Why this is the true test for the KC Royals, and whether it’s time to worry

Paul Hoover, the acting Royals manager for a couple of days, walked along the team plane Sunday afternoon, and the context you need here is that the Royals were flying home after a miserable road trip.

They were 2-7 over stops in Los Angeles, Oakland and Texas, the last of those destinations supplying their first sweep out of town. They scored all of six runs in the final five games. Shut out in the final two.

So, Hoover.

While walking inside the plane, he passed left-handed starting pitcher Cole Ragans.

“We’re all right,” Hoover said. “We got the stopper going tomorrow.”

Ragans, true to that form, delivered one of his best outings of the season Monday night at Kauffman Stadium, a lights-out six innings in the Royals’ 4-1 win. He had a career-high 28 whiffs, second most by a Royals player in the last 15 years.

This isn’t really about the starting pitcher, though. Not entirely.

It’s been a tough go of it for the Royals lately, in case you haven’t tuned in for the past couple of weeks — or in case, ahem, the TV hasn’t provided you much of an opportunity to tune in. They’d lost 11 of their previous 14 games before Ragans shoved Monday.

A team that some have doubted — or a team that perhaps some are waiting to return to, shall I say, historical form — encountered its toughest stretch on the schedule ... and flopped.

I know some considered that the true how-good-are-the-Royals-really exam. And, hey, I get it. But the Yankees and Dodgers beat up on a lot of teams.

The real test? It’s now.

The response.

There will always be tough series, tough opposing pitchers, tough injuries to overcome, tough environments — you name it.

The Royals, though, are in the midst of tough reminders of their past — the very recent past for which they are very much responsible. And that’s a test of different kind, because it’s unique to them and it comes from within.

Yes, the Royals have been 15 games above .500 at one point this season, with a run differential suggestive of a team that has figured out some things. They’re still 11th in the league in runs, even with the lineup mired in a collective slump. They still have a top-7 rotation in baseball overall, and the season is nearly half exhausted.

But the first six hitters in Monday’s lineup — and the starting pitcher, the stopper himself — were part of a team that lost 106 games last year. The Royals might have made a very public point of putting up a wall and turning away anything about last season, but the reminders of that season have a way of breaking down some barriers.

Like, say, these past couple of weeks. The Royals failed to hit. They booted the ball around the field. And they lost. A lot.

Here’s how bad that stretch was (and I’m using it in past tense after Monday’s win, but it’s going to take more than one victory to make it an actual thing of that past): Vinnie Pasquantino walked into the clubhouse Monday afternoon before the game and thought it was Friday. He reached into the top of his locker to get his cleats that match the City Connect uniforms reserved for Fridays at The K, but then he realized that was not the jersey hanging in his locker.

“That’s how miserable the road trip was,” he said. “That’s how bad we played — I don’t even know what day it is.”

The cause-and-effect link there might be a bit of a stretch.

But the response is the importance.

When a two-week stretch starts to look like a lot like the six-month stretch that became so familiar to many of these players, isn’t it hard not to at least consider how long it will be sticking around?

Apparently, not necessarily.

“It wasn’t fun, but there was no panic,” Pasquantino said. “It was just that we’re getting our (butt) kicked right now. What do we need to do to rectify that?”

That’s a word — panic — that came up a few times Monday, as though there is an intentional insistence in keeping it out of the room. Which is really what this is about, right? That is the test.

Royals general manager J.J. Picollo said he had multiple conversations with players over the last few days, the topic varying in nature. Only one player brought up the skid, which came in a text message telling Picollo not to worry — that they’d climb out of this.

The rest?

“It doesn’t even come up,” Picollo said, adding, “It’s been a tough couple of weeks. Teams are going to go through this. We can’t panic about it, and we’re not panicked. We got the right makeup in the clubhouse — we have veterans who have been through this before. If you talk to them, there’s no panic in their eyes. They know this is part of it.”

That’s a good sign, but let’s be honest: The action will be more telling than the signs.

There was always some regression coming in specific areas with this group — the Royals, for example, led baseball in OPS with runners in scoring position through mid-June, despite ranking only 24th in OPS with the bases empty.

The odds of that spanning a 162-game season? Quite slim.

And, guess, what, they are dead last in OPS with runners in scoring position over the last eight days — a putrid .286, nearly 200 points behind the 29th-place team. You’ll weigh the larger sample size over the last week, but the expectation can’t be that they will return to league-leading form.

It can be that they won’t change the individual approaches that prompted past success — that they won’t change after the losing streak.

Or that the losing streak won’t change them.