The following article was published in the Topeka Capital-Journal on July 7, 2018 – you can read it here. The very first Royals teams – 1969 to 1971 – demonstrated how a team can become good in a hurry. They were recognized as the “model expansion team” for how quickly they competed, and how they avoided the moribund stretches of bad baseball typical of teams in building mode.

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.