BALTIMORE >> Adley Rutschman and Bobby Witt Jr. were the top two picks of baseball’s 2019 amateur draft, back when the Baltimore Orioles and Kansas City Royals were among the worst teams in the sport.

“It’s pretty crazy,” Witt said Monday. “Now we’re matching up in the postseason.”

Rutschman and the Orioles host Witt and the Royals in an AL wild-card series of two teams with 100-loss seasons not far back in the rearview mirror. For Kansas City, it was last season, and their 30-win improvement ranks as one of the most impressive turnarounds over the past half-century.

Game 1 is today at Camden Yards.

“This is something I’ve dreamed about since I was a kid,” said Witt, who hit .332 to win the AL batting title. “Going into the last offseason, this was the goal and we’re here now. We just got to keep working.”

The Royals went from 56-106 to 86-76, enough for the second wild card. Only five teams made a bigger leap from one season to the next, a group that includes Baltimore from 2021 to ’22.

That was after the Orioles lost more than 100 games in three consecutive full seasons. But with Rutschman, Gunnar Henderson and other prospects resulting from those dark days, they won the AL East a year ago and got a taste of the playoffs — a Division Series defeat to eventual champion Texas.

Henderson hopes he and his teammates are more “battle-tested” this time around.

“Last year’s experience of what that felt like at the end when we did have this kind of fairytale season and the quick exit, I’m hoping that these guys still have that taste in their mouth going into this postseason,” manager Brandon Hyde said. “I think they do.”

The parallels are not just historic. The Royals and Orioles at times this season were dominant, but each had second-half struggles that endangered reaching October.

Kansas City had two separate seven-game skids over the past five weeks. Baltimore lost 11 of 16 games from Sept. 4-22.

“There’s very rarely a team that goes through a season without some sort of a rough patch,” Royals manager Matt Quatraro said. “But whether that’s two games, four games, seven games — whatever your losing streaks are — these guys in this clubhouse are so resilient. They bounce back.”

The Royals join NL East champion Philadelphia as the only teams to go into this year’s playoffs under .500 over their prior 10 games. The Orioles were at least able to finish 4-2 to recapture some swagger.