KANSAS CITY, Mo. — In the hours, even days, after the best Royals season in a decade, an array of flattering messages flooded the phone of manager Matt Quatraro.

They came from everywhere. Friends. Family. Peers in the business.

The Royals had just completed the best turnaround in franchise history. A year after losing 106 games, they were a playoff team, and then toe-to-toe with the New York Yankees before falling in the American League Divisional Series.

It was baseball’s feel-good story. Which was the point of the messages.

You guys had a great season.

Nobody expected that from you.

But in his office inside Kauffman Stadium, Quatraro didn’t feel much like participating in the plot of a Disney movie.

To the contrary.

“I hated the texts and phone calls,” Quatraro said. “That was bothersome to me.

“I know it’s all well-intentioned, but once you’re in it, I really thought we were going to win that series. It was really disappointing that we didn’t.”

Quatraro shared that story from his spring training office in Surprise, Ariz., this month. This part of the conversation started with an intriguing two-word answer.

How did you process the end of last season?

“Not well,” he instantly replied.

In his two-plus seasons in Kansas City, Quatraro has developed a reputation for a calm demeanor. He’s so stoic in pressure moments, in fact, that we’ve asked him plenty about how he manages to prevent anything from fazing him.

So it’s particularly notable when something does.

What does Matt Quatraro not handling something well even look like?

It’s a peek into his personality — the part hidden from the dugout cameras.

Quatraro didn’t allow any time to elapse between a Game 4 loss to the Yankees in the ALDS and his preparation for the 2025 season. He called people in the organization one by one: coaches, players, front office. He wanted a full breakdown of the season, but especially the particulars about what went wrong at its conclusion — a full assessment of why they were no longer playing baseball.

Over and over again, he rehashed the topic.

For a week, then two, and then a month.

“I was obsessed with it,” he said. “But then you have to realize, OK, I can’t just keep doing this every day.”

But he did, for at least awhile.

This was a time last October when he thought — nay, he knew — that players and coaches should be decompressing from a long season. They had been part of the grind for the previous eight months. That’s the consequence, the benefit even, of playing baseball into mid-October.

Then the season ends abruptly.

But then the offseason was interrupted abruptly too — by his phone calls.

“That’s probably not the most courteous thing to do,” Quatraro said, “But I was like, ‘I can’t turn this off.’”

The phone conversations produced notes that Quatraro plugged into his computer. To this day, he’ll reference those entries. The calls were educational.

For the intended purpose.

And for an unintended one.

Quatraro gathered the knowledge he sought, but he also learned something else in the process: He wasn’t the only one who couldn’t shake the ending.

“We all felt that same way,” shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. said. “None of us were happy with how the season ended. It’s not like it wasn’t on our mind already.”

“People were very willing to share,” Quatraro said. “Nobody was like, ‘Ah, I’ll get back to you later.’ They all had thoughts.”

There’s a bigger-picture story tucked into those few weeks, and an optimist could probably find some relation to what’s ahead in 2025. (The Royals open the season Thursday against the Cleveland Guardians at Kauffman Stadium.)

The manager doesn’t give a rip about the organizational recent history, the fact that the team had spanned eight years without a winning season since the World Series. The 2024 season — a 30-win improvement — falls into his own expectations.

And falls short.

“It’s the attitude you want a manager to have,” Royals general manager J.J. Picollo said. “I was with him two or three times the following week, and you could feel it for sure — the end of the season really bugged him. I could clearly see that in his body language, in his mood.”

In their opening spring training meeting, Quatraro and Picollo characterized the 2024 season as confirmation of the processes they put in place. They were moving in the right direction, even if it didn’t feel that way to them on, say, Oct. 10, 2024. Or, you know, the weeks after.

At some point, though, they had to acknowledge the step forward.

OK, briefly.

“He said last year was a great year, but immediately he said, ‘But how do we improve?’” Picollo recalled. “We don’t want to settle. We came up short. When it comes down to it, I don’t think we were any different than, say, the Yankees. We’re the same way. They didn’t win the World Series. We didn’t either. We weren’t happy.”

Put that quote into the context of just one year earlier, the conclusion of the 2023 season, with the Royals on the heels of a 106-loss campaign.

A year later, he was unhappy with 86 wins.

Bothered by congratulatory texts for them.

Obsessed not with those 86 wins but with the last loss.

“If we’re ever fortunate enough to win a World Series,” Picollo said, “I don’t think that’s going to slow him down either.”

Another chance awaits. It starts Thursday in Kansas City.

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