Loyalty wasn’t enough to save Yost

CHICAGO – The question seemed simple: Who first broached the idea of firing Ned Yost as manager of the Milwaukee Brewers with just 12 games left to play in the regular season?

Brewers owner Mark Attanasio, sitting to the left of general manager Doug Melvin on a podium in a Chicago hotel room Monday night, looked at Melvin. Melvin looked at Attanasio.

“I don’t remember,” Attanasio said.

Never mind that this decision – firing a manager whose team was still in postseason contention this late in the season – comes without precedent in the big leagues, unless you want to count the dismissal of Dick Williams by Montreal in the strike-bastardized 1981 season.

Attanasio, who flew in on a private plane from his home in Los Angeles for the occasion, said he could not recall whether Melvin was the one willing to make history, or if he was. After the news conference, his memory didn’t improve.

“(Who said) should we make a manager change – I honestly don’t remember,” Attanasio said. “Whoever brought it up first, it went back and forth, back and forth.”

You can count on one hand the number of people in baseball who believe that Melvin decided to fire Ned Yost with the team still tied for a wild-card spot with 14 days left in the season. Two weeks ago, the Brewers were coming off a 20-win August, they held a 5½-game lead in the wild card, and Yost was a certain name to appear on Manager of the Year ballots.

When Melvin was general manager of the Texas Rangers, he stuck with manager Johnny Oates. The pair won three division titles together before Oates resigned early in the 2001 season, when the Rangers got off to a horrendous start after signing Alex Rodriguez to a $252 million contract the previous winter. Melvin never wavered in his support of Oates. At the end of the 2001 season, Melvin was fired.

On Monday, Melvin spoke in glowing terms of Yost’s loyalty to the players and his coaching staff. When the team got off to a slow start and was in last place in the division, four games under .500, after leaving Boston, Melvin said he spoke with Yost about possible changes in the coaching staff or player personnel.

“Ned was always, ‘I believe in those people, I believe in the coaches, I believe in the players,’ ” Melvin said. “They backed him on that, because we had the best record in baseball after that, until recently. Now we’ve hit a dry spell again.”

Loyalty?

“I’ve always been that way,” Melvin admitted. “I’ve always been loyal to managers. Sometimes I’ve been loyal to a fault.”

Melvin smiled thinly when someone said people believe he’d never fire a winning manager with 12 games left in the season.

“I’ve told people that, in the end, I’ve got to make the final call,” he said. “It was a tough call, but I can’t comment any more than that.”

This is what Attanasio said during Monday night’s news conference. “I think the move is made by the general manager and as in any big decision Doug talks to me about what he’s looking to do, and ownership in a decision of this magnitude would have a say, but that’s more in the form of a veto than in the form of an initiative.

“The initiative is from the general manager, and the ownership group blesses the general manager’s decisions.”

When asked if it felt funny to fire a manager because his team did not play well in a two-week span (three wins in 14 games), Melvin said, “It seems odd, it seems funny, to fire a guy over 14 games. Yeah, I ask myself that. It does seem funny. It does seem odd to let someone go who has given his heart and soul to the organization, but we didn’t have any options at this point. I don’t know what else to do at this point.”

Does this sound like a man committed to firing his manager with 12 games left? Dale Sveum, the third-base coach, was asleep when Melvin called him at 10:30 a.m. Monday to tell him he was replacing Yost. Sveum admitted it took a moment for that message to sink in.

“Something obviously went wrong the last two weeks,” said Sveum, who hired his best friend, Hall of Famer Robin Yount, to be his bench coach. “We’re just trying to send a shockwave through this team and get them going for 12 (games) and through the playoffs.”

Attanasio insisted that the decision was not made until he’d arrived in Chicago and spoke to Melvin, then to Yost. The fired Yost told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he had no inkling that his job was in jeopardy, though he realized he was a goner when he walked into Melvin’s room and Attanasio was sitting there.

An act of desperation? Attanasio rejected that characterization.

“Nothing at all we do is rash,” he said. “It’s all reasoned and thoughtful.”

The reality is that Attanasio could not sit idly with his team playing bad baseball and risking Milwaukee’s first postseason appearance since 1982. Firing Yost was shock therapy. If loyalty – and Ned Yost – had to be sacrificed, so be it.