SURPRISE, Ariz.
The story is from six years ago, shortly after Ned Yost had taken over for Trey Hillman and long before the Royals would win. The story happened after another loss, when the owner wanted a word with his new manager.
Yost didn’t know it at the time, but he had entered a world in which pessimism was a learned and honest trait. Yost was the exception. Some of that was being new. He’d been hired six months before, as an adviser. But some of it was his eyes and heart, too.
Yost had developed something like a baseball crush on many of the Royals’ young players, and had started telling friends he had never in his life been wrong about something that he had ever been this sure about.