The following article was published in the Topeka Capital-Journal on June 23, 2018 – you can read it here. The Kansas City Royals are celebrating their 50th year without much style. Losing games in bunches with what looks like a makeshift lineup, they don’t look much different than what you might think they looked like in their inaugural season.
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 25th 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.