A 2015 Royals story you haven’t heard before, and how Dayton Moore has changed since
My favorite story from the 2015 Royals is one I haven’t been able to tell.
The story comes from Kansas City general manager Dayton Moore, about a private moment with his son in a suite as they watched Game 5 of the World Series play out live before their eyes in New York. He made me promise not to share the story publicly, until now.
The scene: top of the 12th, one out, Jarrod Dyson on third base and Christian Colon at the plate. You remember Colon, right? The Royals drafted him fourth overall in 2010, their presumptive second baseman of the future who’d drawn comparisons to Placido Polanco.
The Royals had seriously considered drafting Chris Sale in that spot instead, a decision that haunted them as Sale became one of the game’s premier starting pitchers and Colon topped out as an extra infielder.
Maybe it was fitting that Colon had the bat in his hand that night against the Mets for one of the biggest moments in franchise history. He’d driven in the tying run in the 12th inning of the 2014 AL Wild Card game, and here came his chance to cement a legacy as something like the franchise’s modern-day Dane Iorg ...
But back to Moore’s suite, where young Robert Moore — 12 or so at the time, with Colon as his favorite player — turns to the man who possesses ultimate control of the Royals’ baseball decisions.
“Dad,” the son said. “If C.C. gets a hit here nobody can ever give you crap about Chris Sale again.”
You know what happened next. Colon lasered a hanging slider into left-center field. Dyson pumped the air as he stepped on home plate. Colon pounded his chest and screamed to the KC dugout as he rounded first in one of the greatest moments in Royals history.
“LET’S GO,” Colon yelled.
“HELL YEAH,” beloved Royals first base coach Rusty Kuntz screamed back.
In place of joy, relief
Back in the suite, Moore’s emotions were different. He sensed the game was over, which would mean his team would finally be a world champion. It would be the accomplishment of his professional life and, depending on how you view the Miami Marlins, a small-market title without modern baseball precedent.
And all Moore could feel was ... relief.
“Yeah, I didn’t enjoy it,” Moore said in a phone interview last week. “Didn’t enjoy it. That’s one thing Mr. Glass and I talked about quite a bit as we began to rebuild going forward: ‘Next time we’re going to enjoy it more.’”
This is, of course, the five-year anniversary of the Royals’ most recent world championship. Fox Sports Kansas City is replaying the Royals’ wins from that postseason, starting with Game 2 of the American League Division Series against the Astros Monday night.
It’s a celebration, and a particularly welcome one during this time of pandemic isolation, so we’re jumping in with a series of flashbacks and new content throughout the next three weeks.
Moore is a good place to start, and not just because he was the lead architect of baseball’s most improbable championship rebuild, but because he still has the same job and a wildly different perspective on it all.
He’s serious about not enjoying it at the time, by the way.
All Royals scouts and their families were invited to every postseason game, from the top advanced scouts studying the other side to amateur scouts whose work focused on the next year’s draft.
That was done at Moore’s urging and with his full support, but there were moments during the 2015 postseason that, while the current team was thrilling all of Kansas City on the field, he worried the organization was falling behind in its current evaluation of high school and college prospects.
Before Game 3 of the 2014 World Series in San Francisco, Moore had gathered his baseball operations department for a planning meeting about 2015. He remembers leaving that meeting for lunch in the hotel lobby and seeing all these happy faces — the Glass family, their kids, grandkids, other executives and scouts — and thinking What are they happy about? We haven’t done anything. We have work to do.
“You know, just stupid stuff,” he said last week.
The Royals fell one swing short of a 2014 championship in Game 7 — it was only the seventh time in baseball history that one pitch could’ve won the World Series for either team — but they still held a rally at Kauffman Stadium the next day.
Moore used it as a chance to hold another staff meeting. He would not celebrate.
“I wasn’t in a good place,” Moore said. “Mr. Glass wasn’t in a good place, initially. The way we dealt with it is we went to work. We went to work and we started preparing.”
Everything for a reason
Moore says all this with disappointment in his voice. His view of the world is different now, he said. Successes should be celebrated. Moments should be lived in. He wishes he’d felt this way before, but here’s some armchair psychology:
Maybe he had to be like that to be like this.
In other words, remember 2014. Three months before that World Series against the San Francisco Giants, the Royals’ first World Series in 30 years, many in and around Kansas City wanted Moore and then-manager Ned Yost fired. Heck, one month before the World Series, many wanted Yost shot into the sun for using Yordano Ventura in relief in the AL Wild Card Game.
The Royals’ leadership did not know what the future would hold, is the point. But that rocky past felt real. There was no security, no promise of how the team would respond in 2015.
So maybe Moore had to white-knuckle all those moments we now see as part of a grander celebration in order to get to a place where he sees the value in enjoying the ride.
“Probably,” he said. “Maybe. Probably. You’re probably right about that.”
However it happened, Moore is here now. The Royals won 81 and 80 games in the seasons after their championship and have lost 207 in the last two years. There’s an irony in that.
Decisions in the draft and player development usually take years to show up as right or wrong, which means when Moore’s group was being criticized in the early 2010s they were making mostly effective decisions. And when they were praised during the postseason runs of 2014 and 2015, their decisions were leading to struggles.
Some factors outside their control exist on both sides of that. With a lucky break here or there (anybody remember Joe Panik’s play up the middle in Game 7?), they might’ve won the 2014 title. And with a worse break here or there (any number of things in 2015’s ALDS Game 4 against Houston or ALCS Game 6 against Toronto), they could’ve lost in the postseason that led to the club’s second world championship.
Viewing old games on TV isn’t for everybody. But Moore had never re-watched any of his team’s playoff games before the last week or so. There’s no live baseball thanks to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, so he has time, finally.
And with five years since he lived it so intimately, he also has the ability to smile at the memories, finally.
“I’ve really enjoyed watching these games,” he said. “There’s so many things I forgot, that I didn’t realize happened.”
This story was originally published May 4, 2020 at 5:00 AM.