One ‘monumental’ team meeting was key to Royals’ epic turnaround in 2024

When the Royals sank to 45 games below .500 in late July 2023, it was easy to determine that they’d be sellers at the trade deadline.

At that point, there also would be no planning for the possibility of the postseason. That, oddly, proved beneficial in one respect. It allowed general manager J.J. Picollo a chance to get an early start on turning around the team’s fortunes.

And so, more than 200 members of the Royals franchise met on Oct. 8, 2023, in Surprise, Arizona, the team’s spring-training home, and listened to Picollo’s vision for the future. That time together proved to be the beginning of one of the greatest turnarounds in MLB history.

After losing 106 games in 2023, the Royals clinched a playoff berth on Friday night.

“I thought it was monumental,” Assistant General Manager and senior vice president of Major League operations Scott Sharp said. “It was just a time where J.J. could very clearly outline what he thought were the most important things we needed to do moving forward, what his vision was. He had been in the job for slightly more than a year.

“It took that year to really evaluate where we were, not just the major-league roster, but where we were as an organization, and then implement and outline for everyone that this is what my assessment is, and that’s what I think we needed to do to move forward.”

Picollo had been promoted to replace Dayton Moore with just two weeks remaining in the 2022 season. The hiring was more than simply handing the car keys to a different driver. Picollo was intent on putting his mark on the team, and he set about making changes.

In addition to hiring manager Matt Quatraro and bringing in new coaches, Picollo made significant changes from the front office to the minor-league staff. With new people in place, it was time to get them all together.

“The most important thing was saying, ‘OK, here’s the direction.’ Because the year before, all we were doing was interviewing people,” Picollo said. “So I never really had a chance to say, here’s our vision. But halfway through the year, we realized we need to ensure as a front office that our vision is shared with everybody and everybody understands what we’re trying to do.”

‘What’s our why?’

The numbers for the 2023 Royals tell the dreadful story. They were 23rd in MLB in runs scored and batting average with runners in scoring position. KC was in the bottom half of the majors in stolen-base percentage and ranked 23rd in Defensive Runs Saved. The Royals pitching staff allowed the second-most runs in baseball.

“He was very open about not running from it: We lost 106 games,” Sharp said. “I did the major-league season breakdown and the elephant in the room is we were 56-106. There’s no way of getting around that. You can say you didn’t think we were that bad, but the bottom line is it’s a results-driven business. We won 56, we lost 106. What can we do to make sure that that is not what the result is in ‘24?”

Picollo wanted everyone from his top lieutenants to the training staff to be on the same page as the Royals prepared to move on from the dreadful season.

“It was a way to, I’ll say, reestablish what our identity is: pitching, defense, base running, situational hitting,” Picollo said. “The importance of throwing strikes, getting ahead of hitters, the importance of putting the ball in play as a hitter. And when you get a chance in defense to get an out, we need to convert the out. It’s a race to 27 outs. That’s what every night is. Defense should never take a backseat. And base running is something that we take a lot of pride in, just being aggressive and playing a fun style.”

Picollo said scouting and player development are the lifeline of every organization, regardless of whether they have a payroll in line with the Dodgers or the A’s. It’s a key to success in the majors.

Playing off that, Picollo wanted everyone with the Royals to know the bottom line, and he did it by answering his own question.

“But why do we do that?” Picollo said of player development. “So I tried to flip why? What’s our why? We do this to win games in the major leagues. And as much as we want all homegrown guys on the field, the reality is you’re not gonna have 25 or 26 home-grown guys. I think with what we did in ‘14 and ‘15, there were so many who think that’s the only way to do it. It’s not. We still have a lot of guys that are homegrown on this team, but we don’t need to have 100% homegrown or 90% homegrown, but the goal is to win games.

“And if we’re winning games, and people are in the seats, ownership’s are happy. Fans are happy. We’re an entertainment business. People aren’t going to come if you’re a bad team. They’re going to come if you have a good team. So I tried to just reverse the thinking, not to de-emphasize the importance of scouting and player development, but understand what’s on the other end of the rainbow. It’s 35,000 fans watching. That’s what you want.”

Much of the hiring Picollo did in the early days was to beef up the research-and-development team. That’s known commonly as analytics.

Picollo said it was important to identify ways to help pitchers with spin rate, horizontal and vertical break of their pitches. Batters need the tools that can help with hard-hit rates and making good swing decisions.

However, that’s a focus for before and after a game, he noted. When fans are in the stands and the lights are on, those things take a backseat. There’s a more immediate goal during games.

Results.

“When there’s a man on third, get him home. When there’s a man on second getting them over to third,” Picollo said. “Nobody cares how hard you hit the ball when a guy scores a run. Everybody’s high-fiving, you just scored a run. So over the course of the year, the expectations of hard-hit rate will tell us a little bit more about what type of player this is. But in the moment, it’s just getting the job done in that at-bat or on the mound.”

Clubhouse takeover

Eight days after James McArthur struck out Everson Pereira to close out the Royals win over the Yankees in the 2023 season finale, nearly all of the franchise’s employees gathered in Surprise. Baseball operations officials were joined by Quatraro and the major-league staff, minor-league managers and coaches, scouts, trainers and medical staff.

Picollo had a slide deck and PowerPoint presentation in the major-league clubhouse. A dais was set up in the middle of the room for speakers. Breakout sessions took place all over the facility: the minor-league conference room, a coaches conference room, the multi-purpose rooms and even the cafeteria.

“Basically it was rotating meetings between scouting and player development, and analytics and pitching, and hitting and all these different subsets,” Sharp said. “Where are we connected? Where are we getting disconnected? And how do we get back on the same page?”

The timing was crucial. By meeting so early in the offseason, Picollo’s vision could be implemented by the time spring training started in February.

“It’s hard to plan organizational meetings, because if you’re sort of in the playoff race, you can’t set them until when the season is over,” Piccolo said. “November is a tough time to have meetings because the GM meetings are earlier, then it’s Thanksgiving. December’s hard because it’s winter meetings and then Christmas.

“So more often than not, meetings for most organizations are in January. But if we’re talking about things in January, a couple weeks later, you’re in spring training, so what did you really get out of it?”

The Royals were able to map out the plan in 2024 and make sure everyone was working toward the same goals.

Before the end of the year, they signed free agents Seth Lugo, Michael Wacha, Hunter Renfroe and Will Smith, and traded for pitchers Nick Anderson and Kyle Wright.

Lugo and Wacha are part of one of MLB’s best rotations for the Royals, who are second in baseball in batting average with runners in scoring position and 12th in run scored. KC is 10th in stolen-base percentage and fifth in Defensive Runs Saved. The Royals’ pitching staff has the eighth-best ERA in baseball.

Thanks to all those improvements, the Royals clinched a wild-card berth Friday. They will play postseason games in October for the first time in nine years.

Picollo is the frontrunner for MLB Executive of the Year, and one reason is because he gathered the organization for those meetings last October.

“I tried to create an understanding of why we do this,” PIcollo said. “So you’re experts in your field. This is a business, and we’re in the business of winning games and entertaining fans. That’s our mission, to put an entertaining product that wins more games than they lose.

“I want to honor what you guys do but understand there’s a bigger thing in place and that’s the fans in Kansas City. That’s what it is.”