Hunting fall nearly killed KC manager
Kansas City Royals Manager Ned Yost broke his pelvis after falling from a tree in Georgia last week. On Monday, he spoke about the severity of the life-threatening injury.
“There’s no doubt I would have bled out if I didn’t have my cellphone with me,” he told Jeffrey Flanagan of MLB.com. “There was nobody that was coming. Nobody would have found me. I would have been dead by nightfall.
“The trauma surgeon said, ‘Man, Ned, I was really scared about you. We’ve seen these things before. This is a 25-30 percent mortality rate. You were crashing on the table. We couldn’t get the bleeding stopped. I thought we were going to lose you.’ ”
Yost also confirmed Monday that he would need a wheelchair for two months.
He regularly spends much of his offseason hunting on his Georgia property, so the fact that he was up in a deer stand and isolated in the wilderness wasn’t surprising.
“You’ve got people pulling on you,” Yost told Kent Babb of the Kansas City Star in 2012, contrasting his duties as a manager with the opportunity to spend time on his farm. “You’ve got your coaches, you’ve got your players; you’re worried about this, you’re worried about that. But out here, you don’t. You’re just in the tractor. With the air conditioning going on, it don’t matter.”
Yost, 63, has spent eight seasons as the Royals’ manager, going 629-632 in that time. He led the team to back-to-back World Series trips in 2014-2015, winning the championship in 2015.