After a disappointing 2025, everyone in the Kansas City Royals organization–from the coaches to the players to the front office–were adamant that this year’s goal was making the playoffs again. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the season has been a complete and total disaster. We’re 22 games in, and the Royals stand at 7-15, tied for the worst record in Major League Baseball.
The good news is that there are 140 games left in the baseball season. That’s a lot of baseball! Even after playing so poorly
so for long to begin the year, the Royals are only five games out from the third Wild Card spot. That’s a plenty workable gap in July, let alone May.
The bad news is that the Royals have probably functionally played themselves out of a playoff spot, even if they’re mathematically in the running.
Let’s start with some simple math here. Over the last five years, the the third Wild Card team (or what would have been the third Wild Card team in 2021) averaged 86.5 wins. Yes, you could get lucky and sneak in with 83 wins, but you could get unlucky and fail to get in with 90. So a win target of 87 is reasonable.
Here, you can see why the poor start has such a big impact. To get to 87 wins now, the Royals must go 80-60 the rest of the year. That’s a winning percentage of .571, or a 93-win pace.
This is…a tall order. To put it into perspective, the Royals have won 93 games over a full season once in 46 years–that was 2015, when Kansas City won the World Series. The Royals essentially have to play nearly as good as the 2015 team did for the rest of the season. Considering that this team is significantly less talented than that 2015 squad, we have a pretty big problem.
How much less talented these Royals are than a real 90-something win team, a mark that some around the league predicted would happen? That’s the real question. The Royals have made it a nearly yearly tradition to suffer through extended early-season losing streaks. And as longtime Royals writer Rany Jazayerli pointed out, the only times the Royals avoided doing so was when the team made the playoffs (or, in other words, was actually a good team).
The crux of the matter is that good teams don’t start so poorly because they have enough talent to stave off big losing streaks. While I think the Royals are clearly better and more talented than their first few weeks of baseball has shown, I also think it’s clear that the Royals just aren’t a playoff team. They have the same excellent starting pitching and same poor offense as last year, when they went 81-81. Add in what is literally the worst bullpen in the big leagues, though, and this year’s squad is starting to look worse than last year’s squad.
Again, I wouldn’t necessarily be surprised if the Royals fought their way back into standings relevancy. It’s just that playoff teams tend not to what the Royals have been doing over this long of a stretch of time. And when you look at the math, well, it just looks grim–just like the experience of watching Royals baseball this year.
