Former Royal Moustakas remains forever tethered to the franchise in which he grew up
Try as he might to shrug away a quadriceps strain and be able to play against the Royals Tuesday night, despite doing “everything possible I could,” Mike Moustakas remained stranded on the 10-day injured list.
That’s retroactive to Aug. 6 … and keeps intact a retrospective charm to Moustakas’ career that suddenly is going on a decade since his debut with the Royals.
Through 1,138 big-league games, and even after more than 200 in the always-wrong-looking-uniforms-of-other-teams, he has yet to play against the one that raised him in a game that counts.
Not that we shouldn’t all want to get on with our lives or anything.
But there’s a fine quaint upside to being able to have an uncluttered view back of someone that meant so much to an organization that still means so much to him.
Especially when it’s someone who so epitomized the oh-so-human zigs and zags of the riveting story of back-to-back American League titles and the 2015 World Series triumph.
That special time and place seemed alive on Tuesday afternoon when he beamed even at the sight of familiar reporters on a Zoom call, considered aloud the bummer of trying to avoid hugging Danny Duffy amid the pandemic (“we have to respect each other’s families and respect the game of baseball,” he resolved) and gushed over general manager Dayton Moore as if he still were working for him.
“When you spend 10 years of your life with people and … (many) in the minor leagues, you become more than teammates,” he said. “You become more than friends. It’s almost family. It is family, and it really showed in that 2015 season.”
The achievement was all the sweeter and more meaningful for its tribulations, both personally and collectively. And no one radiated the emotions of that arc more than Moustakas as an essential part of the core that ended a 28-year postseason drought.
A group that became known for the comeback was embodied in him.
Consider when he was struggling and sent down to Class AAA Omaha in 2014 … then rebounded to hit five home runs and make an epic catch sprawling into a dugout suite in the run to the World Series.
Then there was 2015, when he was named an All-Star for the first time. With his mother, Connie, battling cancer and other undisclosed illnesses, Moustakas flew from the game in Cincinnati to California to see her before the start of the second half of the season. He gave her his All-Star Game jersey, even though he later told The Star, “To her, I was always an All-Star no matter what.”
That was the last time he saw her before she died five years ago Aug. 9 … though he poignantly continued to leave her tickets at will call and began etching her initials in the batter’s box and around third base.
Her death became part of a remarkably sad but unifying sequence of such events in the weeks to come, part of the very DNA and broader narrative of that team.
Pitcher Chris Young’s father died on Sept. 26, a day before Young insisted on pitching to honor his father and somehow summoned five innings of no-hit baseball before leaving to join the family.
Then there was Edinson Volquez, whose father died just before Volquez started Game One of the World Series against the Mets and returned from the funeral in the Dominican Republic to start the clinching Game Five. One of my favorite memories is standing near Volquez on the field in New York after the game and watching Moustakas hand him the trophy and tell him he loved him.
Asked what he treasured most from that time, Moustakas pointed to the very things that still resonate for so many who followed along.
Winning the World Series itself was “amazing,” he said, then turned the focus to “the path that we had, the journey that we had, and all the ups and downs on and off the field that our team had.”
Invoking Young and Volquez, he pointed to having “all those boys rally around us and pick us up when we needed it.”
Time fleets on, though, and the economics of the game take their inevitable toll.
In another age of the game, perhaps, Moustakas (and maybe Eric Hosmer and Lorenzo Cain, etc) would have stayed in a Royals uniform forever instead of just being certifiably #ForeverRoyal.
Instead, the kid from that bygone era suddenly is 31 years old and the father of three and two teams removed from the Royals after a year-plus stint with the Brewers.
When he talks about being vocal around “the boys in the clubhouse” now, alas, he means the Reds instead of guys he “grew up with” like Duffy, Sal Perez and role model Alex Gordon.
Even now, he’ll tell you, “I just try to be as much like Gordo as I can” … as he tries to help the Reds return to a winning record for the first time since 2013 with what was hard-wired into him here.
“In baseball, you learn so much throughout the course of a year and throughout the course of years,” said Moustakas, who earlier this season missed three games in COVID-19 protocol after reporting symptoms. Maybe as soon as next week, when the Royals play host to the Reds, Moustakas finally will be actively engaged in turning all that against the Royals. But at least up to now, it’s been nice to have the lens back still clean for a pause of appreciation.
This story was originally published August 11, 2020 at 4:42 PM with the headline "Former Royal Moustakas remains forever tethered to the franchise in which he grew up."