I wonder what happened to the "Royals Way"?
No style of baseball works without good starting pitching, or at least league average starting pitching. Royals way was "keep it close, get to the pen, make contact and hope BABIP works out in our favor". Doesn't work when we give away outs and make defensive errors and have crap starting pitching.
The margin in 14/15 was probably thinner than we liked to admit