Ned Yost Can Teach You Whippersnappers A Thing Or Two About The Moon Landing, So Listen Up!

The Royals beat the White Sox 11-0 last night, and got a complete game shutout from starting pitcher Glenn Sparkman. But who gives a shit about any of that? We’re here to learn about space from Royals manager Ned Yost.

Before the game, Yost was asked if he had any thoughts about the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, and boy did he. His comments:

Do you even know what a 1202 program alarm is? Okay, well then you don’t know anything about the space landing. I know just about everything there is to know about it. I love it. I watched it. If I could go tomorrow, I’d go.

A 1202 program alarm, Cody, was when they came apart, the LEM and the command module, then they started their burn to land on the moon. Well Buzz Aldrin, who was the LEM pilot, thought it was very beneficial to keep the rendezvous radar on, and the landing radar on. But at that time, the computers in Apollo 11—you have more computing power, probably by 20, in your cell phone—it overloaded the computer, and it gave a 1202 program alarm. And everybody panicked, “What is it? What’s a 1202? Is it going to be a fatal alarm? Are they gonna have to abort?” And somebody in the backroom all of a sudden remembered what a 1202 was, and they said, “We’ll go on that, as long as it doesn’t continue to pop up.” And they hit the button to take it off, they had one more 1202 alarm and a 1201 alarm, which was all the same before they finally landed. But it was all revolving around the radar landing and the rendezvous landing. Now what else do you want to know about it?

Yost was then asked if he had any recollection of his experience watching the moon landing. He went on:

I loved it. I remember sitting upstairs in my mom’s bedroom, and watching those grainy, snowy pictures. I’ve been very interested in space exploration for as long as I can remember. I just think it was great. My favorite moon landing was when they landed in the Apennine mountain range there by Hadley Rille. I think that was fantastic. They found a piece of what they think was the original moon crust there. They had to land in between mountains that were 20,000 feet. They came down in between the mountains and landed right on the Hadley Rille, which is almost comparable to our Grand Canyon. So.

Please be advised that I am now on a mission to hunt down Ned Yost and force him to read the Three-Body Problem trilogy, after which we will spend the rest of our lives talking about space together.