Royals' Bobby Witt Jr. Breaks Silence After Six Straight Losses, Players-Only Meeting
In this story:
Every baseball season has its ups and downs, but rarely do teams experience them to the extreme degree the Kansas City Royals have in 2025.
At one point, the Royals won 16 of 18 games and seemingly turned their season around. But in June, they've now lost their last six in a row and 15 of their last 21, dropping them four games below .500 for the year.
According to multiple reports, including MLB.com's Anne Rogers, the Royals held a players-only meeting after the 3-2 loss to the Athletics at Kauffman Stadium on Sunday. It was an indicator of urgency from a team with playoff expectations that simply isn't living up to them.
After emerging from the meeting, superstar shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. gave a state of the union address on the Royals' back-to-back sweeps against the New York Yankees and Athletics.
“It wasn’t good,” Witt said, per Rogers. “It was bad. You got to flush it and have an off-day tomorrow, and that’s all you can do right now. Can’t change what happened in those games. But also, you can just learn from it. And we got to learn from it.
“Because we just got beat by teams that we could beat. Can’t have that happen.”
There's no doubt the Royals can and should beat the A's, who entered the series as losers of 24 of their last 30 games. But the Yankees are the team they lost to in the postseason a year ago, and they're the caliber of team the Royals have to beat if they want to advance into October again.
And including the playoffs, Kansas City has now dropped eight straight against New York.
This team doesn't have enough offense right now, and the pitching is slowly withering away, especially with ace Cole Ragans now on the injured list. And if they can't flip the script soon, they might even have to think about selling at the trade deadline.
More MLB: Royals Urged To Trade For $1.1 Million Athletics Star Amid Embarrassing Slide
Jackson Roberts is a former Division III All-Region DH who now writes and talks about sports for a living. A Bay Area native and a graduate of Swarthmore College and the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, Jackson makes his home in North Jersey. He grew up rooting for the Red Sox, Patriots, and Warriors, and he recently added the Devils to his sports fandom mosaic. For all business/marketing inquiries regarding "Kansas City Royals On SI," please reach out to Scott Neville: scott@wtfsports.org
Follow jrobertsbsbl