Royals' Yost says he nearly died after pelvis-shattering fall

Though he will be confined to a wheelchair for the next two months, Kansas City Royals manager Ned Yost said Monday he feels "like a lucky man" to have only broken his pelvis last week in a fall on his Georgia property.

"There's no doubt I would have bled out if I didn’t have my cellphone with me," Yost told Jeffrey Flanagan of MLB.com. "There was nobody that was coming. Nobody would have found me. I would have been dead by nightfall."

Yost, 62, fell off the tree stand he'd been working on and broke his pelvis, and was bleeding so profusely that the trauma surgeon wasn't completely certain he'd make it through surgery, the manager said.

"The trauma surgeon said, 'Man, Ned, I was really scared about you. We’ve seen these things before - this is a 25-to-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.'"

The surgery was a success, however, and Yost has since returned home following a short stay in a rehabilitation facility. He said he hopes to be able to move around normally by spring training.