Kansas City Royals’ 2024 breakthrough was great, but here’s what needs to happen now
Against all logic and physics, the Royals made a quantum leap from 106 losses in 2023 to 86 wins last season.
Striking enough as just the sixth time since 1969 that an MLB team boosted its win total by 30 or more from one season to the next. But it was all the more momentous since they weren’t just resetting after a rough year but peeling out from a quagmire in which the franchise had averaged 99.6 losses in its previous five full seasons (not counting the pandemic-shortened 2020 season).
“It’s a nice story,” general manager J.J. Picollo said at the 2025 Royals Rally on Feb. 1 at Kauffman Stadium.
Sure was.
That was then, though, and this is now.
And here’s the new proving ground for the Royals:
While the goal of course is to win the World Series and ease that path by winning the American League Central, first things first.
Because the season won’t necessarily be a bust if those lofty things don’t happen.
But at least earning another postseason berth is a virtual must to gain traction and momentum and build on their credibility and foundation. Especially as they seek to make the most of their decade ahead built around Bobby Witt Jr. — in this sense, and beyond, a budding parallel figure to Patrick Mahomes with the Chiefs.
“We have a superstar …” Royals owner John Sherman said. “We made a decision to assert ourselves and be more aggressive and surround him with talent, and we’re trying to build on that this year.”
By becoming something they haven’t been in 40 years:
A perennial contender.
To be clear, we’re not trying to set the bar low here or ramp down hope or expectations. And, obviously, merely reaching the postseason isn’t at odds with greater ambitions.
It’s just that the real urgency is to make last year’s breakthrough the start of a continuum, not a one-hit wonder, for a franchise that has only reached the postseason in consecutive streaks once since 1984-85.
And, for that matter, just four times in its entire history … and only once for as many as three seasons in a row (1976-78).
I’ve often told my friends in St. Louis that they’ll never quite know the ecstasy of Royals fans when Kansas City won the World Series in 2015 ... because they’ve never had to wait 30 years between championships.
Going back to the first the Cardinals ever won in 1926, the longest they’ve gone without winning one was 24 years (1982 to 2006) — and that was with three World Series appearances in between.
(I also tell my St. Louis friends something Royals superscout Art Stewart once pointed out to me: While the Cardinals have won 11 World Series, second only to the New York Yankees’ 27, they’ve won three since the Royals were born in 1969. Meaning that if the Royals were to win another before the Cardinals do, they’ll have won the same number during that span.)
But the flip side of that is that Royals fans seldom have ever known the feeling St. Louisans have enjoyed, of their team nearly always having a chance of making the postseason.
The last two seasons notwithstanding, the Cardinals have been in the playoffs 18 times since 1985 to the Royals’ three appearances in that span.
That sort of constancy and perpetual opportunity that the Royals knew from 1976-85 — but not since — is what they now seek most to establish moment by moment, brick by brick.
So as much as 2024 might have altered players’ mindsets from what Picollo called “optimistic belief” to “more of a true belief” today, as much as sheer postseason experience at last now is what Sherman called “part of our DNA,” it’s essential that the Royals harness all that into a baseline.
“You like to think this is becoming a habit,” Picollo said.
Funny thing is, in a certain way the messaging toward making it a trend and not a blip will have a keen resemblance to the way the Royals and manager Matt Quatraro framed it last season.
Albeit for opposite reasons, no one wants to linger on the past as pitchers and catchers reported this week to spring training in Surprise, Arizona.
This is all about right here, right now.
A year ago, that was because nobody wanted to dwell on the endless losing or put an artificial ceiling on a promising young nucleus bolstered by an offseason spending spree.
This time around, everyone knows last year promptly will be irrelevant if the prevailing narrative isn’t Quatraro’s “today” mantra — or however he might riff off of that concept this time around.
“Because nobody’s going to care when we open up the season what we did last year, right?” Quatraro said. “It’s going to be about what can we do now, and how can we keep getting better?”
Just the same, it’s not quite like starting from ground zero.
The 2024 season, Picollo recalled Quatraro saying, was like going from “zero to 60” mph.
And with so much returning, including Witt, the AL most valuable player runner-up, and two of the top four finishers in AL Cy Young Award voting (Seth Lugo and Cole Ragans), the trick now is to take it from 60 to 65.
Sounds simple enough, particularly since the Royals hardly were on cruise control in the offseason.
While they couldn’t, and didn’t need to, duplicate their $100 million free-agency binge of 2023, they fortified themselves by acquiring Jonathan India as the presumptive leadoff hitter in front of the dynamic likes of Witt, Salvador Perez (the eight-time All-Star with 104 RBIs last season) and Vinnie Pasquantino (97 RBIs) — and adding Carlos Estevez to fortify the bullpen.
What they didn’t secure, at least not yet and not for lack of trying, was what Picollo called a “true middle of the order” bat. The absence of that makes the outfield configuration among the infinite variables the Royals will have to evaluate this spring in what Sherman called “the hard work of incremental improvement.”
All of which sets up a fascinating camp with much to be sorted out in the weeks to come, particularly considering how much Quatraro loves to be versatile and mix and match and use everyone at his disposal.
And it all sets up an intriguing encore bid after the Royals’ first playoff berth in nine years.
That was “just kind of a stepping stool,” Witt said, “to what we can really do.”
Starting with at least making it back to the playoffs, to set the tone for what they hope can become an era.
This story was originally published February 14, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Kansas City Royals’ 2024 breakthrough was great, but here’s what needs to happen now."