The 2018 Kansas City Royals were a disaster. But you wouldn’t know it by talking to the guys taking the field the past two months.

That’s because a large number of the guys in the clubhouse now weren’t there when the Royals bumbled to a 27-68 record at the All-Star break. Since then, Ryan O’Hearn and Adalberto Mondesi have brought superstar production to Kansas City. Brett Phillips, Rosell Herrera and Brian Goodwin have brought speed and athleticism (and the swagger that comes with it). And Brad Keller, Heath Fillmyer and Jorge Lopez have infused the starting rotation with youth and potential.

Talk to any of the youngsters, and they see this season as an opportunity.

“The new guys, the young guys, have to prove that we belong here, and demonstrate what we can do for the team moving forward,” said Phillips, who, along with Lopez, was acquired in late July in a trade for Mike Moustakas. “So we have a lot of motivation, a lot of energy, to go out there each day regardless of how many games the team has won or lost.”

Pitcher Ian Kennedy said that while the first half of the season was disappointing to the veterans assembled to start the year, the transformation of the roster points to brighter days ahead. After struggling mightily at the start of the season, Kennedy sat out much of the year with injuries. He observed the change from the dugout.

“The group we started with just struggled all around. We couldn’t click,” Kennedy said. “Now as the team starts to transform, the young guys are all hungry because they want a spot next year. They want to prove that they can do something up here. I’m really excited for our future. I watched the transition while I was on the disabled list, and it’s been fun to see.”

Keller, who has been a leader of the youth movement, said that winning at a respectable clip this fall is going to catapult the team into greater success moving forward.

“The vibe around here these days is just awesome,” said the 23-year-old. “How we’re conducting business from then to now is a night and day difference. You can see it on the field, how much fun we’re having. It’s going to give us confidence moving forward. We feel like, give us a full year together and see what can happen.”

As Keller and company wrap up the Royals’ 50^th season, a healthy dose of perspective is in order. While the overall record won’t be much to celebrate, there is a silver lining to the dark cloud of 2018.

The Class of ‘69

There have certainly been some bleak periods for the expansion team awarded to Kansas City at major league baseball’s 1967 winter meetings. But of the four teams created at that meeting – the San Diego Padres, Seattle Pilots and Montreal Expos being the other three – the Royals are unquestionably at the head of the class.

First of all, two of the clubs bolted their original homes for greener pastures. The Pilots barely paused long enough to unpack their bags in Seattle before moving to Milwaukee to become the Brewers in 1970. The Expos were competitive for a time, but couldn’t win over their Canadian hosts and morphed into the Washington Nationals in 2005.

The Royals have played in four World Series, winning two. Of the other three 1969 expansion clubs, the Padres lost in the 1984 and 1998 series, and the Brewers lost in the 1982 series. So the Royals have played in more World Series than the other three combined, and been the only one to win even one championship.

Of the 30 teams in major league baseball, 12 have reached fewer World Series than the Royals, some of which have been around for much longer.

We’ve been here before and felt far worse

The Royals have lost 100 or more games four times previously. With two games left, this Royals team will escape the embarrassment of being worst in team history. They lost 106 in 2005.

It hurt when, after failing to capitalize on building blocks like Mike Sweeney, Johnny Damon, Carlos Beltran and Jermaine Dye, the 2002 Royals dropped 100 for the first time in team history.

2004 was dreadful because, after the fool’s gold of 2003 led fans to believe the team was actually competitive, the 104 losses exposed that a quick rebuild was not possible.

Things couldn’t have looked more bleak than they did in 2005, when they lost 106 games and hardly had anyone of real major league caliber. 2006 was only slightly better, when the Royals again lost an even 100.

So with a bunch of young studs playing, and winning, in the second half, 2018 doesn’t seem that bad. With Keller, Mondesi and friends emerging as building blocks, there is hope for next year.

As is often said, a losing season doesn’t have to be a lost season. It doesn’t feel like a lost season in the clubhouse these days.

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.