KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Royals manager Ned Yost is home recovering after a fall that broke his pelvis and several ribs.
Yost said during a conference call Monday that he was hanging lifelines from trees holding deer stands on his property near Atlanta, Georgia when the deer stand broke. He fell about 20 feet and broke his pelvis.
"I thought, 'OK, let me just sit here a minute and see if I can't catch my breath and move a little bit,'" Yost said. "I sat there for a couple of minutes, and then realized that I wasn't going anywhere. I couldn't move an inch."
Alone, he called his wife and 911.
Yost knew he was hurt. A helicopter life-flighted him, and the quick actions of everyone saved his life.
"If something happened, you need your phone, and luckily for me, I had my phone," Yost said. "If I didn't have my phone, Deb was on her way to Montgomery, she wasn't coming back that night and I would have died right there, probably in a couple of hours."
Ned Yost also told me, "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.'"
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Yost said he'll be in a wheelchair for at least two months.
"My range in motion in my legs is getting better every day," he said. "By spring training, I should be pretty much ready to go."
Chiefs head coach Andy Reid spoke with Yost.
"Our thoughts go out to Ned Yost. Ya know, I had a chance to reach out to him and talk to him. I'm just glad he's on the mend here. That was quite a deal, and he's lucky for cellphones and modern technology, I tell ya," Reid said.
