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LAS VEGAS — A day after the Kansas City Royals lost Game 7 of the 2014 World Series to the San Francisco Giants 3-2, JJ Piccolo remembers walking back to Kaufman Stadium with other front-office members and wondering if they’ll ever be back in the same situation.
What was clear there was, especially with Alex Gordon left stranded at third base after a wise stop on the play by third base coach Mike Jerschel before Salvador Perez grounded out to end it. And after a wild run that began with a remarkable 9-8, 13-inning comeback win over the Oakland Athletics in the wild-card game, it was fair to wonder if they could replicate the same magic.
“We worked so hard to get to this point and of course you never know what your destiny is going to be,” said Piccolo, an assistant general manager at the time who is now GM and vice president of baseball operations for the Royals. “Once you absorb the pain and it goes away, you go back to spring training quickly and the hunger to be great is still there, and you just keep trying to lead and lead the best way you can.”
“But the thing that you can take out of a painful loss like that is a great suffering,” he added. “Adversity brings toughness and hunger and desire to another level. And that’s what good teams do, they turn negatives into positives. You just have to focus on the professionalism, maturity and veterans in that clubhouse to allow that to happen. And if it’s done right, you can have magical things happen next year.”
Magical things really happened for the Royals in 2015, when they returned the same roster and defeated the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League Championship Series en route to a decisive World Series victory over the New York Mets.
Their experience a decade later isn’t necessarily a model for the Blue Jays, who lost an even more heartbreaking World Series Game 7 to the Los Angeles Dodgers, but it offers an interesting case study for how to bounce back next season and take the final step.
The Blue Jays have previously reviewed the best practices in maintaining success, Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins said Wednesday, “but we’ve tried to do it with a larger sample size, like what we think successful teams do, (rather than) looking at one or two examples.”
“It’s more just about, which good teams do better to win more and also in the playoffs,” he added. “And just trying to learn from history as much as we can.”
These 2014-15 Royals teams feature some interesting parallels, first and foremost with the contact-based pressure-defense style they played. The Blue Jays emphasize those same traits but with more damage capacity at the plate, and are expected to return much of the same core as those KC teams.
The biggest difference between them is in financial strength, with the Royals operating within the confines of their small Midwest market, while the Blue Jays were a top-five payroll club in 2025.
That means they’ll have more options for their reload than Piccolo and his staff did when James Shields, Nori Aoki and Billy Butler left the 2014 team and were replaced by Edinson Volquez, former Blue Jay Alex Reus and future Blue Jay Kendrys Morales.
Still, the heavy lifting was done by returning Royals players, said Piccolo, who “came into 2015 very focused on winning the World Series, not just about getting back to the playoffs.”
“Very similar to this year, Game 7, the one-run margin, the tough game — those things became the catalyst for us, so as a front office, it was just a matter of trying to keep things in perspective,” he said. “What we felt was for us in ’14, running the bases and pressuring the defense was a big part of our identity. People embraced that. We want to continue to encourage that and it’s been a big part of our game.”
“The big thing for us going into the middle of the 15th was trying to understand what the gaps were,” Piccolo added. “We used the trade deadline in a way that was very beneficial, getting Ben Zobrist and Johnny Cueto, so, you’ll still make those adjustments along the way. But I think the focus should be on getting in that position, let’s not be complacent, let’s not just assume we’re going to be in the playoffs, can still decide to add the front team, then decide what the front team can do. Deadline.
The latter part from Picollo is worth keeping in mind as the offseason may be the best time to add talent, but it’s not the only time and needs evolve as the season progresses. This winter, the most immediate need for the Blue Jays is starting pitching, ideally someone from the upper end of the market, although Bo Bechette’s free agency and either retaining or filling in for him is not too far away.
Injuries and poor performance will certainly create different priorities in July, for which the Blue Jays will need continued development from their farm system to generate currency for summer acquisitions.
Many different factors, organization-wise, came together for the Blue Jays this season and those under-the-surface factors are essential for continued success in 2026.
From a distance, Piccolo saw a Blue Jays team he hoped would “come back very hungry in ’26,” which played in a way that reminded him of past Royals teams.
“The energy was palpable,” he said. “Tough games, back and forth. Our ’14 playoff journey started with a come-from-behind, 13-inning wild-card game. From there, we played well, but there were a lot of tough games along the way, but you could see there was no back, there was no moment, not great for the guys. They all want you to be on both sides. Or the Blue Jays throwing a pitcher, that’s a great World Series to watch.” was
There may be consensus in the industry on that, though it won’t ease the sting of losing Game 7 for the Blue Jays. The only thing that can help is winning the next World Series, chasing a bad memory with a good one like the 2014-15 Royals.
Watched and listened to Las Vegas’ Cosmopolitan Roaming during GM meetings:
Change agent? – An interesting dynamic surrounding the Blue Jays after their run to the World Series is how their narrative is being dismissed in baseball gossip circles. Usually, they are described by agents and rival officials as some combination of active, aggressive, eager, frustrated, sometimes respectful, sometimes tired, and this year is no different. An emerging addition now is how they are received differently in the market and to be precise, an impression is made on newcomers to the October experience north of the border, which gives them some potential momentum in the market.
How much that matters is up for debate, though it may be time for the slow, empty agents—Canada’s framework—to come to an end. Notable players to sign with the Blue Jays in the 1990s include Jack Morris, Dave Winfield, Paul Molitor, Dave Stewart and Rogers Clemens; AJ Burnett, BJ Ryan and Frank Thomas in the heyday of the first decade of the century; Russell Martin, JA Happ and Kendrys Morales in the transitional 2010s; and Hyun Jin Ryu, George Springer, Kevin Gausman, Yusei Kikuchi, Chris Basitt, Anthony Santander, Jeff Hoffman and Max Scherzer in this decade.
The takeaway then, as it always has been, is that when baseball is right and the money is there, players will head north. Perhaps then, the industry, with a renewed familiarity with the city thanks to October, will begin to see things as influential agent Scott Boras is, at least, tall when he says that “Toronto is one of the top four or five major league markets.”
“When you become a winning club, the players take notice,” Boras added later. “They’ve done a lot with their ballpark, where we hear about how the families are treated, where all the players’ wives and families notice how it’s done, it’s become very much a model for other major league teams. There’s a lot of things in the player community along those lines that have drawn players to Toronto. And when you believe that you have the light of everything, you have that ability that I have that light. In two years it has proven that with that place to reward them, to say that in the player community, Toronto is a winning franchise and I would strongly consider being a part of it.
Hitting coach wanted – The Blue Jays have another coaching vacancy to fill after firing assistant Hunter Mance left to take the head spot with the San Francisco Giants.
Hitting coach David Popkins “will have a big say” as part of a process that manager John Schneider will “drive” to back the position, Ross Atkins said. Don Mattingly also left his bench coach position, and the Blue Jays are considering various options for that role.
“Losing Hunter Mance and losing Donnie is a hit. And we’re just going to have to figure out how to get better moving forward,” Atkins said. “We will always focus internally first and think only internally on our staff, how the responsibilities may or may not be and clearly from our player development system, or from our broader baseball operations department. Those relationships are powerful.”
remarkable: “Having a list that really comes together and works together, and the chemistry that you find with it, is hard to find. You can try to plan in advance. You don’t always know when it’s going to click and when it will, sometimes it can seem a little rushed. If you try not to change anything, to keep every little piece of it, usually you just change part of the work. It makes you understand that you What’s the identity of the group and then you don’t need to look past, just because of some running back, but really we need to do what everyone needs to do that you can do years in advance, but you don’t want to lose those important themes for your identity that bring the teams together. – Chaim Bloom, president of baseball operations for the St. Louis Cardinals, on the challenges of maintaining success with mix and match rosters.
