What a wild career the infielder had
Last week, former Royal Mike Moustakas announced his intent to sign a one-day contract with the Royals to officially retire with the team that had drafted him. Moustakas, or Moose as he is affectionately known, may not have had the career he wished for when he or the team wished for when he was drafted, but the infielder still made an indelible mark on Kansas City Royals history.
Michael Christopher Moustakas was drafted by the Kansas City Royals in the first round, second overall, in the June 2007 draft out of Chatsworth Charter High School in Chatsworth, California. That draft is somewhat infamous in certain circles because the Royals were expected to have the first overall pick in the draft for most of the 2006 season until a three-game sweep over the Detroit Tigers in the final series of the season caused the Royals to leapfrog the then Tampa Bay Devil Rays and become only the 29th-worst team in baseball that season with a record of 62-100 to the Devil Rays’ 61-101.
The Rays selected David Price first overall. Price went on to have a significantly better career by the raw numbers, including being named an All-Star five times, receiving MVP votes in two separate years, and earning Cy Young Award votes in four years, including winning the award in 2012 and coming in second two other times.
Still, it’s hard to imagine the Royals’ success in 2014 and 2015 without Moustakas. This is especially true because without Price’s success, the Rays may very well have balked at trading James Shields and Wade Davis to the Royals in the 2012/2013 offseason and Price was out of Tampa Bay by the trade deadline in 2014, anyway. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
As a prospect
Moustakas was drafted as a shortstop, but everyone expected him to become a slick-fielding third baseman with power by the time he reached the big leagues. When he made his professional debut in 2007 it was at the hot corner. All throughout his minor league career, he did nothing but hit. Sure, he had only a 95 wRC+ in high-A in 2009, but back then the Royals’ affiliate was known to play in a hitters’ graveyard, so that wasn’t unexpected. By 2010 Moustakas was in AAA Omaha as a 21-year-old – the same age Bobby Witt Jr. debuted at the highest minor league level.
Moose debuted for the big league club the following summer, the same year that key Royals players Alcides Escobar, Lorenzo Cain, and fellow prospects Salvador Perez and Eric Hosmer debuted. Unlike Hosmer and Perez, but similar to Escobar and Cain, Moustakas struggled a bit in that debut season. However, in 2012 he seemed to put all those struggles behind him. Sure, he only had a 90 wRC+ but he banged out 20 home runs and showcased excellent defense at the hot corner.
The struggles
Sadly, if Moustakas had turned a corner in 2012, he was hit by a metaphorical bus in 2013. He was awful at the plate that year, and his defense declined to merely above average. 2014 was more of the same, to the point that Royals fans were demanding he be demoted and journeyman Danny Valencia should be his replacement. The team had finished 2013 over .500 after making that huge trade with Tampa Bay and were playing around .500 with flashes of brilliance in 2014. There seemed to be no room to allow Moose’s struggles to drag the team down.
Finally, on May 22, after a stretch where he went 1-for-15 in five games, he was demoted. Valencia, unfortunately, was hurt pretty quickly after taking over the starting role, so Moose was recalled on June 1, less than two weeks later, and stuck on the big league roster for the remainder of that season. Prior to his demotion, Moose had been hitting at a 48 wRC+ overall. After his recall, he improved to a much-bettter but still-bad 85 wRC+.
Then, the Royals made the postseason.
Playoff heroics
Moustakas had a single with a run scored in the 2014 AL Wild Card game, but when the Royals swept the Angels in three games out of the division series, he went 3-for-11 with two home runs, including an extra-innings blast in the eleventh inning to give the Royals their first victory.
He added a two-run dinger in the Game Three laugher. Next, the Royals had to travel to Baltimore for the American League Championship series. The series was pitched as The Chessmaster vs The Dunce with Orioles manager Buck Showalter getting all kinds of credit for how he had managed his team while Royals manager Ned Yost was given no credit with the assumption that the amazing trio of HDH (Kelvin Herrera, Wade Davis, and Greg Holland) had carried the team that far.
The first game of that series went into extras as well and while Alex Gordon smacked the go-ahead home run in those extra innings, Moustakas tacked on a two-run home of his own that ended up being the difference in the game when the Orioles got one back in the bottom of the tenth.
Moose would only go 3-for-15 in that series, but two of those hits were home runs. He also made an iconic defensive play, diving over a dugout railing to catch a popup to help maintain a tie game in the later innings. It seemed so incredibly symbolic for the Royals. A player going way above and beyond what would normally be expected of him to make the play and Royals fans supporting him with all their might, even if they’d called for his head earlier in the year.
The Royals ultimately lost in that World Series and maybe they could have won if Moose had been a bit better; he went only 5-for-23 with a single home run – in the Game Six rout.
Still, Moustakas’ five home runs in a single postseason set what remains a Royals’ record for home runs in a single postseason (helped by the fact that George Brett never had a Division Series, much less a Wild Card game when his Royals teams made the postseason.)
In 2015, Moustakas overhauled his swing and determined to go the other way more often. He immediately went from being the number nine hitter on a Wild Card team to the number two hitter on the best team in the American League with a career year at the plate.
Moose added one more playoff home run in the 2015 ALCS versus the Blue Jays, a necessary run in the closely contested clinching Game Six of that series.
Those six home runs tie Moustakas for second for the Royals’ all-time postseason home leader list with Salvador Perez. The five from 2014 alone would still have made him third.
After the playoff fun
The Royals would never make the postseason again while Moustakas was playing in Major League Baseball, but that didn’t mean he was done contributing to team history. He started out 2016 strong, but a collision with Alex Gordon in left field ended his season after only 27 games. In 2017, with the Royals trying desperately to return to the playoffs before all of their best hitters reached free agency, Moustakas returned healthy and sacrificed some OBP for power and did something that no Royal had done in more than 30 years – hit more than 35 home runs. He broke Steve Balboni’s home run record – at the time the lowest out of any MLB team at 36 – by hitting 38 home runs.
In 2018, Moustakas couldn’t find a team that was willing to give him the shiny long-term contract he wanted, so he returned to Kansas City on a one-year deal worth far less than anyone had expected him to get. Predictably, the 2018 Royals were very bad and he was dealt at the deadline to the ascending Brewers for outfielder Brett Philips and pitcher Jorge López.
After the Royals
Moustakas signed another one-year deal with the Brewers to return to them for the 2019 season. Finally, with five straight years of above-average hitting and averaging average defense, the Reds took a chance on Moose and gave him the multi-year deal he’d been chasing for three offseasons at age 31. Unfortunately for them, Moustakas didn’t do so well after age 30. He was good enough in the COVID-shortened 2020, but decidedly below average in 2021 and 2022. He was so bad, in fact, that the Reds paid him $22 million to go away.
He signed with Colorado before the 2023 season and bounced back a bit at the plate, but his defense had fully degraded to bad, and he was traded to the Angels in June, where things fell apart for him again. He signed a minor league deal with the White Sox ahead of last year’s Spring Training but didn’t even crack their Opening Day roster and was granted his release. That was the last time he appeared on an MLB transaction tracker – at least until May 31, when he will sign his one-day contract with the Royals to retire where it all began.
Would the Royals have been better off with Price instead of Moustakas in the 2007 draft? The numbers say yes, but they leave out so much. Moustakas was known to be a fiery leader in the clubhouse. He was often cited as a player who would encourage the entire team even when things looked dire at times in 2014 and 2015.
Moustakas may not have had the WAR totals of Price, but the most successful Royals teams of my lifetime might not have existed without him, and his fingerprints remain on several Royals records. As noted earlier, he sits tied for second in career post-season home runs. He is ninth in career home runs and still third in single-season home runs. He was a major part of 40% of every Royals World Series appearing team and 50% of their World Series wins.
While Moustakas will never be an MLB Hall of Famer, and he might not even make the Top 100 Greatest Royals of All Time, he should absolutely be a first-ballot Royals Hall of Famer. I hope everyone cheers as loud as they can when he’s introduced on May 31st. He deserves a little joy of his own after he brought so much to Royals fans.