The Royals front office and coaching staff are killing it right now

Credit where credit is due!

When principal owner John Sherman cut ties with baseball operations head Dayton Moore at the end of the 2022 season, he had a choice: bring in some outside voices or promote internally. Sherman chose the latter, elevating JJ Picollo to the general manager position.

At the time, there was a lot of disappointment in that move—disappointment which swelled alongside every one of the many losses the 2023 squad suffered. Picollo chose to replace a few key positions in the coaching staff, grow the analytics department, and supplement the staff with outside voices rather than totally clean house.

The key question was not if Picollo was different from Moore but if he was different enough. Moore did a great job of reconstructing the Royals into a winning organization but could not or would not change with how the rest of the league was changing around him. Picollo and company therefore had some available low-hanging fruit that Moore did not grab, but the jury was out if he and his team could make the hard decisions with the right timing.

There’s a lot of baseball to play in 2024. But credit where credit is due: Picollo and his team, alongside manager Matt Quatraro and his coaching staff, have been absolutely killing it. They’ve pulled off nearly the impossible without the resources to do so.

Dating back to last year’s trade deadline, the Royals brain trust acted on three core assumptions. One, that the true talent level of the 2023 team was way higher than the 56-win team they were in the standings. Two, that Bobby Witt Jr. had another couple of gears left in his game. Three, that the pitching staff could be entirely overhauled with some free agents, some trades, and better coaching.

All three bets have paid off in spades. The 2023 team played at a 69-win pace in the second half of the year even after the team’s best trade pieces were shipped out to contenders. Witt, well, Witt is one pace to be only the sixth position player in the last quarter century to accrue 10 Wins Above Replacement per Fangraphs in a single season. And the pitching staff looks wildly different—Cole Ragans is a Cy Young candidate, Brady Singer is pitching the best he ever has, free agent signings Michael Wacha and Seth Lugo have been great additions, and Alec Marsh has turned into a solid starter out of nowhere.

For years, Royals fans become increasingly frustrated with Moore’s regime because of a few consistent failings. Moore and his team never had a good handle on how good his Royals teams were and where they were in the cycle of rebuilding. Moore and his team could never develop starting pitchers. And Moore and his team almost never could identify and coach up players into contributors like the other great teams could.

Under the current front office regime, they’ve checked all those boxes. I mean, come on—they acquired their staff ace and their closer for two months of Aroldis Chapman and a few cans of beans. They properly identified the free agent starting pitchers that are providing the best bang for their buck. And they knew that 2024 would be a year of opportunity and aggressively made moves to take advantage.

In the long term, there are still concerns with the front office. Namely, I’m concerned with the draft and player development. Kansas City still doesn’t have any players on Baseball America’s Top 100 prospects, which is not a good sign. Additionally, last year’s draft was extraordinarily risky and the choice to draft Blake Mitchell over Kyle Teel was confusing then and even more frustrating now; Mitchell is striking out over 35% of the time in low A ball, and Teel has a 140 wRC+ at Double-A.

But to re-contextualize it a little bit: what could the front office and coaching staff have done better this year and this past offseason? They made all the right moves at the right time. They’ve shown that they can improve their own players, aren’t afraid to cut ties with veterans who don’t hold up their end of the bargain, and can identify and acquire ones to help the team, all while accurately assessing the overall team quality and making decisions based on that assessment.

Unfortunately, they don’t give out awards for being a good team in a third of a baseball season. We’ll have to see what the front office can do to continue to improve the team, which definitely has its problems. But the improvement to the organization as a whole this year is obvious, and the proof is in the pudding (aka, the wins). So JJ, Q, and team: nice work. Let’s keep it up.