Why the Royals are thinking differently — and the man who insisted they did

The night before the Royals splashed champagne in a clubhouse in Atlanta, they sat inside a dugout in Washington, D.C., locked in a tie game in the ninth inning and trying to elude a free fall.

The Nationals had put their closer, right-hander Kyle Finnegan, on the mound, and so from that opposing dugout, Royals manager Matt Quatraro told left-handed hitter MJ Melendez to grab his bat.

Melendez worked a leadoff walk, though after pacing 90 feet to first base, he promptly left in favor of a pinch-runner. Another walk followed, and then another pinch-hitter. And then yet a third pinch-hitter.

That’s the real-life fabric for one of the most pivotal Royals innings amid their first playoff chase in nine years.

Real life. A weird way to phrase that, right?

That’s precisely the relevance, though, because it perfectly mirrored a hypothetical.

And that hypothetical, as it so happens, is fundamental to why the Royals are here, still playing baseball after the calendar turns to October, as they face the Orioles in an AL Wild Card series.

This first popped up during an interview inside Kauffman Stadium that spanned seven hours. The first one, anyway. The Royals brought in Matt Quatraro to their offices twice in the fall of 2022, but after the initial talk, they had a pretty good idea of where their managerial search would conclude.

How? He said what they weren’t expecting, and that was part of the allure, not a blemish.

General manager J.J. Picollo put Quatraro through a series of suppositional lineup constructions. Must-win game. Left-hander on the mound. What’s your lineup?

Quatraro took a pen and plugged in a couple of reserves — in the must-win scenario, remember — and even put one of the reserves in the cleanup spot.

The first reply, as Picollo recalled: Why would you do that?

Quatraro, in his ever-steady composed-but-confident manner, explained, “I’m going to get two or three at-bats out of him, and then when that turn comes up again, it’s going to be a key spot. So when they bring in the righty, I’ve got the matchup I want with a left-handed hitter.”

It was a layered thought process — one that has come to life so frequently in games this year, and most notably that eventual 7-4 win in Washington that put the Royals on the brink of clinching their playoff spot.

But two years ago in their stadium offices, as the Royals were searching for managers rather than preparing for playoff series, a front office making that decision hadn’t seen it before.

The first reaction sought more information.

The second, as Picollo also recalled:

We need this.

‘I had to evaluate myself’

J.J. Picollo has been part of Major League Baseball since 1999. Began as a scout in Atlanta. Graduated to minor-league operations. Moved to KC. Led player development. Got promoted to assistant general manager.

He interviewed for his first GM job in 2011. Several more called in 2016-17 after he served as one of Dayton Moore’s top lieutenants during those World Series runs.

That’s all led to this: He’s had 25 years to ponder what he might do if given the reins of an MLB baseball operations department. For more than a decade, he’s had other teams asking what he might do if given the reins of an MLB baseball operations department.

So when that day came in September 2022, after the Royals fired Moore, you’d think Picollo’s first act would be to implement all he’d learned along the way. To implement all he’d been planning.

Instead of an answer, though, he asked two questions: What don’t we know? What does everyone else know?

“It kind of pains me to say,” Picollo said. “(but) we felt like what we needed was to get a little bit of outside influence — fresh thoughts — and to challenge us professionally.”

Picollo struck gold with the Royals this offseason, a foundation that flipped a 106-loss embarrassment into baseball’s most intriguing story while riding some house money into the playoffs. Their starting rotation prolongs the intrigue into October, a group totally revamped by Picollo and his staff that features assistant GM Scott Sharp.

That process started last summer with the acquisition of left-hander Cole Ragans, who will be on Cy Young ballots, in exchange for a rental reliever, Aroldis Chapman.

Then, offered more dollars from ownership — you can’t ignore that, especially here in KC — the Royals signed Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha. They are the only team to have three pitchers finish in the top-20 in earned run average in the AL. Those are the three.

Anyone could’ve had them. The Royals did not luck into them. They did not wait on their own development. They sought outside help. They signed outside help.

They have revamped their bullpen during the season, highlighted by the trade-deadline acquisition of Lucas Erceg, turning in the second-best reliever ERA (1.90) in baseball since Sept. 4.

It’s as though every move they’ve made in the last 10 months has turned to magic. Picollo should be the front-runner to win MLB’s Executive of the Year, awarded by other clubs this winter.

That’s how this story should conclude.

This is how it started.

A man who waited for this sort of opportunity for years not only had a willingness to change once he landed it, but an insistence to evolve. The Royals have become a mixture of his past experience and what his studies since illuminated.

“We looked at some of the other teams that were winning with smaller payrolls, and they were doing things differently than the way I was used to it, or the way we were used to doing it,” Picollo said. “So you have to ask yourself why. Why are they winning, and we’re not? We needed to answer those questions — in depth.”

It’s pretty easy to find some examples of the implementation. The Royals have added about three dozen new staffers in various baseball operations departments. It’s not even really about the number. It’s about the type. Most have pretty similar backgrounds, and what’s most interesting is they contrast the background of the man making the hires.

If you want the buzzword of this baseball decade dropped in: Yes, it’s more data. Picollo is a scout, churning through resumes to reinvent the way the Royals stir analytics and data into their player development and player analysis concepts. He spent more than two decades watching the game through a certain lens. His moves have ensured the Royals changed the filter. Change his filter.

“You know, I had to evaluate myself,” Picollo said. “Am I willing to do this? But you have to be comfortable saying, ‘I don’t know the answer here.’ There’s nothing wrong with that.”

‘We want to be the Royals’

Picollo found out less than 24 hours before he replaced Moore that he’d be doing so, and there have been more popularly received moves in Kansas City. He never explicitly stated whether he felt that, but in his first meeting with the media, sitting in the Royals dugout, he made a four-word statement that reverberated.

“I’m not Dayton Moore,” he said.

The fuller context adds the complimentary words, for the record. (Here’s a reminder that Moore brought a World Series to a small market, and what other GM can say that in the last 30 years?) The fullest context shows the change was something Picollo would wrestle with in his own head.

In his first offseason on the job, it hit him “like a ton of bricks,” he said: Why am I still here?

He said it to himself. Then to his wife. Then he provided the answer to the rest of his staff.

“We’re going to have do things in ways we haven’t done them before,” Picollo said. “If we’re not open to what other information might be out there, we’re going to have a hard time surviving.”

He didn’t formally interview for the job, though owner John Sherman will quickly point out that when you observe someone for four years, you tend to gather an impression.

His?

“I knew he wouldn’t be afraid to bring in people from the outside,” Sherman said. “I think he recognized that we were a little bit insular. We hadn’t brought in new thinking and new ideas. He jumped all over that.

“I know people are saying we want to be like some other places. We don’t want to be Tampa. We don’t want to be Cleveland. We respect those organizations greatly, but we want to be the Royals. We want to build our own brand of baseball by drawing on the best practices in the industry. J.J. really went out and sought some new thinking, particularly from some organizations that had been more innovate and forward-thinking than we had been.”

We could get pretty in-the-weeds on that. While this might not be the best time to dig into them, given the offseason return on investment has placed the Royals in the playoffs this week, the foundational pillars are designed to make it more than a one-year wonder. That’s still to be seen, by the way, with a farm system that still needs help. This season does not guarantee another like it.

But allow just one example, perhaps. As the Royals participate in postseason baseball for the first time since winning the 2015 World Series, this very month they are revamping their international scouting program. There’s more data than ever before available on the international level, even if it doesn’t match the domestic analytics, and the Royals haven’t done a whole lot with it.

So recently, Picollo informed Rene Francisco, the lead of the team’s international operations and an assistant GM, of his plans to supplement the scouting with research and development. The response? Great. Make Daniel Guerrero the director, because he’s more equipped to analyze the data.

That’s happening now, as you read this.

“The underrated part of this is you have to get buy-in from the people in your organization — from your leaders, your directors, your coordinators,” Picollo said. “Our guys were willing to do that.”

It’s the crux of the implementation of ideas everywhere — every level of the minors to major leagues, pitching to hitting. The Royals haven’t replaced traditional scouting. They’ve supplemented it. The former still plays a prominent role. There are several examples — particularly with pitching, which blends the two — but, really, just look at the big-picture of it.

Since Picollo took over, the Royals have a new amateur scouting director to run the draft, an international director, an entirely new major-league pitching staff with varying backgrounds and expertise. All from outside the organization.

And — oh, yeah — there’s the change we started with:

The manager.

Embracing change — and risk

One day last year, Quatraro brought with him into the dugout two sheets of paper, each of them displaying a different lineup.

Early on, before he’d even managed a game, he’d requested lineup evaluations from the team’s research and development production, headed by Daniel Mack. But late last season, he requested two, the latter placing more weight on mixing in defense and on-base percentage.

By September, he determined the new variation was an improvement. With assistance from Mack’s department, he’s frequently tinkering with it.

During a 100-loss season, a year Sherman dubbed an evaluation year, in retrospect we applied that too narrowly as intended for the assessment of the players. It was more than that.

Picollo beefed up the R&D department based on the sheer volume of Quatraro’s requests. The nature of the requests, though, was a change, just as his interview had portended. The lineup construction. The makeup of the roster. The list goes on.

There came a day late last season when Quatraro urged the front office to option a pitcher to the minors. A homegrown player. The front office pushed back.

“It might be the only time I heard an ounce of frustration in his voice last year,” Picollo said. “He made the point, ‘Guys, if we’re going to win, we have to get used to doing this. At some point, the game we’re playing that night is the more important thing. So the player might be from our organization or he might not — but it doesn’t matter.’”

That’s been an ongoing point too. Last season, Picollo spent every game counting the homegrown players in the Royals lineup, and then comparing it to the opposition. The Royals won few baseball games a year ago, but they won that exercise almost every night.

They have had to grow comfortable that something might not be rebuilt with their own tools — that it might take some acquisitions developed by other organizations. A franchise too long hamstrung by patience told its homegrown players nothing would be guaranteed, and then used the offseason to prove they were serious.

“We have to embrace risk — I talked a lot about that with J.J.,” Sherman said. “I’m not talking about riverboat gambling. But don’t be afraid to take a risk.

“The data helps that. If you’re making probability-based decisions, it allows you to take more risks. It doesn’t mean it’s always going to work.”

We saw it during this trade deadline. The Royals parted with minor-league prospects who many in their organization favor in order to acquire their closer Erceg. The room didn’t reach a complete consensus on every trade deadline move. Picollo listened to the voices in the room — Sharp, Mack, Francisco, Quatraro and others — and made the final call.

That’s how the conversations about these moves tend to unfold.

It’s indicative of the man leading them — driven both by what he knows and by learning what he does not.

The consistency is in the evolution. The difference is in the results.

It’s why Royals playoff baseball is back this week, even if we acknowledge things have fallen right for this team, particularly with the health of its starting rotation.

But it’s also why it might not be another nine-year wait before we’re talking about it again.