There’s a lesson to learn from Eric Hosmer’s return to Kansas City to face the Royals

Eric Hosmer’s arrival to the majors came in May 2011, one of the most anticipated Royals debuts of the previous decade — so anticipated, in fact, that the team’s front office had coined a term for it.

Operation Flip the Switch.

Sure, an organization then with eight straight losing seasons would not have used the phrase if a handful of other prospects had not accompanied Hosmer’s debut. But it was his call-up that, well, flipped the switch on the term’s public introduction.

In a call Thursday, Dayton Moore, the Royals’ president of baseball operations, shared that story, same as he’s done in the past. The purpose? Hosmer made his long-awaited return to Kauffman Stadium later that evening, five years after he bolted for more cash, and Moore wanted to articulate just how significant of a role Hosmer played in the organization’s 2014-15 trips to the World Series.

It’s an anecdote about the past.

But with some relevance toward the future.

Hosmer’s return served as a reminder of how long ago those playoff runs were — do you realize Salvador Perez is the only current member of the Royals who actually played even one game with Hosmer here? But just the same, it was also a reminder that simply because a rebuild is too slow in pace does not necessarily mean it will fail.

And before we continue, let me be clear that this rebuild has required more time than it should have — that criticism has already been pointed out in this space.

For today, let’s focus on what it means for the future.

That’s where Hosmer comes into play.

The bigger picture will tell you that the switch did eventually flip with Hosmer and the prospects that joined him. The Royals have banners flying above their left-field Hall of Fame structure to prove it.

But it was not immediate. It was slow enough, actually, to doubt its conclusion. Hosmer came up with the Royals playing better than .500 baseball, but they would still lose 91 games in 2011 then 90 more in 2012 — even as the club’s marketing team embarrassingly dubbed the latter “Our Time.”

Wasn’t the case. And you couldn’t help but wonder how they would ever put it all together.

Little did we realize then, it was closer than understood. The Royals finally finished above .500 in 2013, before ending a three-decade playoff drought a year later. I don’t need to inform you of the rest.

“Ultimately, you get to the big leagues (and) you realize this is the hardest stop of them all,” Hosmer said. “Stuff doesn’t change in a year.

“You’re going to fight through some stuff. You’ve got to make some adjustments. You gotta learn as a team and individually.”

Before Hosmer spoke inside Kauffman Stadium’s media room Thursday, the very setting in which the Royals introduced him as an 18-year-old draft pick, I reminded Perez of the zig-zagged journey over those four-plus seasons long ago and asked, Does this in any way remind you of ...

“Where we are right now?” he interrupted. “Yes, I see the similarities.”