On May 24, the Royals sat in the third and final American League Wild Card spot in a far-too-early look at a postseason chase, four games above .500 and winners of 20 of the past 31.

That might seem like an arbitrary date to identify over a 162-game season, especially considering that it’s 15 weeks ago, but there’s a reason I picked it.

On May 24, a hot Royals team had the privilege of matching up against a starter with a 12.00 earned run average. Twins right-hander Zebby Matthews had made just one start at that point, but still, it wasn’t exactly promising.

Then came a date against the Royals. That night in Minnesota, Matthews struck out nine Royals over four innings, and here’s the important part of the story:

The Royals lost.

And thus began the most frustrating, consequential and just plain strange trend of this Royals season.

They have turned baseball’s worst pitchers into aces.

Slade Cecconi is the latest, the Cleveland starting pitcher who took a 4.78 earned run average into Monday night’s game and then brought a no-hitter into the eighth inning against the Royals. Cecconi would give up a hit in the eighth but not a run, and the Guardians moved ahead of the Royals in a playoff chase that is running low on time.

Yes, All-Star shortstop Bobby Witt remained absent from KC’s lineup with back spasms, but before Cecconni got everybody out over seven innings, he hadn’t gotten much of anybody out recently, posting over a 7.26 ERA over his past six starts.

This isn’t intended as a big-picture indictment on a Kansas City offense that has actually been just fine since the All-Star break — even better than fine, ranking 11th in the majors in runs and eighth in OPS and homers.

That makes it all the more inexplicable that the Royals have still been at their worst in the most advantageous of opportunities the sport provides: facing bad pitching.

On 35 occasions over the past 15 weeks — more than once every three games since that May 24 date — a Kansas City opponent has trotted onto the mound a starting pitcher holding a 4.54 ERA or higher when the game began. (The median ERA of those 35 pitchers is a 5.13.)

Here is the Royals’ record in what amounts to 35 of the easiest games on their schedule: 12-23. That equals a .342 winning percentage, which extrapolated over a full season would be worse than every AL team this season, even the White Sox.

Those 35 struggling starting pitchers have combined for a 3.39 ERA and 1.10 WHIP against the Royals. And we can’t even chalk it up to a small sample. They’ve combined to thrown 191 innings, a mark reached by only nine pitchers all of last season.

Put it together, and consider the composite in the Cy Young voting.

It’s a better ERA than Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman, who is making north of $100 million over five years and has been worth every bit of the money. It’s an identical WHIP to Yankees lefty Max Fried, who is making north of $200 million over eight seasons, a contract nobody in the New York organization is regretting.

The Royals are turning baseball’s worst into the value of baseball’s richest. And it’s altering the course of their playoff chase.

After Monday’s games, the Royals are 3 games behind Seattle for the third and final AL Wild Card spot, though Texas and Cleveland are sandwiched between that pursuit. Both Fangraphs and Baseball Reference put their playoff odds in the neighborhood of just 6%.

While the Royals’ record against the highest-ERA starters in the past 15 weeks totals a .343 winning percentage, the rest of Major League Baseball has posted a .570 winning percentage in games started by those same pitchers.

If the Royals had equaled that mark against those pitchers — and they’re slightly above .500 and therefore better than the average team, so that’s not exactly an unreasonable ask — they would have won 20 of the 35 games instead of just 12. That’s eight more wins for the season, eight fewer losses.

Let’s do the quick math on that.

It would make the Royals one game out … of the American League Central division race. Seriously. One game behind the Tigers. They’d be just 1 1/2 games behind the Blue Jays for the best record in the American League. We’d be talking playoff matchup preferences, not playoff chances.

Heck, even if they’d just posted a .500 record against the bottom of the pitching barrel, the Royals would have a 3-game lead in the race for the final playoff spot, rather than a 3-game deficit.

The Royals have endured a lot, some of it within their control — like a three-month slump to open the year — and some it less so, like losing starting pitchers Kris Bubic, Cole Ragans and now Seth Lugo to injured list stints. And they’ve still made the games in September matter.

Yet for all of that, an oddity of the highest frustration could determine the outcome of their season. The reason I keep calling it strange and odd: The inverse of this statistic means the Royals are 33-24 against the upper- and mid-echelon of pitching over that same time frame, which would be a better full-season winning percentage than any AL team.

So yes, it’s strange. Can’t figure a reason for the backwards nature of it.

There are still 18 games left, and on the face of it, the Royals have a particularly challenging schedule, with 12 of the 18 against teams above .500. What’s directly in front of them: Cleveland will finish this four-game series with three pitchers statistically better than the one they sent to the mound Monday.

Heck, maybe that’s a good thing.