Idiots don’t chase Joe McCarthy. Over the last 100 years of Major League Baseball, only two managers to appear in at least 19 postseason games own a better career winning percentage than .670:
1. McCarthy, a Hall-of-Famer who won nine pennants with the Chicago Cubs – the Cubs! – and the New York Yankees: 30-13, .698.
2. Edgar Frederick Yost: 18-8, .692.
And yet Ned Yost, the first man to ever take the Kansas City Royals to back-to-back World Series, has yet to win a manager of the year award. Ned Yost, the winningest manager in Royals history (468), gets the kind of embrace from his own fan base that a 7th-grader gets during his first slow dance at the church social: arms locked, cold, distant and untrusting, swaying awkwardly in time.
Some of this is because, even at the age of 61, Yost deflects credit the way most career politicians prefer to deflect blame. Some of this is because he has yet to win the big one, coming up on the wrong side of Giants ace Madison Bumgarner in the 2014 Fall Classic.
But that same Yost, a lightning rod locally for everything but love, is also 2-0 in one-run games in the 2015 playoffs, and 25-17 in one-run contests since the start of the regular season. The same man Kansas City can’t quite trust enough to bring close to its collective bosom is dancing with the New York Mets starting Tuesday night.
“This club,” he said late Friday night, after a 4-3, series-clinching win over Toronto in the American League Championship Series, “has a lot of determination.”
A case will be made – several cases, probably – that the 2015 American League pennant was a triumph over the skipper’s poor hunches as much as it was over Joey Bautista and his running mates. Which also overlooks one critical thing: this team trusts him, believes in him, even if you don’t.
In the bottom of the eighth, after a 45-minute rain delay, contest tied at 3-all, Royals center fielder Lorenzo Cain, led off the bottom of the frame with a walk. First baseman Eric Hosmer plated Cain with a sinking liner into the right-field corner to snap a 3-3 tie, the quintessential Royals run, the intersection of athleticism and awareness. Third-base coach Mike Jirschele saw right fielder Bautista turn and toss the ball toward the cutoff man at second, an off-balance lollipop, rather than press the runner. The coach gave the speedy Cain a green light, resulting in a run reminiscent of Enos Slaughter’s mad dash in Game 7 of the 1946 World Series.
“It was a huge send by Hirsch,” Yost would say later. “Our club does not mind being tied late.”
Which goes back to the trust thing, the belief thing, all that magic and the mojo. And yet social media cracked that when the grounds crew pulled the tarp off of Kauffman Stadium at roughly 10.31 local time, it was allegedly against the wishes of Yost, who wanted to leave it out there to take more abuse.
“I try not to get too freaked out about things I can’t control,” Yost told Fox Sports’ Erin Andrews during the rain delay.
What he can control is who gets the call, and when, unflappable to the last, even when it blows up in his face. If the bottom of the eighth was a testament to trust, the top of the frame, just before the rain, was an indictment. Instead of trotting his best reliever, Wade Davis, to face the meat of Toronto’s 2-3-4 hitters, a chain that included sluggers Josh Donaldson and Bautista, Yost rolled out setup man Ryan Madson to protect a two-run lead.
He didn’t.
The sequence: single (Ben Revere). Strikeout (Donaldson). Two-run homer (Joey Bats). Walk (Edwin Encarnacion).
Davis came on to coax a popout and a strikeout. Then Mother Nature came on – strong – to bring out the second guessing. Then the third.
“The rain delay,” Yost said, “was a pain in the ass.”
But Davis stayed warm during the wetness, stayed loose. And when given the choice of sitting him down or putting him back out there in the top of the ninth, Yost went with his gut again. That and injured closer Greg Holland.
“I looked at Holly and Holly said, ‘Don’t worry about nothing,’” Yost recalled. “’Wade wants to go to the World Series. He’s going to be fine.’”
Four times, including the ninth, Toronto had a man at second with less than two outs. Four times, the Jays failed to score.
Yost, meanwhile, constructs his lineup the way Michael Corleone constructs nightmares: just when you think you’re out, they pull you back in again. The Royals’ No9 hitter touts a .755 career OPS and whacked the ball at a .368 clip in the ALCS. The No. 8 hitter has a career OPS of .783. The leadoff man has now hit safely in 10 straight playoff contests.
His No6 hitter, Mike Moustakas, belted a solo home run in the second that settled just beyond the bleacher seats in right-center adjacent to the visiting bullpen, and into the outreached glove of a fan, 19-year-old Caleb Humphreys of the nearby surburb of Blue Springs, Mo. It evoked Jeffrey Maier’s infamous over-the-fence assist on a Derek Jeter home run in the 1996 ALCS. At least one former baseball executive in the press box, seeing the replay, predicted the home run would be overturned.
“That’s a double,” he muttered, and replays appeared to show the ball trapped by the glove off the top of the fence, a possible case of fan interference. (Ground rules at Kauffman indicate that any ball that strikes the railing above the out-of-town scoreboard in right and caroms back onto the field is, in fact, a home run.) The Blue Jays protested, and after a delay of 97 seconds, officials in New York determined that there wasn’t enough replay evidence to overturn the call.
And as a referendum on Jays starter David Price, poised to cash in his free-agent lottery ticket this winter, Friday proved equally inconclusive. The lefty came into the evening without a career postseason victory as a starter (0-7) and a playoff ERA of 5.24 – more than two runs higher than his regular-season mark of 3.09. But keep this in mind, too: He also received only 2.29 runs in support, on average, during those seven starts. Bautista’s two homers aside, help was in woefully short supply in Game 6, too.
“Sometimes,” Gibbons said. “you’ve got to give credit to the other side.”
Sometimes, you’ve got to give credit to Yost, too. Debate all weekend whether it’s because of the man or spite of him, but this much is indisputable: in Kansas City, that damn line keeps moving on.
