By Adam Gardner | April 20, 2026
The Kansas City Royals appear to be a team with no plan.
The Royals are in the midst of a seven-game losing streak and there is nothing that looks good right now.
They actually scored runs on Thursday but Lucas Erceg blew a 2-run lead in the ninth inning in a loss to Detroit. The team battled but the bullpen gave up late runs in a loss to the New York Yankees on Friday.
Saturday was a joke as the Yankees thumped KC, 13-4, in a game where outfielders collided, the manager was ejected in the first inning, and the hitters struck out 12 times. The Yankees finished off the sweep with a 7-0 win on Sunday as Cole Ragans gave up 7 runs in 4.1 innings of work.
It’s incredibly hard to pick out any positives from the weekend’s games. Even the baserunning was bad as another runner was picked off and KC had someone thrown out by a mile at home plate.
Grasping at straws here, but at least the bullpen didn’t give up any runs on Sunday?
Grab a shovel
The Royals record sits at 7-15. They have dug themselves quite the hole and there isn’t really a good precedent of teams being able to get out of holes like this early in the season.
No Royals team has started this poorly and gone on to have a winning season.
Somehow the Philadelphia Phillies have a -38 run differential and are the worst in all of MLB, but the Royals are second-worst at -32. KC is dead last in the American League Central, even behind the Chicago White Sox who have been a disaster the past couple seasons.
The Royals were supposed to be a team contending for the postseason and the AL Central title. They have Bobby Witt Jr., Salvador Perez, great starting pitching and a handful of players who showed off during the World Baseball Classic.
None of that seems to matter because nothing is working. The 2025 season was derailed by a pitiful June. The 2026 season has been derailed by a pitiful April, so at least we didn’t have to hold on to hope for very long. The game results graph on Baseball-Reference isn’t encouraging.
Not all doom and gloom
I am obviously extremely frustrated, but maybe I’m being too harsh. Sure, 7-15 is a bad start and there aren’t really any signs that the team is about to snap out of this funk. But it is still just April 20.
Would Royals fans be as disappointed – as angry – with the results right now if a 22-game stretch in August resulted in a 7-15 record? It depends on what had already happened during the season but there’s a chance it would be viewed as just a blip on the radar.
The 2015 Royals had an 11-17 record in September and they won the World Series. There was some consternation during that tough stretch 11 years ago, but there was reason to believe they could get out of the slump. If that team had started the season 11-17, I’m sure plenty of fans would have hopped off the train and written off 2014 as a complete fluke.
So the timing of this bad stretch of games potentially makes it look worse than it might actually be.
Buddy Bell’s wisdom
A lot of Royals diehard fans have been through a lot of losing seasons and witnessed some pretty rough stretches of baseball.
Buddy Bell was the manager during some of these stretches and he happened to speak some of the most memorable words when it comes to watching bad Royals baseball. “I never say it can’t get worse.”
The memory of Buddy Bell whispered those words in my ear as the Royals finally scored some runs and Vinnie Pasquantino finally hit a home run in Detroit, only to see the lead and the game slip away.
Buddy poked me in the shoulder as Witt was picked off base – yet another baserunning mistake this season. The words grew larger with each run the Yankees scored on Saturday as it looked like a varsity team was picking on the junior varsity in a scrimmage.
I could hear Buddy laughing as the Royals were shutout on Sunday. “I never say it can’t get worse!”
This quote pops up far too often for Royals fans. We remind each other of it nearly every year when the team goes through a losing streak. I’m not being original by remembering Buddy Bell’s quote, but sometimes the most appropriate thing to say isn’t original.
The Royals have lost seven games in a row and the only thing I can think of right now is it might get worse.
The best thing about Sunday’s game was that I didn’t watch it. Work responsibilities made it so that I missed the first handful of innings and by the time I was home, the Royals were already down 7-0.
I checked the score, shook my head, then fired up the grill and spent the evening with my wife.
What needs to change?
There are more questions than answers right now. The Royals seem like a team with no plan and I don’t have the secret formula to fix that.
Nobody has scored fewer runs than the Royals as of Monday morning. Does that mean Alec Zumwalt, Connor Dawson and Marcus Thames need to go?
Ragans has been inconsistent and the bullpen has been worse than we hoped. Does that mean Briand Sweeney and Mike McFerran need to lose their jobs?
Everything looks bad right now, does that mean Matt Quatraro should hit the bricks?
I’ve mentioned it before, but I’m not big on making big, sweeping generalizations. I’m not a fan of calling for someone’s job just to satiate a blood lust fueled by a losing streak.
But what can the Royals Front Office do right now? The team can’t continue taking the field like a team with no plan. Hitters can’t be in the box looking like they’ve never faced a decent pitcher before. Outfielders can’t keep running into each other. Runners can’t keep making outs on the basepaths.
A team with no plan is a team with no hope. Whatever the plan has been to this point, it isn’t working and it needs to change.
Don’t blame the field dimensions
The Yankees out-homered the Royals 9-2 over the weekend series.
The Bronx Bombers catch a bit of heat for playing in a home run-friendly stadium. There might be some cheap homers here and there, but I think it’s overblown.
I read a few complaints online and heard a couple in person this weekend as New York was ripping the heart out of Kansas City. I think it’s misplaced anger, though. Both teams were playing on the same field. The walls don’t move in and out when the Yankees are batting or in the field. The Royals just didn’t get it done.
That’s been the theme the entire season, really. The Royals just aren’t getting it done. The Royals have 12 players who have taken the bulk of the at bats: seven of those players have an OPS+ of 81 or lower. Take out Jonathan India’s 81, and nobody else in that group is over 61.
The sticks just aren’t hitting. Witt is homerless and isn’t meeting his standard, which is to be one of the best players in baseball. Kyle Isbel has cooled off after his hot start to the season. Maikel Garcia is doing OK.
Jac Caglianone has a .270 batting average and .343 on base percentage, which are great, but where is the pop? He’s a slugger. Or at least should be a slugger. He has 0 home runs and that’s just not what he needs to do for the Royals.
Carter Jensen is really the only batter that is meeting preseason expectations. For a team that had hopes on the postseason, it’s unacceptable to have one player doing what you hoped he’d do 22 games into the season.
Not just Royals fans noticing
“The Athletic” made a list of which teams were overachieving and underachieving on Friday.
If you had told me a month ago that the Royals would be grouped with the Toronto Blue Jays, Boston Red Sox, San Francisco Giants, Seattle Mariners and New York Mets a few weeks into the season, I would have been pretty excited about how things were going.
Sadly, that group is “The Athletic’s” worst of the worst underachievers to start the season. And this was published before the Royals were swept by the Yankees.
No better time than now
So what can the Royals do now? Tonight is the start of a six-game homestand with three games against the Baltimore Orioles and three against the Los Angeles Angels.
It’s good to be back at home as the Royals are just 2-10 on the road this season. Maybe some home cooking will get the team going and things can turn around.
I want nothing more than to look back at the 7-15 record and laugh at how worried we all were. I would love to hear broadcasters in October talk about how the Royals rebounded from a terrible April to make the postseason.
But it’s not about what I want or hope for; this team needs a plan and needs to start winning. Soon.
“It’s disappointing, but you move on,” Bobby Witt Jr. said to reporters after Sunday’s game. “You can either get better and improve, or you just keep doing the same thing, showing up and doing kind of what we’ve been doing. We just got to get better and flip the page.”
