There’s a great moment in the first Pirates of the Caribbean when it’s revealed—spoiler alert, I guess, for a movie as old as Jac Caglianone—that the pirate crew of the Black Pearl are undead monsters.
“You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner,” Captain Barbossa rumbles to a terrified Elizabeth Turner as he steps into the moonlight and reveals his true form. “You’re in one.”
That’s sort of how it felt when the Kansas City Royals revealed themselves as a playoff team last year. Teams often talk about a “competitive window,” or a period of years in which a team is maximally structured to make the playoffs and make a championship run.
For a long time, a competitive window for the Royals felt so far away as to be unbelievable. In 2023, the Royals lost 106 games and looked like a franchise in the basement that would be looking up towards the rest of the standings for the foreseeable future. But then the metaphorical Captain Barbossa told us to believe in competitive windows because, all of a sudden, we’re in one.
And then the 2025 Royals lost a bazillion games from Memorial Day through the Fourth of July and then stumbled again after Labor Day. The playoffs are happening right now, and the Royals aren’t in it.
Why they aren’t in the playoffs is really clear. Their situational hitting production–which statistics show is more a function of luck more than anything else–was worse than last year. Bobby Witt Jr. was very good this season but not the ridiculous offensive powerhouse. And the starting pitching, whose Opening Day starting rotation averaged 30 starts per person in 2024, wasn’t as effective or as healthy this year.
And despite all that, the Royals were only four wins under last season’s win total. General manager JJ Picollo and manager Matt Quatraro were therefore largely positive in their postseason press conference this week. They think this team has a good core, and they think being iterative rather than transformative is the way to go. One quote stuck out to me:
“We need to figure out how to get the most out of the rest of the roster. Some adjustments will be small tweaks rather than wholesale changes. It could be managing days off or sequencing in a different way. Baseball is full of a million small decisions that add up over the course of a season.”
Picollo, Quatraro, and the rest of the baseball operations team have largely done a fantastic job. They took over with a farm system and talent development system that was, to put it kindly, unproductive. They created a winning team nearly out of nothing with such a spark that it makes me retroactively furious over Dayton Moore’s early years. It took Moore eight seasons to build a playoff team. Picollo did it in two! It can be done!
So they have some street cred, as it were, to operate with a little benefit of the doubt. Picollo and Quatraro aren’t dumb. They know what the team’s problems are. They have repeatedly and shrewdly hunted for effective bargains both in free agency and in the trade market. It has largely worked.
Still, the key word there is “largely.” It has mostly worked. The simple fact of the matter is that the Royals were not talented enough to make the playoffs this year. They didn’t have good enough players. That’s really it. Apart from Jonathan India’s unfortunate season, I don’t know if there was a single result that you can point to and go, “Ah, yeah, that dude fell apart with no warning.”
Competitive windows don’t exist forever. Mike Trout was the best player in baseball for a seven-year stretch. His team went to precisely one playoff series during that time, and the last time he played in 140 or more games was in his age-26 season. Bobby Witt Jr. may be signed to a long-term extension, but he is in his prime right now. He turns 26 next year. He has played in the playoffs one year out of four. What he needs right now is help.
Additionally, the Royals shouldn’t just be looking to get back to where they were in 2024. They should be looking to get better than that. Kansas City plays in the AL Central, for God’s sake. The White Sox are awful. The Twins are a damn disgrace. Detroit just blew the baseball equivalent of a 28-3 lead for the division. Cleveland is perpetually annoying but never great. That the Royals have only one AL Central title in its entire history, and that makes me sad.
The biggest thing that would help is going out and getting a legit free agent bat, and to be prepared to spend $100 million or more for it. The two that pop out to me are Cody Bellinger in the outfield and Bo Bichette at second base. But it doesn’t have to be them. It doesn’t even have to be a free agent, either. Be open to trading Blake Mitchell. Be open to trading some of the intriguing arms lower in the system. Go trade for Taylor Ward or whatever. Get some talent.
I’ve gone back and forth on this piece and deleted and restarted it on three separate occasions. There’s so much to say about this season because this whole “being kinda good but mediocre” is so new. Criticisms, such as they are, of Picollo and Q are nuanced. I know a lot of fans are pissed about this year, but the Royals have moved on from being a bottom feeder team. They are well run.
But there is a limit to how much iterative changes can bring you. This isn’t a team that is in full-blown iteration or maintenance mode. They still need to get better to compete. And for that, I’m just not sure that small tweaks are going to do it. They’ve shown that small tweaks pay off. However, at the end of the day, the Royals missed the playoffs while their competitive window sways open. They need to do something about it.
