The Royals remaining April schedule does not get easier
The Royals April schedule does not give the team many easy teams to build their confidence against
It’s fair if you’re having a sense of déjà vu with the Kansas City Royals this season, because they have started in a similar manner as they did last season. Both teams started 2-4, winning one game in each series. Both teams suffered some close and frustrating losses; the 2024 Royals had two walk-off losses in their second series of the season, while the 2025 Royals only had one. Progress! Also, Maikel Garcia is back to his early season 2024 form, which definitely bodes well for the rest of the year.
Like last season, the Royals played their first series at home, then their second series on the road before returning to the K for a seven-game homestand. That homestand was when the Royals flipped the script on the season most of us expected them to have into the playoff run that we witnessed; the Royals went 7-0 on that homestand and stayed above .500 for the remainder of the year.
It would be great if the Royals decided to give us all an even stronger feeling of déjà vu and embark on a seven-game winning streak, but it’s going to be much tougher to pull off that task this time around. Last year, the first four games of the homestand came against the Chicago White Sox. The 2024 White Sox were one of the worst major-league teams ever, and they played the part last April, only scoring five runs across the four games.
The next series was against the Houston Astros. The Astros would go on to win the division, but even the Cincinnati Bengals think the Astros started out the gate slow last year. Houston opened the season with a four-game sweep at home against the New York Yankees, and came limping into Kauffman Stadium with a 4-7 record. The Royals would then go on to sweep the Astros, picking up a walk-off win of their own in the first game of the series before blowing out the visitors in the final two games of the season. Houston was also swept by the Atlanta Braves and the Chicago Cubs in April, and fell to as low as 12-24 before they started to right the ship.
If the Royals were really repeating last season, this year’s seven-game homestand would involve... well it would involve the White Sox again but it would also have the 0-7 Atlanta Braves traveling to Kansas City. Instead the Royals will start a three-game series against the Baltimore Orioles before facing the Minnesota Twins in a four-game series. To be fair, neither the Orioles (3-4) nor the Twins (2-5) look like world-beaters. We are still in the world of extremely small sample sizes, but the Twins offense in particular has looked pretty weak so far against non-White Sox opponents, so maybe that will continue and the Royals can pick up some easy wins.
As of Thursday night, however, both the Orioles and the Twins are projected to win more games according to the Fangraphs Projected Standings. The differences aren’t huge; the Orioles are projected for 84 wins, the Twins for 82 and the Royals for 80. Still, these are teams in the big middle of the pack that the Royals are going to need to take some series from in order to get back to the playoffs.
The rest of the April schedule does not get much easier for the Royals. Kansas City has 25 games remaining in April, and 19 of them are against AL teams currently in front of the Royals in the Fangraphs Projected Standings: the Orioles, Twins, New York Yankees, Detroit Tigers, Astros, and Tampa Bay Rays. Three of the six games that aren’t against teams currently projected to win more games than the Royals are against the Cleveland Guardians, who won the AL Central last season and have already taken two of the three games they’ve played against KC. Only the three-game series against the Colorado Rockies on April 22-24 pits the Royals against a team that the Fangraphs projections seem them as clearly better than.
If the Royals are as good as many of us on staff thought/hoped they would be, they really should hang around .500 during this month. With so many games against fellow division/wild card contenders, we are going to get some evidence rather quickly if they can follow up on last year’s progress or if we are going to see a step back. Incredible things can happen, but in all likelihood, the Royals will not go on a crazy winning streak in order to run and hide early in the year. It’s going to be essentially impossible to solidify yourself as a playoff team early this season, but a cold April against so many Wild Card contenders could put the Royals in an early hole that will be extremely difficult to dig themselves out of.
Baseball is a marathon and just last season we saw the Astros start terribly before coming back to win the AL West. A team's April record is far from its destiny. Still, if you want to be a playoff team then you have to hold your own against other playoff-caliber teams, and the Royals are going to get many more chances this month to show us what caliber of team they are against what we anticipate to be quality competition.