The 2018 Royals were expected to be bad, and a rebuilding process was anticipated. For a blueprint of how to build the next great roster, the current Royals could look to the expansion process for cues of how to become competitive without a long dry spell.

A previous column looked back at the early Royals’ use of the draft to build the franchise: http://www.cjonline.com/sports/20180623/royals-rundown-early-royals-showed-amateur-draft-often-is-uncertain-building-block

The Royals selected a cadre of young players with solid character in the 1968 Expansion Draft. From that point, in the days before free agency, they emphasized three keys: executing good trades, developing raw prospects, and competing to win from day one.

The Royals did not draft particularly well in the early years. But general manager Cedric Tallis hit immediate home runs with some crucial trades that infused the big league club with cornerstone players, while trading away very little in return.

“One thing Tallis did in the first few years was he made great trades, with exclusively National League teams,” said Royals announcer Denny Matthews, who was part of the broadcast crew from day one. “He did that because the National League was the better league at that time – it had the better players, better races, so the best talent was in the NL. Look at all the trades he made early on, they were almost all with NL teams.”

Just before the 1969 season, the Royals traded a couple of no-names to fellow American League expansion team the Seattle Pilots for Lou Piniella, who became Kansas City’s first star.

After the inaugural season, they dealt a promising player selected in the expansion draft named Joe Foy to the New York Mets. In return the Royals got one of the stalwarts of their heyday, Amos Otis. In addition, they also received a pitcher named Bob Johnson, who, after one solid season in Kansas City, was part of a package deal that brought Freddie Patek to the Royals.

And in the middle of 1970, the Royals traded a player of no significance to the Philadelphia Phillies for Cookie Rojas.

Thus, the foundation for the early 1970s was laid through four astute trades in which the Royals gave away almost nothing and received stars in return. Two more trades in the early 1970s brought John Mayberry and Hal McRae from National League teams, and the Royals were suddenly an elite squad.

The early Royals didn’t just sit back hoping to acquire polished performers. They were innovative in developing raw potential as well.

“The Royals tried unique things to try to develop players,” Matthews said. “Ewing Kauffman (the Royals’ initial owner) had the idea to try the Baseball Academy, which a lot of baseball people thought would never work. They thought it was kind of crazy.”

The Royals started a school in Florida – the Royals Baseball Academy – that took undeveloped but talented athletes, and taught them to play baseball. In just 5 years, the academy produced 14 eventual major leaguers, but never won over traditionalists and was closed in 1974.

“A lot of baseball people are slow to accept anything new and different,” said Matthews. “But we got Frank White and UL Washington out of it. It was another thing they tried to speed up the process to make the Royals a viable franchise.”

While the Royals haven’t run an academy in more than 40 years, they should view the development of raw prospects as integral to their rebuilding process. That is particularly true in one area that in which the Royals can offset free agency – international scouting and development.

“Things have changes so much. Free agency and the escalation of salaries have really changed the process,” said Matthews. “But the thing that is the same is, when you are checking out a player, it’s easy to scout the physical, but you don’t really know what’s inside of them. It’s just an unscientific process.”

While the Royals aren’t a big-market team that can lure ultra-expensive stars through free agency, they can scout, sign and develop international talent not subject to the amateur draft. The Royals current roster features nine players who as international signees were not drafted.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the Royals never tanked, not for a second, during those early years. They were proud to finish ahead of three established teams as well as the other three expansion franchises in 1969. They saw nothing to be gained by tanking, and they were relentless as they chased down the dominant teams of the 1970s.

Current general manager Dayton Moore believes in the importance of a culture of winning, and he signed veteran players to keep the big league club competitive while it builds from the bottom up. It’s resulted in an atrocious product in 2018. And sadly this rebuild won’t be as quick as the original construction of 1969.

But by astutely dealing some of the players they currently possess, scouting, signing and developing young talents from around the globe, and never discontinuing the fight, the Royals can mimic the process that quickly took the original team from birth to relevance in just a couple of years.

One of four expansion franchises in 1969, the Royals were expected to lose a lot those first few years. What success they did achieve came as a surprise.

But quickly the Royals earned the reputation as the “model expansion team,” for their quick rise to contention. They won 69 games in their inaugural season, more than three established teams, and considerably more than their rival expansion clubs. In just two years they were winning more than they lost, and within five years they had established themselves as a contender for the American League pennant.

The 2018 Royals are back where the franchise began, trying to ascertain the best route to contention in the American League. The game has changed a great deal since the early 1970s, most notably due to the advent of free agency. Building a competitive team is particularly challenging in small markets where money is tight.

But perhaps a look back at how the great early Royals teams were built could provide some insight into how it can be done again.

Starting completely from scratch, the Royals first had to acquire some players. An expansion draft gave the Royals, and the other new club to the American League – the Seattle Pilots – a chance to pick established players from the other teams in the league. (The same process took place in the National League to outfit the Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres.)

So the Royals were gifted a group that could at least provide some semblance of a roster from the outset. The Royals went after young players, while the Pilots (who shortly became the Milwaukee Brewers) tended toward older players with more experience. In the 1969 season, the Royals starting lineup and pitching rotation was made up almost entirely of players under 26 years of age.

“Seattle went for experienced guys. The Royals went for youth, which was probably pretty smart on the part of Cedrick Tallis (general manager of the early Royals),” said Denny Matthews, radio announcer for every one of the Royals 50 seasons, about the expansion draft. “It worked out pretty well. The Royals drafted, quote/unquote ‘good guys.’ Guys who they had checked not only physical ability, but also mindset, baseball IQ, as best you can.”

The first gathering of Royals major league players at spring training was an interesting experience, Matthews recalled.

“The Royals had a minor league system set up in 1968. So they had a little bit of a kick start,” Matthews said. “But when Spring Training started in ‘69 in Ft. Myers (Florida), nobody knew anybody. So you had no idea how they would assimilate the minor leaguers and the expansion draft guys into a team.”

From that point on, like all teams prior to free agency, the Royals had three mechanisms through which to acquire players: the draft of amateur players, the signing of international prospects and undrafted players, and by means of trades with other teams.

While free agency has since changed the game drastically, these same mechanisms are the key to the rebuilding of the modern Royals.

Much to the chagrin of the MLB today, there is incentive for bad teams to “tank.” The worst teams are rewarded with the highest selections in the draft of amateur players. Tanking is not in the Royals DNA. They fought to compete from day one, and even today as the team is losing at an alarming rate, there is little question about their effort.

But the early Royals teams weren’t particularly effective at drafting, and they weren’t often in position to draft at the very top of the order.

MLB didn’t allow the expansion teams to select in the first few rounds in 1968, but the Royals did pluck one of their all-time greatest pitchers, Paul Splittorff, in the 25^th round. In 1969, the league positioned the expansion clubs at the bottom of each round, and the Royals whiffed on nearly every one of their 90 picks. Al Cowens and Doug Bird were the only picks of significance. The 1970 draft netted the Royals virtually nothing.

So based on the first three drafts in the team’s history, and considering its immediate success, the draft was not the catalyst. The Royals were winning long before they began seeing drafted players make a big impact. When the 1971 Royals challenged for a playoff bid in just their third season, they did it with just one pick acquired via the amateur draft – Splittorff – making a contribution.

Thus the early Royals proved you can develop a competitive team quickly without losing on purpose for several years. Bad as the 2018 team is, it is following one of the early Royals’ principals – never stop playing to win.

As is typical of losing teams, the Royals June draft got quite a bit of attention, when they loaded up on college pitchers. But the modern Royals are wise to not put all their eggs in the amateur draft basket, as it is completely unpredictable and the rewards are neither quickly reaped nor ever of a great quantity in any particular year.

In an upcoming column, the development of the early Royals and what can be learned from them will be examined further, particularly in the areas of trades and international signings. As the 2018 version hurtles toward 100 losses, a look back at the past will hopefully provide some hope for the future.

One of the most iconic sounds in the Midwest is the sound of a Royals broadcast on radio. For many, it was the soundtrack of summer, whether while in the car, working in the yard, or drifting off to sleep on a warm evening.

If you were one of the thousands who tuned in, you heard one man’s name mentioned. He was to a large degree responsible for the broadcast. Yet you probably had no idea who he was.

As the announcers, almost always including Denny Matthews, signed off each evening, they noted that Don Free served as “producer/engineer” for the broadcast. That was, from 1986 until last September, when Free retired from his longtime position with the Royals.

The Capital-Journal’s Kevin Haskin described the sendoff Free received from the Royals last September, including throwing out the first pitch on Sept. 29. Free stepped away at the age of 71 with a World Series ring and a world of memories.

Now several months into retirement, one might be tempted to say Don Free is finally a free man, but he prefers to say now he’s “just Sandy Free’s husband.”

For 32 years, Free made the drive from Topeka to Kansas City for Royals home games, and boarded planes to fly with the team all over the country for road trips. But having already worked for 20 years in Topeka, most of it with WIBW, and with a wife and two daughters settled in town, it was important to the Frees that Topeka remain their home base.

Free’s wife served as a nurse in Topeka, while he worked in TV broadcasting prior to joining the Royals. He cut his teeth in radio during the Royals stretch run to the 1985 championship, filling in while longtime producer/engineer Ed Shepherd took some time off. After the season, Shepherd retired.

“When the job came open after the 1985 season, I had been going to Kauffman Stadium for 10 years already, doing TV broadcasts occasionally,” Free said. “So I thought ‘Well, I gotta try.’ I talked it over with the girls, and they said ‘Of course.’ But when I actually got the job, I was really surprised.”

Thus began three decades of tireless travel for Free, and three decades of losing baseball by the Royals.

“We had just won the World Series when I started, so I thought I was going to see a lot of playoff races, and playoff games,” Free said.

Free spent those bleak years seated behind Denny Matthews and the other announcers in the Royals radio suite, running a soundboard and controlling the broadcast. In spite of the losing seasons, he never wavered.

“Don was probably the hardest worker, the most diligent I’ve ever been around,” Matthews said. “He left nothing to chance. He would have all the equipment set up hours before the broadcast, but he wanted to make sure everything was just right. He was like that on the road, too, where things were a little more out of his control. He never let down, and that never changed over all his years.”

Matthews was impressed by Free’s ability, and determination, to fix, correct or improve just about everything he got his hands on.

“He was so helpful. Someone would come in with something wrong, and he would obsess and make sure that it was fixed,” Matthews recalled. “Even engineers from other teams would come to him for help or advice. He was a great employee and always easy to work with because he made sure everything was right every time.”

Free said he ran on adrenaline through the Royals’ two marches to the World Series in 2014 and 2015. He said he got just 10 hours of sleep during one four-day stretch of the 2015 series.

“I was pretty much the first one there and the last to leave for every game,” Free said. “It finally caught up to me after 32 years. I was pretty run down. I just didn’t have the same energy level anymore.”

Free had seen many great players retire during his decades in Kansas City. Now it was his turn to hang it up. He said he’s ready to be Sandy Free’s husband, content to follow the Royals from his living room in Topeka, when he’s not on the road to visit grandchildren.

“I met such great people and made so many memories,” said Free. “It was an unbelievable experience.”