1980 World Series season, who then was the Mets roving minor-league pitching instructor, thinks of now when he watches Yost’s team.

The Royals, he says, are a reflection of Yost, whom Connors called “a dirt bag” … in the most affectionate of ways.

“Always dirty at the end of a game; he was that type of kid,” Connors, 74, said in a phone interview from Florida, adding, “The Royals always are going to come back to get you sometime in a game, and that was Ned. That was the way Ned played the game.”

That sense of want, perhaps shrouded in obliviousness, was evident in the very fact that Yost was in Batavia at all.

When he was drafted by the Mets seventh overall in the secondary draft, Yost’s coach at Chabot College harangued him for accepting the offer … albeit after setting Yost up some, first.

The coach, Gene Wellman, called the walk-on who had played one season to his office and told him to make sure he took care of himself for the next week.

Then Wellman added: “ ‘Because that’s how long you’re going to last, son. You’re going to be back on the first bus. You think you’re a professional player? You ain’t going to make it. Good luck. See you later.’ ”

Safe to say it all began inauspiciously enough. In his first at-bat with the Batavia Trojans, Yost recalled being frozen by a 96 mph fastball for strike one.

After he struck out on a curve that he thought broke “like 19 feet,” he walked back to the dugout thinking, “Maybe Gene was right.”

That was hardly the only discomfort Yost experienced in Batavia, as he recalled with a smile.

“There were like 16 of us living in a two-bedroom house, and they had a pay phone on the front porch … that’s how you called home once a week,” he said.

Asked what Batavia was like, Yost said he didn’t get around town much because his mode of transportation was a used bicycle he bought for $10.

On his way to the ballpark one day, he added, he “went to pop a wheelie to jump the curb, and the front tire shot out and I took a header.

“That’s what I remember about Batavia.”

But there was something else Yost remembered about Batavia:

A few men had a great influence on him, none more than Connors — a lifelong baseball man who saw something of himself in Yost that made him want to encourage him all the more.

“I was always the last man on the (pitching) staff, and I know that feeling when you’re not really expected to be the guy,” said Connors, who roomed with Tom Seaver and Nolan Ryan in his brief Mets career. “So I knew Ned needed help.

“Those were the kids that I loved. … And I knew he had the ability. That’s why I was always in his corner.”

Yost needed someone in his corner in more ways than one.

“I always had a knack of getting in trouble back in those days, and (Connors and others) stood by me through it all,” Yost said, smiling and adding, “That was back in my younger days. I’m a lot calmer now.”

For reasons that are unclear to Connors, whom Yost considered a protector, Yost particularly was at loggerheads with scouting director Nelson Burbrink.

So much so that Burbrink was furious when at season’s end Batavia manager Wilbur Huckle submitted only Yost’s name on a list of players he felt were legitimate major-league prospects.

Burbrink fired Huckle for the offense, Connors recalled, saying he couldn’t evaluate talent.

Yost, as it happened, was the only one in the lot to make the big leagues.

Not for a while longer, though.

After hitting .252 his first year, Yost hit .192 for Class A Wausau (Wisc.) and .199 in Class AA Jackson (Miss.) a year later.

If a major-league career hardly seemed assured then, at least Yost was advancing in other ways.

He met his future wife, Debbie, in Jackson, where at an uncle’s shop he also honed an interest in taxidermy he had started as a teen

“That was my winter job,” Yost said. “We’d go deer hunting and we’d do taxidermy in the back of the bowling alley back there.”

Yost would hit .309 in Jackson in 1977 and .291 in Class AAA Tidewater later that year before being plucked by Milwaukee, where in 1980 he made his big-league debut. In a largely obscure career, he hit .212 over six seasons.

Yet it wasn’t so obscure that Wellman, his coach at Chabot, didn’t notice.

After Yost hit home runs on back-to-back days in a series at Oakland Coliseum, he felt a tap on his shoulder one night. It was Wellman, who’d had no contact with Yost since he left nearly a decade before.

“ ‘I was dead wrong about you,’ ” Yost would recall him saying. “ ‘The one thing I didn’t take into account is that you can’t keep a good man down.’ ”

Wellman last year verified the story and added a telling point: “He’s good at working with what he has.”

Yost is an emotional man who doesn’t really like you to know it, so he can be tricky about matters of sentimentality.

He seemed choked up last year when he told the Wellman tale, but in recent days he was alternately appreciative and dismissive of the influence the Mets’ organization had on him.

Asked if he thought he’d even be in baseball if they hadn’t drafted him, Yost more or less shrugged and said, “I’m not as nostalgic as you.”

Just the same, you can see a certain thread from Connors to Yost to this Royals team, whose young stars first required seasoning to be hatched.

“I think a lot of the patience I have with guys who are struggling kind of goes back to the time when I was struggling and felt like, ‘Just give me an opportunity; I’ll get through this,’ ” Yost said. “I just (feel) like if you believe strongly enough in a player, give him an opportunity when he’s struggling. And if he’s got enough talent, he’ll get through it.”

And if he doesn’t quite have that, well, he might have the determination and wits to make a life and name for himself in the game, anyway.

As Yost has secured now after years of being doubted.

“I’m so proud of him; he worked like hell at it,” Connors said. “A guy just needs to be in the right place at the right time, because if he’s prepared himself, it happens.”

This story was originally published October 29, 2015 at 8:44 PM with the headline "Royals’ Yost has chance to make indelible mark on game against team that drafted him."