I'm going to shush about Ned after this, but what I liked about him from the start didn't have much to do with baseball. I probably watched three full royals games all year. But from what I saw from a leadership standpoint was that he seemed like a guy who wasn't an emotional dork that made snap decisions, and seemed like he had an over-arching philosophy that he was trying to stick to and believed in. I also heard him talk and he seemed slightly smarter than the average baseball manager. He basically struck me as the anti-Paul Rhodes, who is always my go-to example for worst possible kind of leader.
