Now, at his retirement (and at the end of his second consecutive 100-loss season), the task is to try and put Ned Yost in some kind of perspective, and it isn’t easy to do.
I think the best thing to say is that he had some kind of magic, even if it was and is hard to define. In Kansas City, when Ned’s teams were at their best, his teams played loose. The players liked each other. The bullpen was invulnerable. The Royals kept winning games that seemed lost, and they kept coming back when things seemed insurmountable, and they beat odds and probabilities and statistical likelihoods enough times to create a folk story they will tell in Kansas City forever.