It was a great season. Should it have been greater?
The internet is not a good place for nuance or subtlety. We’re constantly in pursuit of the best, of the correct, of the winner, of the definitive argument. Maybe that’s just how discussions around sports just go in general. It’s probably just how we’re wired as human beings, really. An incurable condition of the pursuit of absolutes.
The 2024 Kansas City Royals season is at an end, and there’s a knee-jerk reaction to have some sort of knee-jerk reaction about what the season meant and how we should evaluate it. That’s what the talk shows and radio programs have been doing, phrasing it in terms of either/or because that makes good Content. The articles that get the clicks are those that provoke some sort of response. This is my 11th season writing about the Royals on this site. I know how it goes.
But when thinking about this season, I can’t easily dump it into a “good” or “bad” bucket and move on with my life. Last year? Bad bucket for sure. In 2014 and 2015? Good bucket, no contest. This year? More good than bad. A lot more good than bad, really. It’s not all good, though, and that’s ok.
First, let’s talk about why the team was fantastic, which is obvious. The 2024 Royals were fantastic because of what they accomplished and just how fun they were. The 2023 Royals only eked out 56 wins and were largely unwatchable. This year, the team won an even 30 games more. They became the first team in Major League Baseball history to go from 100 losses to winning a playoff series.
Moreover, this team was fun and had stars. Bobby Witt Jr. will in all likelihood be MVP runner-up. One or both of Cole Ragans and Seth Lugo will end up in the top three of Cy Young voting. Salvador Perez was good, again. The team had some moxie. It is infinitely more interesting to see the Royals play in October playoffs than it is to watch a sort of death march in September.
So, how could the team be frustrating when they were so improved? This relates back to something I wrote about back in August about the expectations for team. At the time, the Royals were 64-52, one pace for 89ish wins and barely holding onto the last Wild Card spot with a two-game lead over the Boston Red Sox. The postseason was not yet locked down. The question was whether fans would be or even should be disappointed if the Royals missed the playoffs, considering that they had already exceeded expectations so wildly:
So there’s a legitimate question here that is quite timely: what are are expectations of the Royals now?
I’m not talking hopes here—I’m talking expectations. For instance, I hope the Chiefs win the Super Bowl every year. I expect them to make it to the Divisional round of the playoffs and anything less would be disappointing. At the beginning of the year, nobody expected the Royals to even have a winning record. That seems very likely to happen. But if the Royals won, say, 85 games and missed the playoffs, would we be happy or unhappy?
…Does it matter now if, like that 2003 team, the Royals faded into winning somewhere between 83 and 85 games? That’s still a huge improvement over last year. Additionally: would you rather have something like the 2013 Royals happen? Is it worse to win 86 games and lose out on a playoff spot at the last minute, or would you rather claw back from an early slump and just barely miss the playoffs? Because you sit home either way.
The consensus thought when it came to social media responses and comments was that, yeah, not making the playoffs after being so good for so long would have been disappointing. That’s because, at some point, preseason expectations matter less.
And this, I think is why it can be true that the season was both fantastic and frustrating—fantastic because of last year’s expectations, but frustrating because of this year’s expectations and what the Royals did in the final stretch, when they lost 18 of their last 29 regular season games and got bumped from the playoffs at home.
What might frustrate me the most about this year was that the team never really cashed in on convincing the city they were for real. On the year, the Royals only won 2 of 9 games at Kauffman Stadium when 30,000 or more fans were present. They lost on Opening Day, on the 4th of July, both of their home playoff games (where they never lead for a single inning). They lost their last 8 games at home. All year, the Royals heavily marketed Bobby Witt Jr., who then disappeared in the playoffs.
To put it another way: the Royals were set up as well as any team in the playoffs for a deep run, but while they were in every game in the postseason, their play boiled down to “feisty, but overmatched.”
The other part about the Royals being frustrating isn’t this team’s fault. Kansas City’s 2014 and 2015 World Series runs were highly abnormal. A lot of the time when teams make the playoffs, they win a few games and get bumped from the dance before they thought they deserved to. That is normal. And in witnessing normal levels of good, the losing over the previous eight years hurt even worse. The Royals lost a golden opportunity during that time to build a generational fandom with sustained success. Sprinkle a few 2024s throughout the previous years and discussion about the Royals franchise is fundamentally different.
Maybe I’m waxing a bit too philosophical here, and you prefer to think that I’m just nuts for thinking that the 2024 Royals were in any way disappointing. Maybe you think I’m nuts for giving the team so much credit when they had a chance to advance to the ALCS and didn’t take it. That’s the great thing—you’re both right. It’s wonderful to see the Royals be good enough for these discussions to happen at once. And that’s why I’m excited for the future.