The baseball has been superb all around Kansas City — Johnson County Community College capped the best junior-college season in (at least) a generation; Central Missouri reached its third straight Division II World Series; and the Kansas Jayhawks will play Oklahoma this weekend in the first NCAA Super Regional in program history.
But directly inside Kansas City?
Yeah, it’s a far different vibe.
The team anticipating it would occupy our summer baseball fascination is captivating for all the wrong reasons. The Royals opened June tied for the fewest wins in baseball. They sandwiched three six-game losing streaks into the season’s first 60 games.
As of this writing, they are pacing for 61 wins — six shy, by the way, of the total JCCC accumulated in 70 JUCO games. There’s a comparison I never thought I’d make.
Who’s to blame? What’s gone so wrong with the Royals?
Nearly everyone.
Nearly everything.
There will be an all-over-the-place nature to this conversation because, after all, that is most reflective of the complications confronting the Royals. They come from everywhere. Pick your starting point, but don’t end there.
How about the last 24 hours?
With a one-run lead Tuesday night in Cincinnati, KC manager Matt Quatraro again turned to Lucas Erceg, who has the worst ninth-inning ERA in baseball by nearly two runs among relievers who have appeared in the final frame at least 13 times.
Three pitches into the outing, Erceg lost the lead. One inning later, the Royals lost the game. Erceg has allowed 17 hits in his last five innings. In his last four appearances, he has recorded nine outs and allowed nine runs.
It’s one game.
It’s one pitcher.
It’s one perfect example of this season: The Royals have far too frequently pressed the same players into the same roles and expected them to produce different results.
Quatraro’s motto of “Today” is supposed to be built for these moments — to stop the avalanche by ignoring its existence and embracing a new day. The avalanche is not only here but continues to pick up momentum.
At some point, the preference for consistency and the resolve to make decisions built on past success starts to mirror stubbornness. And a mandate to turn the page can subtract the acknowledgement, or even some of the urgency, of where exactly this team sits — which at the moment is the bottom of the baseball world.
The manager in charge of one of the best single-season turnarounds in baseball history — who guided the team to back-to-back winning seasons for the first time in a decade — has not suddenly forgotten how to do his job, nor can we suddenly forget that’s part of the resume.
But it’s equally worth mentioning, and even more visibly evident, that Quatraro isn’t pushing the right buttons. That statement alone, however, prompts a far more important question:
Do the Royals even have the right buttons available?
Somebody has to hit third behind Bobby Witt Jr.
Somebody has to hit cleanup.
Someone has to pitch the ninth.
Someone has to pitch the eighth.
The Royals have also operated like a team without many right answers.
They have scored fewer runs per game than any team in baseball. They were 26th in the league a year ago. The offense so rarely gives everyone else a night off — so rarely allows for a bullpen or starting rotation to endure even the shortest of slumps, let alone the kind of slump the Royals’ bullpen has endured this year.
Since the start of the 2025 season, a span of 223 games, the Royals have put up three or more runs in an inning in just 74 games, six fewer than any other team in the American League. Those are essentially game-changing innings, though that’s what the Royals have almost shown an immunity toward:
Change.
The noise growing outside the Royals’ walls isn’t just about the results. It’s about the consistency, even predictability, with which they arrive.
The lineup absorbed only tweaks, not overhauls, in the offseason after finishing 26th in runs. Club brass was banking on internal improvement but underplaying the possibility for internal regression. As an asterisk, I’ll point out the outfielder names being thrown around over the past couple of winters have flopped, but the Royals have failed to acquire a middle-of-the-order bat that could ease stress on the entire operation.
They had only four regulars record an OPS (on-base plus slugging percentage) better than .700 a year ago — Bobby Witt Jr., Maikel Garcia, Vinnie Pasquantino and Salvador Perez. All four have a worse OPS this season — by an average of 99 points per player.
Until very recently, when Quatraro has tinkered with the order, those four continued to occupy the top four spots in the lineup. Pasquantino and Perez are top-five in the AL in plate appearances with runners in scoring position this season — which should come as no surprise for players who bat directly behind Bobby Witt Jr. — yet they are two of the three least productive hitters in the AL with runners in scoring position this year.
Those situations — runners in scoring position — ballooned the Royals’ team totals in 2024. But that has proven to be an aberration. They’ve not only regressed to the mean but blown far below it.
Which reflects where they are.
Their lineup has grown worse and less productive, despite only one player aging beyond his peak. Their starting rotation, the foundation of the previous two seasons, entered this week ranking below-average in ERA. The bullpen is an outright mess, the second worst in baseball after Tuesday’s meltdown that ruined one of the best starts they’ve had all year.
In other words, everyone owns a piece of this mess — the lineup, the rotation, the bullpen, those who coach and manage the players and those who assembled them.
As difficult as it was to produce the 2024 turnaround — as many things that had to come together to make that happen — it’s required nearly as many things to fall apart for the Royals to be this bad.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.kansascity.com ’
