How the Royals became baseball’s best story — following a team meeting

Two stories.

The first is about a baseball team stuck in a tailspin, barreling toward the worst record in the history of a franchise that has plenty of competition for such records, and a manager who despises full team meetings calling, ahem, a full team meeting.

The second is about an ascending baseball team moving into a playoff position in the American League — this team the owners of a top-five rotation and a 24-year-old shortstop, who, as one of the sport’s most captivating players, is surging into the MVP race.

The first team? The Kansas City Royals.

The second? The Kansas City Royals.

One year apart.

If you’re in town, or paying attention from afar, the surprise aspect of that is lost on you. You could see the kicker coming, right? Heck, you’ve lived it.

But one of the best turnarounds in baseball history — so far, that is, with two months left to play — prompts a couple of obvious questions: Why is everything so drastically different in just a year’s time? How is it so different?

“Last year sucked,” first baseman Vinnie Pasquantino, rarely short on wit, said. “And this doesn’t suck.”

OK, sure, the Royals have already, in late July, matched their 2023 win total. Sometime this weekend, with the Cubs in town, they’re likely to surpass it. Read those two sentences again, if you must, but they’re accurate. Then read the quote from Pasquantino, and maybe it offers enough.

But for the fun of it, let’s backtrack to the aforementioned team meeting — the one manager Matt Quatraro prefers to avoid. He typically meets with players in just small groups or for individual conversations, but with the Royals sitting at 29-75 a year ago, general manager J.J. Picollo had begun to worry about just how bad it might get. What if the team, knowing the season is all but officially done, stops competing?

That was a component of Quatraro’s meeting — to ensure that didn’t happen — but with more narrow focus. At one point, he told the players that he anticipated they already had a growing list of things they would work to improve in the offseason.

“Do it now,” he said. “Don’t wait.”

But, and I’ll apologize, I’m burying the headline in this meeting, which came next:

“I remember telling guys, ‘Here’s what’s guaranteed: Bobby and Salvy will be on the team next year,’” Quatraro said. “Beyond that? We don’t know. So if you have ideas, start now.”

Blunt.

Truthful.

Purposeful: a message that the results were unacceptable, and they would prompt change.

Appropriately, as he recalled that moment while sitting in the Kauffman Stadium dugout this week, Quatraro donned a shirt with just five letters printed across the front in Royals blue:

Today.

‘Sky’s the limit’

Royals general manager J.J. Picollo grew up in Cherry Hill, a township in New Jersey that fancies itself a suburb of Philadelphia.

A group of his childhood friends were competitive swimmers there, participating for a club team called Jersey Waters. The roof of the club once burned down, and in its aftermath, someone had painted a message on the wall.

If you have no roof, the sky’s the limit.

As the Royals began their offseason, a line from Picollo’s childhood rushed back to him. (And like my colleague Vahe Gregorian pointed out as Picollo shared the anecdote with us this week, I’ll take the liberty of extending the analogy: The Royals, who finished 56-106 last season, tying the worst record in franchise history, took care of burning the roof down.)

For Picollo, who shared the metaphor to the front office at the onset of the offseason, it was supposed to be about the response.

“Just think big,” Picollo said. “It’s OK to think big.”

Truth is, Picollo had mapped out a plan months before that offseason gathering took place. It was in June that owner John Sherman had requested a meeting with Picollo, in the midst of a self-dubbed evaluation year, to, well, evaluate the team.

Not just the present.

The future.

Afterward, Picollo started a list on a dry-erase board in his office: Starting pitcher, starting pitcher, reliever, reliever, reliever, hitter.

Below it, he projected the cost: $47 million.

The Royals’ record renovation had to, above all else, include a roster renovation. But 56-106 is a lot to renovate in a small market, even with $30 million coming off the payroll.

Yet for a couple of winter weeks, behind the blessing of ownership, the Kansas City Royals’ spending habits became baseball’s most compelling story.

They signed relievers Will Smith and Chris Stratton first, then starters Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha and then added outfielder Hunter Renfroe — all in a matter of just five days. They’d later acquire others, like reliever John Schreiber via trade.

The actual 2024 cost of the top-six: about $47.5 million.

Missed it by less than a million.

In the midst of the five-day spending frenzy, veteran catcher Salvador Perez sent Picollo a quick text message: I need to talk to you.

Picollo’s first thought? “Uh-oh. What is this about?”

Is there a more accurate example of just how bad it’s been for the Royals over the last decade? It’s a perpetual worry that something has gone wrong, followed by a mostly perpetual confirmation.

Perez, though, “just wanted to tell him how excited I was about everything we were doing.”

To not oversimplify it: The Royals’ turnaround included more than the roster. They gathered in Arizona days after the season, Picollo asking the front office to change the way they think about player development, player acquisition, player identification, all of it — or, more true to his nature in a job he assumed two years ago, Picollo stressed to keep an open mind about changes.

Alec Zumwalt, the hitting coach, recalled tough conversations with existing players, preparing “for whether some guys might be ready to knock me out, because I wasn’t going to sugarcoat a turd.”

It was a lot more than player acquisition, in other words.

A 106-loss season requires a lot more.

But yet one more thing arrived on the eve of spring training.

As the team across their Truman Sports Complex parking lot (for now) had already landed in Las Vegas in search of back-to-back Super Bowls, the Royals interrupted the sport’s world’s biggest week and became the most prominent Kansas City story for a day.

They made a final move that has rarely been associated with Royals baseball since, uh, pick a date.

They re-signed one of their own.

The turnaround

The Royals have had more than three times as many 100-loss seasons as playoff appearances over the last 30 years. Since 2018, they have baseball’s worst record, 394-589. They are eight games shy of 29th.

The 106-loss 2023 campaign falls into that perspective. And the Royals, by the way, had to finish 27-31 to “achieve” it. They actually showed some signs of encouragement after the Quatraro meeting, which came around the trade deadline, after he’d instructed them to implement changes now rather than waiting until the offseason. That was the idea.

But no one could be completely sure how much the previous year would hover over their current season, even as they were sure how much they felt it should. See, Quatraro, by all accounts a patient man with media, has a bit of a tell when he’s asked about last year. It’s clear he doesn’t quite understand why it’s still a topic. It’s not the same team, he believes.

But the despair of last season was once his own topic.

For a day.

Actually, for about 60 seconds.

Quatraro opened spring training with a speech to the entire team, as is customary across baseball.

“I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something along the lines of, ‘We don’t need to rally around last year to get over last year,’” Pasquantino recalled.

Will Smith, who hadn’t even thrown a spring training pitch for the team — unless you count his first stint way back in 2012-13— already felt comfortable enough in his new clubhouse to interrupt the speech.

“We’re not talking about last year,” he said, as others recalled, in summary. “We weren’t here. Why would we spend energy and time talking about that?”

That $47 million the Royals spent — excuse me, $47 and a half million — had a purpose beyond the talent acquisition.

They sought veterans who could have an influence on the rest of the room, and they ended up collecting a very specific type of veteran.

Will Smith has won three straight World Series titles. Chris Stratton was with him for the Rangers’ championship last year. Michael Wacha has been a part of four playoff teams, and Lugo was in the postseason two years ago. Renfroe played in a World Series in 2020 with Tampa Bay and the AL Championship Series with the Red Sox a year later.

It wasn’t the only priority. But it wasn’t coincidence, either.

“They’ve played on so many good teams,” starting pitcher Brady Singer said. “And there’s not a lot of good teams that have bad clubhouses.

“This clubhouse, this locker room, we were together from Day One. Those guys really helped bring this team together.”

In the opening week of spring training, a collection of more than a dozen pitchers stood behind Lugo as he threw a bullpen session. Lugo is not a fiery speech kind of personality, but he’s most certainly of the one-on-one advice type.

Earlier this season, I wrote about something I’d witnessed in in the dugout, in which Lugo had walked in from his bullpen session between starts and spotted Ragans in the home dugout, then stopped to remind him that his fastball in the strike zone would be his best pitch against one specific hitter.

Just one example.

The Royals rotation has the fourth best earned run average in the game, and it’s thrown the third most innings. A year ago, they were 27th and 25th, respectively, in those categories.

The lineup has developed a certain characteristic, a trait that defined the last team to hoist a World Series trophy in Kansas City: They’re tough to put away.

In a plate appearance.

In a game.

In a streak.

They’re at their best when they’re behind late in games— scratch that, they’re at baseball’s best when they’re behind late in games.

They’ve responded well to adversity, a year after having little response to it. Two games in, for example, 2024 looked a lot like 2023. The Royals managed just two total runs in games in the opening series against the Twins.

But something emerged, an early contrasting sign.

“There was no panic,” Zumwalt said, “and I think that’s because we were honest with ourselves about what happened last year.

“The biggest thing is there are two ways to go about that. Either you ignore it, in which case you don’t learn from it and you repeat it — or you have to sit down and actually reflect on it. We owned it.”

The team is littered with individual success stories too, of course. Perez opened the season rejuvenated. The acquisition of Cole Ragans last summer could go down as one of the most favorably-lopsided trades in Royals history.

It starts with Witt, though, the guy they resigned to an 11-year, $288.7 million contract before the season, which is more than $200 million richer than any previous ownership had handed out. That’s not a misprint.

“That got everybody going even before spring training,” Lugo said.

Witt’s presence and preparation has a way of impacting those around him.

For himself?

The word printed across his manager’s shirt — today — encapsulates a radical shift he made about this time a year ago, too. The internal impact derives from a change to his mental approach he made last season. Every morning, he calls into the “Success Hotline” and listens to a message of positivity. He meditates. He, in a nutshell, focuses on the now.

On the today.

He forced himself to learn the trick, so tired of losing that he worried it compounded the effects.

But a year later, for him and, more to the point, for the team, today looks pretty good.