Ned Yost deflected credit for Royals’ 2015 World Series. Here’s why he deserves it

It was early into Ned Yost’s tenure in Kansas City, maybe even his first week if the man telling this story remembers it correctly, when the Royals were discussing what to do with Alex Gordon. The former top prospect in baseball had been dropped to the minor leagues that 2010 season, and so this conversation centered on that topic.

Why isn’t Gordon more consistent?

“And you can just see that Ned is getting irritated the longer this discussion (goes on),” said former Royals general manager Dayton Moore. “And eventually he stands up, raises his voice and challenges everyone.”

With?

“This guy’s going to be a star,” Yost said, as Moore recalled in an interview with The Star. “If we don’t believe in guys like Alex Gordon, then we’re wasting our time.”

On Saturday, the Royals inducted Yost, 68, into their Hall of Fame with a pregame ceremony, which he preferred to turn into a 2015 World Series reunion. And to be sure, it did have a lot of that flavor to it, with about a dozen former players traveling to Kansas City. Some hadn’t seen one another in seven years.

But what we got from all of those guys — from Moore, who also gave the induction speech, and from former players — was something quite different.

A snapshot of the manager’s part in all. Snapshots, actually. Plural. One after another.

They came in storytelling snippets. For instance, when you ask players their memories of Yost, wouldn’t you expect something from the 2015 championship season? Or perhaps 2014?

Those weren’t the nature of the replies. As quickly as the snap of the fingers, Greg Holland immediately pointed to his MLB debut. He had recorded the first out that day in Oakland, but then a walk, single, run-scoring hit and another walk to load the bases.

And, well, uh oh.

“I went from confident to spinning,” Holland said.

Out to the mound jogged some help. Not his catcher. Not his pitching coach.

His manager.

Yost.

The talk was quick. You can do this is. It was “the confidence he exuded,” Holland recalled, that would change the inning. Or end the inning, as it turned out. The next batter grounded into a double play.

Wade Davis, another member of the vaunted bullpen that would pace the World Series team, told a story of the moments that preceded him becoming baseball’s most dominant closer.

He’d lost his place in the 2013 rotation, unsure what awaited him next, when Yost shared a new blueprint that featured Davis not in some sort of mop-up duty role in the bullpen, but instead a pitcher used in high-leverage.

“You see people get written off pretty quickly if they’re not doing well,” Davis said. “... I got the opportunity to be part of that bullpen that was so good — where I think in most managers’ eyes, that probably wouldn’t have been a thing.”

There are countless of these types of anecdotes, far too many to stuff into one night of commemoration. Did you know Yost once brought a struggling Mike Moustakas into his office just to tell him he wouldn’t be benched? Moustakas, Yost thought at the time, probably assumed he was on his way to the minors, only for Yost to tell him, “Son, you’re going to play every day. Relax.”

In fact, on that note, Moore remarked that Yost never suggested they demote a player, even in private conversations. “Not once,” Moore said. “Not even once.”

Unusual?

“Oh, very,” Moore said.

This is the legacy within the Royals celebration of Yost’s career Saturday night at Kauffman Stadium. And it derived from his own career. That’s the nurture piece in it. Yost was a backup catcher in Milwaukee, Texas and briefly Montreal, and not a particularly successful hitter.

“If you went 0-4 and 0-4, you weren’t playing anymore,” Yost said.

So when he became a manager, he had a fairly simple philosophy: They’re going to struggle. Just let them work through it. Just let them play.

That’s oversimplifying it, of course, but it was the foundational piece after taking over a team in the midst of its seventh straight season finishing fourth or worse in the AL Central.

“He rescued us mentally,” Moore said.

Look, the team, any team, obviously first and foremost must have the talent in which to believe. But Yost maintained that belief when it was evident that talent alone wouldn’t carry a young core of players. If a manager’s primary job is to generate the most out of every player — take the in-game moves out of the equation — he accomplished that.

There isn’t any data to tell us what might’ve happened had he treated it a different way — what might’ve happened if he’d grown impatient and just moved on to the next guy. These players are certain, though. They know a different approach would’ve produced different results.

Yost took patience to the extreme. It wasn’t foolproof. It wasn’t for everyone. It was, in the end, precisely for a developing Royals organization in need of a boost of more than pure talent.

Holland described the transition of thinking you might win to thinking you could win to knowing you will win.

And much as Yost wanted to write Saturday’s story about that talent that surrounded him — no doubt a consequential factor — we don’t have to wonder what might have been had they never known the possible.

That’s what he provided.