How bad has it gotten for the Royals this year? Their hope is this ‘Miracle’
The 1914 World Series champion sat 14 games under .500 in early July.
The Braves — and this is so long ago that they played their home games in Boston — were baseball’s laughingstock, 11 straight losing seasons and barreling toward another before they suddenly and stunningly won 68 of their final 87 games to earn a spot in the World Series.
They were still the presumptive underdog against the Philadelphia A’s, who not only had the American League home run king but the best-ever-named recipient of that honor: Home Run Baker.
The Braves swept the A’s in the World Series, outscoring them 16-6 across four games.
That team earned a nickname: The Miracle Braves.
When you’re trying to dig into the 2026 Royals — trying to decipher just how deep a hole they’ve dug — this is what the research spits back out at you.
The miracle.
The Royals are 7-15 and riding a seven-game losing streak as they return to Kansas City this week. They have scored an MLB-low 71 runs (10 fewer than any other AL team); and they own a minus-32 run differential, better than only the Phillies.
Those are the metrics which we have to compare to baseball history. Their results:
• In the last 44 years, only two teams have started a season 7-15 or worse and later made the playoffs. The median record (after excluding the two teams from the COVID-shortened 2020 season) is 68-94.
• In the last 40 years, only one team has made the playoffs after scoring 71 runs or fewer through 22 games. One.
• The last team to have a minus-32 run differential or worse through the first 22 games and later finish with a winning record and make the postseason came in 1914.
The Miracle Braves.
The research isn’t to prove the Royals are off to a bad start. You knew that.
Even if the Royals are better than they’ve shown — and count me among those who believe that — through 22 games, they look like a pretty bad baseball team.
On paper, most obviously.
With your eyes, most recently.
Twice over the weekend, they turned cans of corn into houses of mirrors. At one point Sunday, Yankees hitter Cody Bellinger appeared to be laughing as he walked into second base after Maikel Garcia and Isaac Collins let a popup fall, Collins needing sorcery to avoid it hitting him and Garcia tapping himself on the chest as though to acknowledge he created the mess. Which was actually a better highlight by comparison than a day earlier when Jac Caglianone and Kyle Isbel collided in the outfield while trying to field a fly ball.
On Sunday, the Royals self-concluded their only real threat to break a shutout when third-string catcher Elías Díaz turned third base like he was running the wrong way in a lazy river. But he got the wave anyway, though how much can you blame a third-base coach for believing that’s still a better opportunity to score than bringing the heart of the order to the plate right now?
Oh, and then there is the other catcher, the one who wears a literal “C” on his chest. The manager was left to clear the air Sunday with Salvador Perez after suggesting he was “trying to give (Perez) a mental breather,” which seems like pretty innocuous wording for a player who had struck out nine times in his last 21 plate appearances. Perez returned to the lineup Sunday, and so did his 0-for-4 outing with two strikeouts — a stat line he has produced four times in the last week.
You can’t pin this on any individual player, to be abundantly clear, because you could more easily pin it on darn-near everyone in the lineup. Which probably speaks to the larger point.
The Royals’ lineup featured slight tweaks this offseason and nothing resembling a major overhaul, hoping internal improvement would save the day, and it instead has returned only regression.
The OPS numbers for Perez and Vinnie Pasquantino crept below .500. Bobby Witt Jr., who had some promising swings Sunday, still remains without a home run. Those three accounted for 75% of the lineup’s success stories a year ago.
Where is the success story in this lineup?
I’ll offer one, but perhaps just one: Carter Jensen, a 22-year-old catcher has five home runs and an .812 OPS.
If you want to put Maikel Garcia on the list, I’ll remind you he has a lower average, on-base percentage and slugging percentage than he did in 2025.
Six of the nine players in Sunday’s lineup concluded the day with an OPS of .554 or worse — a number worse than every qualified player in baseball last year. And another of the nine was Diaz, a 35-year-old called up from the minors to make his season debut.
They’re in need of a real change or real spark, one that should’ve been generated already from the middle of the order.
The starting rotation is still quite good, though has regressed to 10th in MLB in ERA. The bullpen ERA (6.18) is by far the worst in baseball.
That’s all to say this: The Royals aren’t 7-15 by fluke, nor do they have a minus-32 run differential by happenstance. They’ve earned this record.
There are ways to put lipstick on the ugly historical comparisons, and it’s even probably fair to apply it. If your research includes any 22-game span rather than only the initial 22 games, you’ll find at least one playoff team almost every season has endured this kind of stretch. And you’ll find multiple examples in most seasons.
Those playoffs teams, though, had the foundations of good baseball earlier in the year.
So this isn’t to say the Royals can’t turn it around. The season is still 13.6% exhausted. Man, there’s a long way to go.
But this much is clear: Man, there’s a long way for the Royals to go, too.
This story was originally published April 20, 2026 at 11:08 AM with the headline "How bad has it gotten for the Royals this year? Their hope is this ‘Miracle’."