Kansas City Royals GM Dayton Moore on the losing: “I’m not making excuses for anybody”
The general manager of baseball’s most disappointing team is waiting. He sits in the dugout near the spot where reporters are allowed on the field. Dayton Moore does not always do this. He knows you have questions.
He wants to provide answers, but 21 losses in 25 games have dragged the Royals from above .500 to last place, from hopefulness to a place where satisfactory answers don’t much exist.
If you only have time for a line or two here, the purpose of this unannounced but intentional conversation with a few of us seemed to be to provide accountability for the poor results, talk through how things got this bad, and to present support for manager Mike Matheny, hitting coach Terry Bradshaw and — most relevant to the loudest (and fairest) criticism — pitching coach Cal Eldred.
So, if that’s as far as you want to take this, there it is: the Royals stink right now, they know it, and nobody’s getting fired. Yet, anyway.
But if you’re interested in going deeper, Moore was honest and open, particularly with a 10-minute stream-of-consciousness answer to a question about Jorge Soler and Hunter Dozier struggling that hit on everything from how confidence can be fleeting to the timing of big-league promotions to how and why the big-league roster was constructed the way it was. Plus injuries and problems snowballing and the trade deadline ...
He had a lot on his mind.
“I know there’s a lot of talk about the pitching coach,” he said. “I understand all that. (Talk about the) general manager, I understand.”
Moore talked before the Royals’ 81st game, the season’s halfway point, and so far more than 40 percent of the season has been occupied by losing streaks of five games or more. It is tracking toward the Royals’ most disappointing season since at least 2012, and maybe longer, and the most interesting of Moore’s words may have been his blow-by-blow of the problems so far.
“When we put this team together, we knew we were going to have to score runs,” Moore said.
He then went through all the reasons the club believed it would score: Soler led the league in home runs in 2019, the same year Dozier was among the American League’s better hitters. Carlos Santana is always on base. Salvador Perez is a power-hitting catcher. Whit Merrifield always performs. Andrew Benintendi would provide consistent production. Adalberto Mondesi was on the brink of a breakout.
“We’re going to score runs,” Moore said, repeating the front office feeling out of spring training. “There’s no way we’re not. We’ve got guys who can hit the ball out of the ballpark, we’ve got guys who beat you in multiple ways, steal bases, can score from first…”
He then did something similar with the defense, citing Mondesi, Michael A. Taylor, Santana, Nicky Lopez, Benintendi, Merrifield, Perez and Jarrod Dyson as plus defenders.
Then came the pitching. He described the preseason evaluation finding an unproven but promising bullpen.
With the rotation — and even after all these years, with the Royals reworking how teams value relievers, it always starts with the rotation for Moore — he described Singer as unproven but maniacally competitive, a good bet to improve a third pitch and get outs in the big leagues.
He described Mike Minor as “a solid starter” and Danny Duffy as ready to go. He predicted Brad Keller would continue his trend toward being one of the division’s better starters, and pointed to a group of Kris Bubic, Daniel Lynch and Jackson Kowar that should provide at least one and perhaps more productive pitchers.
You can see where he’s going with this, right?
The vision before the season was for a team that could win in different ways on different days but would be built on depth of starting pitchers, some high-end relief and versatility of skill with the position players.
“It’s really simple,” Moore said. “We started off really, really good the rotation wasn’t great, but the bullpen was. And we were scoring runs. We were getting more out of Nicky Lopez than we thought, especially defensively. He really solidified some things. But the rotation struggled, and the bullpen got kind of worn out a little bit. We had to use it a lot. We played Cleveland, we got the lead, the bullpen gives it up and we haven’t been the same since. We haven’t found that rhythm yet.”
Moore was talking about a home series in early May, and this isn’t said flippantly but he could have been talking about any of the three games — the Royals led 3-1 after four in the opener, 3-0 after five the next night and 4-0 after five (and 4-3 after seven) in the third game.
The Royals lost all three and the Indians completed a four-game sweep with a shutout. The Royals began that series 16-10 and in first place. They are 17-37 since.
“Everything begins and ends with starting pitching,” Moore said. “It puts the whole game in rhythm. Why does the offense struggle? Well, because the rotation struggled and those same guys that have to hit are on their feet the whole time. And psychologically they’re getting beat down, like, ‘Holy cow, we have to score all these runs.’
“And when you’re standing around, you lack energy energy and you lose concentration on a ball or two. Then, you could see it: When Mondesi comes back, everybody’s like, boom. When Mondesi got hurt, the whole thing’s like (down).
“I’m just trying to explain things. I’m not making excuses for anybody. When you’re a major-league player, (or) you’re a major-league general manager, (or) you’re a major-league manager, you have to find solutions and you have to get better and you can’t make excuses. Because everybody deals with the same stuff every single year. That’s why it’s so damn hard to win.
The list of problems is long, but in general he’s describing a team built with promise but without depth, a team that needed good health and breaks to compete instead finding rotten health and worse breaks.
Those seven position players Moore singled out as central to the team’s preseason optimism? Four have been injured or unproductive. Then you add a struggling rotation putting the offense behind and leaving the bullpen overworked and, well, then you have a situation where the team loses 21 of 25 and the general manager essentially seeks out reporters to provide answers he knows won’t satisfy.
“To sum it up, I believe in Cal Eldred and Terry Bradshaw and our players that we’re going to continue to get better,” Moore said. “Focusing on the things that we need to do better. We’ve got a lot of baseball left. We’re going to expect to get better.”
They need to. The status quo is not sustainable. Moore and everyone else involved with the team know that.
This story was originally published July 2, 2021 at 7:10 PM.