BOCA RATON, Fla. — Terry Ryan looked around the room, where most of the major league general managers were gathered.

“There’s really no excuse for all us here not to be competitive,” the Minnesota Twins GM said Tuesday.

Everyone wants to be the Kansas City Royals, who won the World Series with a young, athletic team that had a payroll of $128 million at the end of the regular season, 13th among the 30 big league teams.

Kansas City won its first title since 1985 with a five-game victory over the New York Mets, who were 19th at just under $110 million.

“My favorite fun fact about the World Series is we had a small market against a big market, and the small market had a higher payroll than the big market. That’s all good from my perspective,” new baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said.

Eighteen teams had payrolls of $110 million to $170 million for 40-man rosters, according to MLB calculations, pending final bonuses and auditing. Only the Los Angeles Dodgers (a record $289.6 million), the New York Yankees ($223 million), Boston ($185.6 million) and San Francisco ($180.4 million) were above; Miami ($64.9 million), Tampa Bay ($77 million) and Arizona ($79 million) were at the bottom.

Pittsburgh (24th at $95.9 million) and Houston (27th at $82 million) were among the 10 teams that reached the playoffs.

“You can take snapshot of any point in time and there are small-market teams that are competitive,” Pirates general manager Neal Huntington said in the room, overlooking moored boats at the Boca Raton Resort & Club. “The challenge is what the Royals did: to get to the World Series and win it.”

Pittsburgh and Houston, exciting teams with young players who have been able to end long playoff droughts for their franchises, want to emulate the Royals, not the Rays.

“Tampa Bay, they were the model franchise and they were a playoff-caliber team,” Huntington said. “The sustainability and the consistency of playoff-caliber becomes very challenging in small markets.”

Many GMs credit changes in the collective bargaining agreement reached in November 2011, which stiffened the luxury tax, put in restraints on spending on amateur draft picks and instituted a provision that in 2016 will prevent the largest markets from receiving revenue sharing money.