This year’s KC Royals have a key trait of their 2015 World Series team
The most promising Royals season in a generation placed the long-term future of the franchise at the plate, one out left in a World Series, game tying run 90 feet shy of home plate.
The first thing that stands out when re-watching the 2014 October highlight is that it’s a light-framed Salvador Perez in the right-handed batter’s box. OK, relatively speaking.
The second thing, you won’t find it in the highlight clip.
It came in the dugout.
Perez popped out in foul territory to end that 2014 World Series Game 7, and the San Francisco Giants celebrated inside Kauffman Stadium.
Inside the Royals dugout, the players didn’t want to leave. A team that had reinvigorated baseball in Kansas City, that had brought the energy back to the stadium, that had all but introduced a young generation to the sport, felt precisely none of that in its immediate aftermath.
Eric Hosmer, perhaps the most prominent name on a team not defined by prominence, began to pack up his things when he heard something. It took a second before he realized it was coming from the crowd.
“Let’s go, Royals!” the chant began faintly, before picking up steam, loud enough that the players left in the dugout couldn’t but acknowledge it.
Hosmer recalls a sense of accomplishment felt by a city and team alike.
But the players felt something else, too.
“If you don’t (win),” he said, “it’s a failure of the season.”
Well, except in one avenue.
“Everyone came to spring training (the next year),” Hosmer said, “really ready to go.”
We know what followed.
One more win.
That encore team from 2015 is in Kansas City this weekend, along with the 1985 crew, to commemorate the only two World Series championships in franchise history.
Appropriately, those flags whipped atop the Hall of Fame building on a particularly windy Friday, hours before a 40-year ceremony for the 1985 team and a day prior to a 10-year reunion for the 2015 team.
Those championship groups reached baseball’s ultimate pinnacle.
But for the 2015 team, the climb started elsewhere, and it just might have a relation to this year’s team.
It started with the almost.
The 2015 champs
The Royals returned for 2015 spring training a week early.
You could call it motivation from the proverbial unfinished business.
They’d use another description: ticked off.
In the first game that spring, Hosmer led off from first base in an early inning. Lorenzo Cain stood at the plate.
Cain ripped a single into left field, a ball that, as then-general manager Dayton Moore recalled, hugged the line. But Hosmer rounded second hard and busted it to third. He dived into the bag to beat the throw.
In an exhibition game.
“Wow,” Moore said, “these guys are fired up.”
An acknowledgment here for what should be obvious: More than one team arrives at spring training expecting to win. Motivated teams lose, even if this one didn’t.
I’ll offer only the extremely condensed narrative of the 2015 Royals, but they had won together. A lot. They’d won championships in the minor leagues. Moore had built the team for Kauffman Stadium, even studying the 1985 team to determine what worked in the home park.
He then — ahead of his time — built it for a modern era that hadn’t yet fully arrived, with power arm after power arm stacked in the back end of the bullpen.
They were without a bonafide franchise player, but they were good, and on the foundation of their minor league track records, they believed they were good.
But first they had to know it.
If there’s a game that re-birthed baseball into Kansas City, it’s perhaps the best game played in its history: the 2014 AL Wild Card Game.
The influence here, though, permeated into the clubhouse, its effect just as long lasting.
“I think everything goes back to that wild card game,” third baseman Mike Moustakas said. “After that game, I felt like we knew that we belonged.
“Once you know you belong in the big leagues and you know you can win, it’s a pretty special feeling.”
They had talent.
They had belief.
And after 2014, they had an edge.
“With Hos and Moose, as soon as the umpire says, ‘Play ball,’” Moore said, “they’ll kill you.”
With maybe a week left in that spring training, the Royals had a home night game in Arizona, so they practiced in the warm desert sun during the day. They worked on fundamentals, specifically rundown plays. Perez assumed his spot behind the plate.
“He’s going at it like it’s Game 7 of the World Series,” Moore recalled.
At which point, Moore turned to the team’s manager, Ned Yost, the two of them sitting together in the dugout of the practice field.
“This team,” Moore said, “is going to be good.”
They won their first seven games.
But more to this point: They won their last one, too.
The future Royals?
In the corner of the Royals clubhouse is the mainstay, a capital ‘C’ lining the upper right corner of his powder blue jersey.
Perez is the lone hangover from that 2015 team. As they gathered inside Union Station on Thursday night for a celebration, he remarked that maybe some of the rest of the guys should still be playing. Lorenzo Cain, he joked, is in better shape now than when he played.
That gathering stoked a lot of memories.
It’s still reality for one.
On the first day of spring training, on the heels of the team’s best season since that 2015 group, the Royals were cycling through rundown plays.
Perez began taking over the drill.
“Let’s go! Game speed!” he kept shouting, as his manager, Matt Quatraro, recalled.
There he was, again.
And again, it was everyone else, too.
In the first full-squad workouts, even the infield practice stood out. The team ran drills at full speed. Bobby Witt Jr. whipped a throw across his body. And Quatraro couldn’t help but wonder: “Are we getting too far ahead of things?”
“Trying to make sure that we’re being smart about what we were doing,” he said. “But they were dying to get after it.”
The city had been starving for a winner.
They got one last year. The Royals had one of the best one-season turnarounds in MLB history, following a 106-loss year with a playoff appearance.
But the team left it starving for more.
It’s not unusual for a playoff loss to provide motivation, but a feeling of disappointment doesn’t typically so drastically contrast those in the stands.
It did a decade ago.
It did last year, too.
That’s the real point here, right? It’s sure nice to finally be comparing the 2015 Royals and 2025 Royals rather than contrasting them. We can use statistics for that, but the vibes are in the responses.
After last season, that 30-win improvement, Quatraro’s phone was overwhelmed with congratulatory texts. It bothered him. He’d later regret calling players and staff, interrupting their offseasons. But he just couldn’t get his mind off it.
“We all felt that same way,” Witt said. “None of us were happy with how the season ended. It’s not like it wasn’t on our mind already.”
Sounds familiar, right?
Well, let’s just ask the player who’s still here.
The only player.
“We were just talking about that,” Perez said when I asked him if the similarity struck him. “A hundred percent. Same thing.”