Were the Kansas City Royals going through a World Baseball Classic hangover?

Considering the Royals practically have made it a rite of spring to start with an April swoon, maybe their 7-16 launch to the worst record in baseball felt like just another numbing version of their exasperating habit: Since 2016 they’ve only made it through three Aprils with a winning record. Even last year’s triumph (16-15) was despite starting 8-14.

Not coincidentally, they’ve earned one postseason berth in that span: the 2024 team that started 18-13 and was 35-24 through May — at which point the Royals had been 81 games under .500 in full seasons from 2017 through 2023.

Disheartening trend that it’s been, each start and season is its own story — a complicated mix of the who, what, when, where, how and why of what makes any given team.

And maybe this one has an entirely separate factor at play for a promising team coming off back-to-back winning seasons … and Aprils.

Given that the Royals entered Wednesday night’s game against Cleveland having won 10 of their last 13 since that unsightly start, it’s all the easier to wonder now about something that first came to mind amid the fever of a World Baseball Classic conspicuous with emotionally consumed Royals.

As he joined Fox Sports moments after his Team Venezuela’s intense victory over Team USA in the WBC title game, a euphoric Salvador Perez said, “I’m super happy, and now I feel like I can retire.”

The Royals star laughed as he said it. But even if he wasn’t exactly joking about its meaning, no one should begrudge him saying that or feeling that way — especially given the strife in his native country and his pride in representing it.

Perez’s words, though, further illuminated something you could tell just by watching: The WBC wasn’t a mere exhibition or entertainment. For many of the players, it took on the gravitas of representing their country in an Olympics or, say, World Cup.

Which brings us to the heart of the question:

Beyond the mere fact of missed time together at spring training, how much was the core of this team emotionally spent and needing a reboot after playing such vital roles in the WBC?

It’s a notion that Royals general manager J.J. Picollo acknowledged the other day the team has been “looking at.”

With ample reason, seems to me, he reckoned it has been a factor in the sluggish starts of five of the seven organizations that had 14 or more players involved in the WBC.

“So I don’t think (it’s) a Kansas City Royals issue,” Quatraro said.

In their case, though, it stands out that not having your better players around for a full spring training affects “the time to bond and build camaraderie,” as Quatraro put it.

Then there’s essentially having to recover from the “adrenaline rush” of a playoff atmosphere and returning to … spring training. With the season opener only a week or so away when we spoke, Picollo ventured that even opening day was likely “a little bit of a letdown from playing high energy, very impactful games.”

To be clear, Picollo only spoke to this notion in response to my question. He absolutely wasn’t invoking it as some sort of excuse, and he wasn’t questioning effort.

(A potential parallel of that comes to mind: The Chiefs in 2022 collapsing and losing to the Bengals in the AFC Championship Game a week after peaking with the incredible 42-36 overtime win over Buffalo.)

And, yes, there are too many variables to isolate here — Royals over the years, other franchises, etc. — to really conclude anything tangible. At least not yet.

So maybe this is just an intriguing talking point more than anything scientifically demonstrable.

Or as Royals vice-president for research and development Daniel Mack put it via text message, the notion has been worth “a bit of a look” but has “just enough confounding variables” that any conclusions would be of low confidence.

Still, consider this.

Only three other franchises had more of their organization’s players in the WBC, and only two had more participants from their 40-man rosters than the Royals — who had 14 overall, nine from their 40-man roster.

Moreover, Royals players in many ways were the prevailing stories of the WBC.

The all-in Maikel Garcia emerged as the tourney MVP, and Witt awed defensively. Vinnie Pasquantino became the charismatic face of Team Italy, including with three home runs in one game, and Jac Caglianone homered with four RBIs and five walks to help the Italian team to the semifinals.

A few weeks ago, Caglianone lit up at the mention of the WBC. He thought about how he couldn’t hear himself say the word “wow” out loud in the thunder of one game’scrowd, and how the event helped rekindle his sheer love of the game.

The long-term benefits of that figure to be significant, especially when it comes to meaningful Major League Baseball games late in the season. And it’s not hard to see how WBC success accelerated matters for Caglianone, who has worked through a quiet start as he appears in several ways to be coming into his own overall.

No doubt high-intensity competition furthers development, as Picollo likes to say. As the saying goes, anyway, pressure makes diamonds.

But the short-term could well have had a downside. That includes a timeframe of not worrying about the natural process of getting ready for a 162-game season, Caglianone said, since “you had to speed it up a little bit” to be ready for the WBC.

Instead of the typically painstaking work at spring training, he joked that “who cares how your swing feels?” — and all the diligence that goes into that — when you are in the middle of actually playing.

Coincidence that it might be, the three teams that put more players into the WBC than the Royals (the Mets with 17, the Mariners with 16 and Phillies with 15) started 7-16, 10-13 and 8-15, respectively. The three that sent as many as the Royals (the Red Sox, Brewers and Pirates) began 9-14, 13-10 and 13-10.

Of those, the Brewers (18-16) and Pirates (19-17) were the only teams with winning records as of Wednesday afternoon.

The flip side is that three of the four teams that entered five or fewer players in the WBC had bad starts and still have losing records.

So a lot remains to be understood about this, whether it’s collectively or player by player. After all, each consumed it his own way. When I asked the ever-steady Witt if he felt like he was in any way drained by the experience, he just smiled and said “not really.”

Just the same, it might explain some things about this particular halting start … and the Royals emerging from it.

“They come down off of that high, they sort of settle in …” Picollo said. “And now I feel like we’re starting to click a little bit better. We’re starting to see a little bit more chemistry. And I’m not talking about, like, clubhouse chemistry.

“I’m just talking about on the field. There’s more rhythm to the game. The bullpen’s starting to develop some rhythm, the lineup’s starting to develop some rhythm. I think we missed that from spring training.”

As for how the Royals might view the next WBC in 2030, Picollo is reluctant to suggest players skip it.

“You only get to play this game so long,” he said. “To tell a player we don’t think you should play I don’t think is our spot.”

Still, how to view it and handle it no doubt will bear further study — by the organization — as the season unfurls.

“Collectively, we’ve got to come up with a better way to combat (the related issues),” Picollo said, “if, in fact, we do look into it (further) and think there was a problem.”