The 2014 Royals were magical. The 2024 version is even more improbable
It was the eve of the 2014 Wild Card Game, and Eric Hosmer expected jitters. His Kansas City Royals were in the playoffs for the first time in 29 years — a lifetime for a generation of baseball fans in Kansas City — and he was just 24 years old. For years he had wondered how it would feel to take Kansas City back to the postseason, yet when he showed up to Kauffman Stadium for a workout on Sept. 29, 2014, he was stunned by the scene.
“I just remember there being like 15,000 people at a workout,” Hosmer said, “and I’m like, ‘Man, what is going on?'”
The next day, the Royals would storm back from a 7-3 deficit after seven innings, edging the Oakland A’s 9-8 in the bottom of the 12th. The improbable comeback ignited the greatest two-year run in franchise history. After more than two decades in the wilderness, after 18 losing seasons in 20 years, the Royals barreled all the way to the World Series, losing in seven games to the Giants, and then won it all the next year.
The championship glory was fleeting; the Royals missed the playoffs in 2016. The core of young players grew older, and then left. The Wild Card Game has gone the way of the multi-purpose stadium, and the only player remaining from the 2014 Royals is catcher Salvador Perez. Yet as Kansas City opens a three-game Wild Card Series against the Orioles on Tuesday — a rematch of the 2014 ALCS — the 2014 Royals live on in the firmament of the franchise, a model of resilience, a symbol of unexpected glory, a testament to the roulette wheel nature of the postseason:
If you survive the wild-card round, anything can happen.
“It was a crazy time,” Hosmer said.
Hosmer retired in February after 13 seasons as a first baseman. He spent part of the summer considering the legacy of the 2014 Royals. The players from that team gathered for a reunion in Kansas City in May, and Hosmer’s media company — MoonBall Media — created a documentary looking back on the season. But something funny happened as they finished the project about the biggest surprise run in franchise history.
The 2024 Royals crafted a story even more improbable.
The 2014 Royals’ World Series seemed to come out of nowhere. The team was just 48-50 in July, and it had not reached the playoffs since 1985. But it wasn’t exactly miraculous. The Royals had won 86 games the previous year, and the roster was loaded with top prospects from a farm system that was once the envy of the sport.
By comparison, the 2024 Royals have been a bonafide Cinderella. They lost 106 games in 2023. Their farm system was middling. When the club spent nearly $110 million in free agency last winter and then extended shortstop Bobby Witt Jr., the hope in Kansas City was — maybe — a run at .500.
The Royals have done that and more. Witt has grown into one of the best players in baseball. Perez found the fountain(s) of youth at Kauffman Stadium. General manager J.J. Picollo built a starting rotation that leads all playoff teams in ERA. The Royals increased their win total by 30 games and became just the second team in MLB history to make the postseason in a full season after losing at least 100 games the year before.
“It was 106 losses last year,” Perez told reporters Monday in Baltimore. “And now to have the ability to make it to the playoffs the next year, that’s pretty impressive.”
When Picollo arrived in Kansas City in 2006 to work under general manager Dayton Moore, his first jobs were in scouting and player development. He was part of a group that built a farm system that produced Hosmer, Perez, third baseman Mike Moustakas and pitchers Yordano Ventura and Danny Duffy. The group was supplemented with trades and free agents, and when Hosmer looks at the current Royals, he sees a striking parallel.
“When you talk about building a team nowadays, there’s certain teams that really have their system of how they play the game and how they’re built, and I think not many teams really have that,” Hosmer said. “I think a lot of teams are just kind of acquiring talent and not really knowing how to build a team from it.
“But J.J., you can really see he had the vision of that team. He wanted to be athletic. He wanted pitching.”
Hosmer was speaking of the 2024 Royals, but then again, he could have been talking about 2014 or 2015. In many ways, the Royals of a decade ago came and went like a comet, bursting onto the scene and then disappearing just as fast. In other ways, the blueprint remains durable.
The Royals won with the relief pitching of Wade Davis and Greg Holland, the defense of Lorenzo Cain, the contact rate of an aggressive lineup, and a belief that winning big was more valuable than prospects. Even now, they remain the only low-revenue team to win a World Series in the last two decades. You can see traces of the model throughout baseball, in the collective style of the Brewers, in the bullpen of the Padres, in the go-for-broke ethos of the Padres. You can see the model in Kansas City. Ten years later, the Royals are once again winning with pitching and opportunistic hitting. They are still winning with Perez.
“I feel old,” he joked.
Ten years later, the magic of 2014 still feels tangible. In the hours after the 2014 Wild Card Game, the Royals flew to Anaheim, where they took two games from the Angels in the ALDS. They then flew home to Kansas City and finished off the three-game sweep. It was that night that Hosmer, outfielder Jarrod Dyson and infielder Johnny Giavotella got an idea. All three were staying at a downtown hotel after their leases had run out that September. One player suggested that they should go out to celebrate. Another told Hosmer to get on Twitter and invite the rest of Kansas City.
It was only when they approached the Power & Light District in downtown Kansas City that they noticed a few thousand people waiting.
“There were a couple police officers outside,” Hosmer said, “and they’re like, ‘Man, I don’t think you realize what you just did.'”
The party went on. The Champagne sprayed. The Royals headed to Baltimore and eventually won the AL Pennant. For Hosmer, the memory offers a lesson.
If you just give yourself a chance, October can be magical.