Win, loose or draw on the Jonathan Broxton trade, The Powder Blue Room would like to issue a small courtesy golf clap for Ned Yost in the spirit of resourcefulness. Everyone has probably heard the story about the hunting trip where Ned, Jeff Francoeur and he-haw funny guy Jeff Foxworthy sent the white tail dear of LaGrange, GA into survival mode. In short, it was a recruiting trip (hunting trip), set up by old Ned, who included his apparent friend Jeff Foxworthy.
Finally, something on the Yankees and Boston in the competitive advantage category. Baseball managers don't get to diagram plays or any of the PlayStation involvement of a football or basketball coach. American League managers don't even get to get involved in the game of double-switch. But Ned apparently got tired of the front office guys hogging all the joey-deal-making fun and set out to get in on the game himself.
But Kansas City has a manager pulling his weight, and quite frankly, we like to see it. The logistics of the signing will be covered in a later post and what effect the hunting trip had on the signing is intangible at best. If you saw the photo of Dayton standing next to Broxton at the press conference what is not intangible are the dimensions of this guy. Whoever built the dear-stand for Team Foxworthy back in LaGrange, probably had to run out and reinforce some of the stand's structural members prior to Mr. Broxton entering the premises. We have not yet received the tapes of the wire-taps we placed in the deer-stand, but we are sure the transcripts will show a highly cultured, literate and dignified set of words spoken amongst the trio. How many times Broxton told Jeff to "tell me a joke" will be part of a future Powder Blue Room poll, so stay tuned.
So kudos to Ned Yost, out there doing the hustle, making things shake where he can. Something tells us that Joe Torre never grabbed a dear rifle and Captain Derek to set out into the forest in hope of luring a player to the Bronx.
