The MVP of the Royals’ last World Series winner wanted to know last season how far away his team was from competing again.
General manager J.J. Picollo didn’t lie to franchise great Salvador Perez, who made his name as a Mets-killer in October 2015.
Why say something that 106 losses refuted?
“When he asked me for an honest assessment, I said, ‘A lot of things have to go right for us to be back in the playoffs. We have to turn this roster over, we have to stay healthy throughout the year,’ ” Picollo said Saturday at Yankee Stadium. “But here we are, and Salvy’s a part of it.”
The Royals’ unlikely path to Game 1 of the ALDS included a remarkable 30-game turnaround in the regular season — from 56-106 in 2023 to 86-76 in 2024 — and a two-game sweep of the Orioles in the AL Wild Card Series.
That’s been the payoff for committing a franchise offseason-record $109.5 million to free agents — pitchers Seth Lugo, Michael Wacha, Will Smith and Chris Stratton, to name a few — before spring training, according to MLB.com.
Then came the in-season acquisitions of closer Lucas Erceg and outfielder Tommy Pham.
“Our starting pitching wasn’t deep enough to compete at a high level,” Picollo said. “It was a matter of trying to put pieces of the puzzle together. Starting pitching, they were the biggest pieces, but we also had to address the bullpen and our lineup. We also wanted guys who had experience in the playoffs, so the younger guys who are still learning what this is all about were around guys who had been there.”
Around that same time last August, the Royals came up with the “Today” slogan that adorns their team T-shirts and has carried forward into this season.
At the time, manager Matt Quatraro didn’t want players mailing in the end of a lost year as “also-rans” by looking toward the future.
Now, it means something different.
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“We don’t care what happened last year. That’s last year. This is the year,” said Cole Ragans, who will start Monday’s Game 2 of the series. “We’re focused on day by day. That’s what our mindset was coming into spring training: We expected to be a lot better, and we’re not done.”
Quatraro said he didn’t even realize that he said “today” as often as he did during a course-charting meeting, but Picollo credits the manager’s “steady” personality for impacting the year-over-year turnaround.
The Royals have at least a few more todays to play spoiler to the Yankees’ World Series dream.
“That was not an intentional thing on my part to come up with a mantra or whatever,” Quatraro said. “But I try to live that way, and I think our guys embrace that and understand that there is no reason to think about the future until you take care of the business right in front of you.”
