KANSAS CITY, Mo. — As the New York Yankees celebrated on the field Thursday at Kauffman Stadium after winning the American League Division Series, Bobby Witt Jr. laid his chin on the padding atop the fence guarding the home dugout.
“That’s where I want to be,” said Witt, who sounded as if he'd shed a few tears before addressing the media after a 3-1 loss in ALDS Game 4.
He continued, “It’s just motivation. That’s where we want to be, so we’ve just got to keep working, get better each and every day. I think the best is yet to come for this team.”
Outside of Kansas City — heck, outside of the Royals’ locker room — not much was expected from manager Matt Quatraro’s bunch in 2024.
Kansas City was coming off a 56-106 season, which tied a dubious franchise record for most losses in a season.
The postseason seemed like a pipe dream. PECOTA, FanGraphs, talking heads — there was universal agreement that 70 wins would be a solid season and little more should be expected.
But as Witt emerged as one of baseball’s brightest young stars and the rotation coalesced around Cole Ragans, who was acquired late season, and a couple free-agent additions, Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha, the Royals brought a Blue October back to Kansas City for the first time in nearly a decade.
“Now, for Kansas City Royals baseball, this is what we want,” Witt said. “This is what we’re going to do every year. Get in the postseason and now it’s, ‘How far are we going to go? It’s not, ‘We’re going to get there.’”
It was impressive for Kansas City to become only the third club in MLB history to reach the postseason after losing 100 games the previous year.
But the Royals went further, becoming the first of those 100-loss turnarounds to win a postseason series — sweeping past the Baltimore Orioles in American League Wild Card Series.
The ride ended Thursday as top-seeded New York won the best-of-five series 3-1 but only outscored the Royals by two runs across the four games (14-12).
“Frustration, disappointment, sadness — I feel really badly for those guys in the room,” Quatraro said after the Game 4 loss, “because, as you know, this is seven, eight months of the year that they just pour it all into it and give every ounce of effort and energy they have. ... It doesn't matter what other people thought we were able to accomplish this year. Our guys had bigger expectations for themselves, and that's how you should approach this game. You don't come here thinking, ‘Oh, I hope we get a little bit better.’ That's not how it works at the big-league level.”
It didn’t matter that few expected the Royals to be in this position because the Royals expected to be in that position, so getting eliminated Thursday stung.
“It feels like you let a lot of people down,” said Witt, who went 2 for 17 with a walk in the ALDS.
Still, it’s impossible not to envision a bright future for Kansas City baseball.
“We know what we believe in here,” Pasquantino said. “... We know where we want to be. We know where we want to continue to be, and that’s in this position. Not in this exact position, because we just lost, but we think we can be back here quite a bit and we want to keep trying to do that.”
2024 was proof of concept, a launching pad for renewed hope within the organization.
“If you look at it and you look at what we did this year, then we move into next year with even more confidence, knowing that we have a taste of it now,” Pasquantino said. “We’re not just talking about potentially playing in playoff games; we’re talking about what we did in a playoff game.”
Much like 2014 was the most-recent Royals playoff bunch, the mission moving forward has forever changed.
“As soon as you taste the playoffs, you just want to play for the playoffs,” Salvy Perez said. “You never know what’s going to happen, but that’s the mentality that we have to have.”
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