The Royals started laying the groundwork for their incredible 2024 season just five days after the last one ended.

Most teams hold their organizational meetings in January, a few weeks before spring training. But J.J. Picollo, who officially took over baseball operations at the end of 2022, didn’t want to waste time. On Oct. 8, 2023, less than a week after Kansas City finished a 106-loss season, tied for the worst in franchise history, more than 200 people in the organization met in Arizona to discuss Picollo’s vision and autopsy every nook and cranny of the team.

“Basically, if we’re going to get kicked in the teeth, it was, How can we learn from this?” said second-year pitching coach Brian Sweeney. “How can we grow?”

Sweeney, like manager Matt Quatraro and many others in the assembled group, hadn’t yet been in the organization a full year. Picollo’s immediate priority when he was promoted was finding a manager, filling out a field staff and trying to modernize an organization that had fallen behind. Picollo winces at the term “evaluation year”, but that’s how 2023 was often viewed, both publicly and privately: as a painful period of assessment.

Before those organizational meetings, in September, Picollo and majority team owner John Sherman had met with Bobby Witt, Jr., their young superstar. Accompanied by his father, a former big-leaguer who now represents his son, they needed to do some fact finding. What was important to Witt, Jr.? How could a small market team like Kansas City keep a potential generational talent for years to come?

It was simple. Witt, Jr. — whose father had pitched in just four playoff games over 16 seasons — wanted to win. He didn’t want to be a superstar on a bad team. Sherman got the message loud and clear, greenlighting an offseason in which the Royals spent a franchise record $109.5 million dollars on eight major-league free agents. Right before spring training, they signed Witt to the longest, most lucrative contract in franchise history, an 11-year, $288.7 million deal with options to reach $377 million.

These are the new Royals. On Friday, Kansas City clinched its first playoff spot in nearly a decade, and just its third in 37 years. The team has won nearly 30 games more than it did last year, a franchise record for year-to-year improvement.

It is the first team Picollo truly engineered. The organization underwent a significant offseason reshaping before they even signed a player, hiring a new scouting director (Brian Bridges), promoting Jim Cuthbert (director of pro personnel and strategy) and Daniel Guerrero (international scouting director) and investing in new technology.

As they turned over a third of the big-league roster, the Royals also hired six people in research and development, including Pete Berryman, who travels with the team as a major-league analyst, and a new R&D director, Christine Harris.

Picollo, who hired Quatraro from the analytically-minded Rays, wanted someone who would challenge the status quo. And Quatraro and his staff — which includes bench coach Paul Hoover (also from the Rays) and Sweeney (Cleveland Guardians) — made it clear last season that the Royals’ analytics needed work.

“If we were going to take a big leap in that area, it wasn’t going to be a slow trickle of add two (people) this year, add two the following year,” Picollo said. “To really integrate R&D we needed to go for growth.”

In a January Zoom call, while other organizations were just starting their meetings, each Royals department presented their ideas and a plan of attack. There were new players to discuss, new data models to integrate, new technology and ideas on how to blend improved scouting and analytics. There was an unmatched fervor heading into spring training.

This is how you change a culture from the inside out. This is how the Kansas City Royals became one of baseball’s biggest surprises.

“The guys that came in said, ‘We’re done. We don’t talk about last year,’ Quatraro said. ‘We’re here to win.’ And that was their objective right from the get go.”

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On December 11, the Royals signed free-agent pitcher Will Smith for the backend of their bullpen. Smith has famously been on the roster of the last three World Series champions with the Texas Rangers, Houston Astros and Atlanta Braves.

Smith wanted closing chances, and the Royals offered that opportunity. He also wanted to go for a fourth straight trophy.

“Who else are you going after?” was one of the first things the left-hander asked the Royals front office.