What the heck’s happened to the KC Royals? We went into the clubhouse to find out

When the Royals’ clubhouse opened to media Sunday at Kauffman Stadium, about 15 minutes after the team careened to its seventh straight loss, a rare and even strange sight awaited in that muted room.

As if stunned by what had just transpired — an eerily flat 2-0 loss to a San Francisco Giants team with no incentive beyond the day itself — virtually every Royals player remained in uniform at his locker.

The static silence had a mournful vibe, really. So much so that when I listened back to my interviews with Bobby Witt Jr. and Michael Massey I realized I was practically even whispering the questions.

Beyond words, though, maybe there was nothing more revealing about the moment at hand — and the implications — than the terse demeanor of Salvador Perez when he emerged from the training room.

Putting his never-ending exuberance on a rare pause, Perez answered a couple minutes of questions with obvious exasperation — even interrupting a few — that belied his insistence that “we don’t have any frustration.”

But … no wonder they so clearly do.

Sabotaged by an offense that has mustered one run in the last 28 innings and is eight for 54 with runners in scoring position during this brutal streak, the Royals abruptly have plunged: from a foregone conclusion they’d earn their first postseason berth since 2015, to a precarious spot.

At 82-74 as they begin a six-game road swing to Washington and Atlanta to complete the regular season, the Royals as of Sunday afternoon had tumbled into a tie with Detroit for the second of three American League Wild-Card berths. And Minnesota sits a game behind.

That’s what two seven-game losing streaks since Aug. 27 will do to the would-be rebirth of a franchise that’s averaged 99.6 losses in its last five full seasons.

Actually, “would-be rebirth” is an unfair way to put it.

Because this season has been an exhilarating revival for the Royals no matter how this goes now.

They’ve reinvented and even rebranded themselves with one of the best starting rotations in the game, the advent of Witt among the game’s elites and Perez’s remarkably abiding excellence. And then some.

They’ve demonstrated that they’ll invest in the product in ways that were long unthinkable for this franchise, particularly through a $100 million free-agent spending spree in the offseason and a nearly $300 million long-term contract for Witt.

And they’ve won 28 more games than they had to this point a year ago (54-102) despite this cruel twist: After years of pointing to semi-promising Septembers as a reason for optimism the next year, the Royals are suffering their worst September (7-12, .368) in the nine-year span since their last playoff season.

For all that, though, any Royals fan would have been elated to have known after last year that they’d have a grasp on a playoff spot entering the last week of this season.

The trouble now is the context and trajectory of the perch. A lurking sense of the Royals going out with a whimper instead of a bang was amplified by Sunday’s slothful, rainy home finale. Their ongoing struggles neutralized any presumed energy to be summoned from the crowd of 24,189.

In essence, that’s the crossroads at which the Royals stand after the Giants made them just their third series sweep of the season.

Will the Royals be consumed by the trajectory of how they’ve arrived here, or might they be buoyed by the fertile opportunity that remains? Is the pilot light flickering, or can they turn it back up?

“Believe, man, believe,” manager Matt Quatraro said. “We didn’t come this far to pack it in, right?”

As he spoke, in fact, the Royals’ clubhouse workers were packing up for the road with the notion of not just a six-game swing ahead, but also being ready for at least three more road games in the MLB Wild-Card round after this week.

With the Royals not leaving until Monday for Washington, Massey thought about needing to pack for the extra days — and the mentality that it will take to make that worthwhile.

“Lot of possibilities coming up,” he said, smiling.

All the more so if they aren’t marinating in what’s just happened but seizing what still looms.

“Just really there’s no other option other than keep going,” Massey said, adding, “We still control our own destiny. That’s the way we’ve got to look at it.

“Obviously, there’s two mindsets we could take. That one or the other one (downward). So we’ve just got to be mentally tough and play through it.”

Nearby a few minutes later, Witt echoed the point: The focus has to be entirely on the days ahead and what’s in reach, instead of being pulled down by a bad week of todays.

“That’s all you can do,” he said, later adding, “Be where your feet are.”

And leave footprints befitting an otherwise remarkable turnaround, instead of squandering all that this season has meant.

“You never know what’s going to happen in baseball,” Perez said.

Even when it might seem like you do.