As the 1985 World Series got farther and farther away and before the Royals reached the top of the baseball mountain again in 2015, there was a sense that the Royals hadn’t been remotely relevant between championship runs. And while that’s largely true, it’s not entirely true. They were just two games out of first place in 1987 and won 92 games in 1989. And even though they failed miserably when trying to go for it with the highest payroll in baseball in 1990, they still were above .500 in both 1991 and 1993.
If this was today’s baseball landscape, they’d have won the division in 1989 (that 92-70 was the second best record in the AL and the A’s wouldn’t have been in their division if there was an AL Central).