Royals suffer same familiar issues from 2025 in painful Opening Day loss to Braves

After waiting longer than any other team (minus their opponent) to open the 2026 season, the Kansas City Royals came up short and frankly showed up looking flat in a 6-0 Opening Day defeat at the hands of the Atlanta Braves.

And in a year where the hope is that everything goes right after a season where at certain points everything seemed to go wrong, it was those same familiar and painful reasons from 2025 as to why they lost their first game of 2026.

Whether it was in the batter's box or on the mound, there were plenty of reasons as to why the Royals found themselves drawing the short end of the stick on Friday night.

While it's a long season and one game doesn't define a whole year, for a fanbase that found themselves frustrated seemingly more often than not a year ago, Game 1 did nothing to ease their minds.

The bottom of the Royals order continued to come up short in Opening Day loss

Arguably the biggest question for the Royals heading into 2026 was determining whether the rest of their order could complement their, dare I say, elite top-half of the order.

Too often it seemed names like Bobby Witt Jr., Maikel Garcia, Vinnie Pasquantino and Salvador Perez would set the table only to have the bottom half of the order squander any momentum they created.

And on Tuesday, putting Pasquantino's 0-for-3 performance aside (although still frustrating in it's own right), the Royals didn't see a single hit from six through nine in the order and just one walk.

As Jack Johnson mentioned on the Locked On Royals podcast before Friday's game, the Royals have never been the team to blitz their opponents with a ton of runs in the first few games of the season. However, seeing the same trend of the bottom order failing to keep up with the top half is not an encouraging sight after the 2025 campaign - especially with offseason questions surrounding names like Isaac Collins and Jonathan India.

Royals continued to get runners on base only to leave them stranded

Tying into the first issue, time and time again last season it appeared the Royals were able to get runners on base but were unable to start a rally.

And despite pitching a six shutout innings, it's not as if the Royals didn't have their opportunities to score against him.

He surrendered three hits and walked three in that span, which included loading the bases in the second inning, leaving runners on first and second in the third inning and leaving Witt Jr. stranded on base after a no-out single in the sixth.

The Royals, with their 651 runs scored, only managed to accumulate more runs than four teams in 2025, a result of failing to capitalize on rallies.

While there's plenty of time to resolve things before the season really gets going, it's not an encouraging sight to see that this trend has carried over at all in 2026.

Cole Ragans' struggle with flyballs continued in Royals Opening Day loss

Now I want to preface, Ragans wasn't one of the worst pitchers when it came to surrendering the long ball a year ago. In fact his 1.02 HR/9 rate would've ranked among the Top 20 lowest totals in baseball among qualified arms had he been able to pitch a full season.

However, in comparison to his 0.66 HR/9 clip in 2023 and 0.72 HR/9 mark in 2024, it was certainly a noticeable jump.

On top of that, Ragans' Pull-Air% rose from 12.7% in 2023, to 18.0% in 2024 to a whopping 27.0% in 2025.

So, the fact that Ragans surrendered three homers in his first start did not ease the minds of fans worried about this aspect of his game. Especially in a season where the hope is that he'll unequivocally bounce-back to ace form following an injury-ridden and underwhelming 2025 campaign.

On the bright side, perhaps he can take solace in the fact that maybe besides Ozzie Albies' first innings homer (which was still down the line and not overly hit far), none of them travelled a particularly long distance, especially Baldwin's third inning "blast" and Michael Harris II two-run shot in the fourth, which both just snuck over the wall in right.

One start won't define Ragans' season and at the end of the day he's too strong of a pitcher to let a bad outing hold him down, but the numbers are still worth noting after a start like this.