Kansas City Royals: 3 reasons Mike Matheny should be next Royals manager

After Ned Yost’s announced his retirement after this season, promoting Mike Matheny to manager for the Kansas City Royals is the right move.

A quick retrospective of Yost’s years at the helm of the Kansas City Royals is truly like the opening line from Charles Dickens’ novel “A Tale of Two Cities”. That story opens by stating, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”. A young team when Yost took over won around 44 percent of their games in his first three seasons followed by the first winning record in several years by the squad.

Then there were back-to-back trips to the World Series in ’14 and ’15, the latter of those bringing back the title to Kansas City for the first time in 30 years. The Royals played .500 ball the next two seasons before re-pushing the youth movement button which has led to consecutive 100 loss seasons.

I find it admirable that Yost stuck around this year knowing that it was going to be rough. He knew that bringing in a new manager to oversee a lost season would be unfair to the new skipper.

We move on to who should captain the Royals ship as we head into 2020. The writing was on the wall with the addition of Mike Matheny as a Special Advisor for Player Development after the 2018 season. Keep in mind this was exactly Yost’s role with the club before he took over the reins in 2010.

There are other candidates from within the organization but Matheny is the best fit based on his positive and negative experiences while the skipper for the cross-state St. Louis Cardinals.

Here are 3 reasons why: