Yost compares present Royals to past

This story was excerpted from Anne Rogers’ Royals Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

KANSAS CITY – With so many former Royals in town to celebrate Ned Yost’s induction into the Royals Hall of Fame this weekend, it’s hard not to compare the teams Yost and the Royals’ front office built for the 2014-15 playoff runs to the Royals of today.

Yost’s core went through similar struggles the 2023 Royals are going through now, a young roster full of potential and learning on the job – the hard way – in the Major Leagues.

“I can see similarities between what we went through early,” Yost said Saturday. “The toughest thing for a small-market team to do is get competitive. You have to draft well, you have to develop well and then you have to have patience when they get to the big leagues.”

The Royals are working to improve on the first two, but the latter is being tested more than ever this year. In manager Matt Quatraro’s first season, Kansas City is the second-worst team in baseball at 42-95 entering Sunday’s series finale against the Red Sox. When Quatraro was hired last offseason, Yost spoke to the rookie manager about patience.

It’s how Yost led the Royals to their first World Series title in 30 years.

Yost’s insistence on playing his players regardless of the results in the early years of his tenure was sometimes exasperating. He followed his gut. He stuck with them when they lost, when they struggled, when it looked like nobody was going to turn a corner.

“I just knew,” Yost said. “I knew. One time I said to [former president of baseball operations] Dayton [Moore], ‘You know Salvador Perez, Alcides Escobar, Lorenzo Cain, Mike Moustakas, Eric Hosmer, Greg Holland, Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, these guys are all going to be All-Stars.’ And Dayton said, ‘We are going to have a team full of All-Stars?’ And as dumb as it sounded, I said ‘Yeah, I believe it. We are going to have a team full of All-Stars.’ And of course in 2015 we had seven All-Stars on that team. So I don’t know how I knew. I’ve always had the knack of knowing.”

Yost was sometimes criticized when he allowed untested players to pitch or hit – and often fail – in big situations. The win or loss that day didn’t matter to Yost.

“It takes time,” Yost said. “It takes patience. It takes the ability to allow them to go through situations that will gain experience for them down the road. My mindset was that I would much rather lose today to set us up to win it all tomorrow. It was my only goal, my only focus, to win a world championship. I was going to do whatever it took to do that. … I wanted to give them as much experience through those situations so that when they got to the tough times, when it really met something, they were going to have those experiences to draw back on. That strategy worked perfectly in ‘14 and ‘15.”

Yost’s players have praised him for the way he managed a clubhouse and brought a team together. More than anything, his belief in them when things weren’t going well propelled them to playing better.

“He was really in tune with, ‘We’re going to go do our job, we’re going to get better,’” Holland said. “At a certain point, you’ve got to leave the wins and losses on the back burner and just focus on taking care of today.”

Will patience work with this core? Quatraro and the Royals coaching staff has given its fair share of it this season as players go through the ups and downs. What that has shown is that Kansas City has work to do to get back to October baseball – internal improvement and external additions that must start this offseason.

“The process is in the work they put in, the attitude they come with, the effort they show,” Quatraro said. “The things you can actually control, they’ve done a good job. So that’s where I’ve seen their patience, their understanding of what we’re going through. But none of them think that what we’ve done is good enough. That’s obvious when you look at the record. It’s something you still have to come to grips with as a player and as a staff member, that the improvement has to be there, and it has to be a big improvement.”

Time will tell if it all works. Perhaps that blueprint can’t be recreated; perhaps the talent level is vastly different. But, as the highlight videos and stories showed this weekend, something great can be on the horizon if it does.

“In 2010 and ‘11, I think we lost almost 100 games both years,” Holland said. “It’s easy to let that kind of manifest itself into, ‘We’re a bunch of losers,’ but you’ve just got to understand, you’ve got to have the right mindset that we’re building toward something. The old [saying], ‘It’s always darkest before dawn.’ The progress you’re making as a team and as an individual player doesn’t always show up in the win-loss column.

“You’ve got to keep that in perspective, like, ‘I’m making the right necessary steps of improving, and if we just get better a little bit each and every day, next thing you know, you’re in a playoff race.’ I really hope these guys get back to that because it’s really something special when you see that hard work come to fruition.”