OK, so this isn’t true, but this story has been “adapted” by deleting a few words and adding the bold face words from a story written on September 16, 2008 by Tim Marchman of the New York Sun. (View Article)

Be sure to read this as well as my comments at the end.  It’s amazing how true the similarities are.  What’s more crazy, is the fact that I didn’t have to “hunt” for an article to do this activity with.  This was the first article I clicked on after googling: “Ned Yost fired Brewers.”  You’ll find it by doing the same thing.

It wasn’t just the American financial system that melted down this week, but also the Kansas City Royals. Having woken up Wednesday with a fourteen-deficit in the Central Division to achieve .500 , they went to sleep just before the All-Star Break with five games under, having lost four out of sixteen.  Today, Kansas City wakes up with a new manager, as yesterday Ned Yost got the sack. If only Wall Street could do the same.

The firing of a manager, who after all was close to achieving .500 with just two weeks left before the All-Star break, is unprecedented in baseball history. This is pretty strong evidence that it was a good idea. No team does something so dramatic unless they honestly think there’s nothing else to do. Kansas City came out of a July 13 loss to the White Sox with a 12 game gap under .500, promptly went 3-7, and still had to endure losing three series in a row  at the hands of their top rivals just to fall into a further decline. If the closest observers of the situation think the year can be salvaged with a switch, it’s hard to second-guess them. The better question might be why it took so long.

As a distant observer of Kansas City over the years, I’ve been impressed by much of what Yost has done, especially in the way of young players. Since 2010, the team has developed several exceptional, if hardly well-rounded, talents such as Alex Gordon, Alcides Escobar, Mike Moustakas, Eric Hosmer, and Lorenzo Cain, and it’s easy to forget that the standings might look quite different if another one of them, pitching prodigy Danny Duffy, hadn’t torn up his elbow.

With every freak play, though, he’s show[n] an example of [his] signal flaw: a propensity for the staggeringly inane. I happened to be sitting in the stands at that game with a friend, and as run after run scored, both of us were mourning the potential loss of another game. Oddly, Yost continually let[s] them finish out the inning on what later proved to be disasterous. This is a relatively small thing, but I’ve often been bewildered by Yost’s seemingly nonsensical use of his bullpen and inability to run a sound defense or enforce a disciplined style of play. A man who played Sanchez (an all-time ERA butcher) on the mound , as Yost did this year, is a man not entirely to be trusted.

To this it must be added that this year isn’t even the first Royals collapse Yost has overseen in the last two years. After a great start last year, Kansas City had a record of 10-4 tied for first  as of April 16th. With that kind of momentum, a team can usually finish .500 for the month so long as they play .500 ball the rest of the month— and indeed the Royals did, but they went 10-17  in May. Even so, they only had seven-game deficit on the .500 goal in the American League Central as late as May 30. Perhaps worst of all, while they continued to fall even further, the season was lost by the All-Star Break.

In such circumstances, it would be hard to say that Yost’s weird fixations on particular pitchers (for the Brewers it was relief) and inability to straighten out his starting pitching weren’t to blame. Whether or not tossing him overboard works, you at least have to give owner David Glass part of the blame for standing by helplessly pulling his hair as his ship went down in flames. Shrewd longtime Royals-watcher Bob Dutton of the Kansas City Star reports Glass as the driving force behind the firing, and between his willingness to trade for Alex Gordon and his radical solution to the problem of a listing team, whatever else can be said of Glass, he clearly means it when he says he’s trying to win on a low budget payroll.

Will the firing make a difference? Maybe so. Yost was an odd manager, with some real strengths, but one who was unusually prone to huge, mind-numbing mistakes. Ask any Royalsfan who’s watched blown-out pitchers like Jonathan Sanchez and Sean O’Sullivan  continue to allow games to slip away while sporting ballooning ERAs over the last two years…

The remainder of the article discussed Dale Sveum

I’m sorry, but this article could totally be written on Yost today as well…