As expected, the Grand Old Man of the AL Central is leaving the Kansas City Royals on his own term, if not the top of his game.
The Royals announced that Ned Yost will retire at the end of this season, which is his 10th in Kansas City. The Royals have already lost 100 games this year for their second consecutive season with triple-digit losses. The good news is that Yost secured his legacy in Kansas City a long time ago.
“With the development of our young players and our returning veterans, I feel and hope the worst is behind us in this rebuilding phase of our organization,” Yost said in a team release. “My plan all along was to get us through the rough times, then turn it over to a new manager to bring us the rest of the way. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time here as your manager and will never forget the good and the hard times we had together as an organization and a fanbase."
Yost's career with the Royals will be damned hard to duplicate. He quickly became a punching bag due to his old-school defenses of decisions numbers (and logic) didn't support, but his preferences meshed well with the talent in Kansas City (contact, speed, defense), and by evolving in small ways, he didn't get in the way of the Royals' ascension. They won 22 postseason games from 2014 to 2015, falling a game short of the World Series in the first of those years before reaching the peak.
Yost took over for Trey Hillman 35 games into the 2010 season. His first series was against the White Sox, and the Royals took two of three, setting the template for many of the seasons ahead. Yost had a 106-78 career lifetime record against the Sox, and even during a 100-loss season, the Royals managed to take this year's season series, 10-9.
As for Yost's replacement, Bob Nightengale set Royals Twitter ablaze with a tweet:
The Royals hired Mike Matheny as a special advisor last year, which is the way organizations have hired managers in advance. The White Sox did it with Robin Ventura, the Angels with Brad Ausmus, the Brewers with Craig Counsell. Hell, that's how Yost got his job with the Royals.
But Matheny has more baggage than any of them. It's not just a performance thing, because sometimes managers need to get fired once in order to adapt. Yost needed a couple brushes with baseball doom, including the wackadoo wild card game with Oakland in 2014, in order to break down some of the rigidity that made him a punch line.
No, Matheny was a more toxic kind of terrible in St. Louis. The clubhouse degenerated under his watch, and the last straw arrived when The Athletic published a story about Matheny giving Bud Norris his blessing to perpetuate a cycle of abuse of younger players.
Much like I felt about the Tigers hiring Ron Gardenhire to oversee their rebuild, I'd have zero issue if the Royals ignored the storylines that unfolded in close proximity by hiring Matheny. The Royals have thus far denied Nightengale's report:
We'll see whether it's Nightengale cloaking bad info with the passive voice, or whether the Royals just don't want to mar Yost's farewell with a hire that will prove to be immediately unpopular.
