Mooooose! Royals may trade Moustakas, but they’ll never forget him
Just after Tampa Bay made David Price the No. 1 overall selection in the 2007 Major League Baseball draft, Mike Moustakas was sitting on a couch in his Northridge, Calif., home as the Royals were about to make the next pick. Surrounded by family, his future wife, Stephanie, and friends, he playfully tapped one of us buddies and said, “Hey, dude, I might get drafted right here.”
When he actually was, Moustakas felt shock amid the celebration and, as he said last year, couldn’t immediately process that “This really just happened.”
That sense of wonder in one way or another has underscored his fascinating tenure as a member of the Royals organization, with whom he has spent his entire adult life in the most human of ways.
This really just happened ... He could say that same thing today about this experience, and so could we all.
Which is why his seemingly imminent departure (the odd second farewell scene after last year’s anticipated one) makes for a moment to pause and appreciate him once more.
With the trade deadline looming next week and Moustakas considered a prime target for contenders as the Royals drill into rebuild mode, Moustakas knows full well that Wednesday could mark his last home game at Kauffman Stadium as the team departs until Aug. 6.
Just the same, he said late Tuesday night, “I can’t focus on that. None of us can. That stuff’s out of our control. And you start focusing on stuff like that, that’s when you start getting into trouble.”
So you just keep doing the right things and keep playing the game hard, he said, and just know that general manager Dayton Moore is going to do whatever he feels is best for the organization.
“We all have his back, and he’s had our back since Day One,” said Moustakas, who earlier in the night hit his 20th home run.
That’s a typically sincere sentiment from Moustakas, who was the first man Moore selected in his first full-fledged draft after taking over just days before the 2006 version.
And it speaks to the essence of what has made Moustakas so special to Kansas City: Of all the Royals of this era who grew up before our eyes, maybe none has been more real and relatable than Moustakas through his extreme ups and downs and poignant life experiences along the way to a triumphant legacy.
Much was staked on Moustakas, who delivered with a breakout 2014 playoff run that included a club record five home runs in one postseason and a downright iconic and symbolic defensive play into the dugout suites, who delivered a club-record 38 homers last year, who delivered tangibles and intangibles that led to a parade in 2015 that no one will ever forget.
That’s only part of the story, though, of why he has meant so much to the franchise and its fans.
It’s also because of the cycle of life that he’s shared that reminds us nothing worthwhile comes easy.
We’ve seen the third baseman be labeled one of the would-be saviors of a lost franchise, then seen him thrash so mightily that you wondered if he’d ever find his way.
We’ve seen him a year ago set the club record for home runs in a season, 38, only to see him become the epitome of the, uh, fiscal restraint that dominated baseball’s offseason: When Moustakas might reasonably have expected a multi-year mega-deal (he declined a $17.4 million qualifying offer by the Royals to test free agency), he was relegated to the bargain rack and was surprisingly available for $6.5 million this season for the Royals.
We’ve seen a deep capacity for emotion, whether in embracing the family of firefighters who’d died on the job (“Kansas City, this is a big family. It’s not just baseball. It’s a big family. We’re all in this together,” he said then) or traveling to the Dominican Republic for the funeral of Yordano Ventura (“I just wanted to be around him and to be around his family and show them how much he meant to us,” he said last year) or being the guy teammates would point to as a catalyst in the rally in Game 4 at Houston in 2015 down 6-2 and facing elimination.
We’ve seen him in the infinitely emotional intersections at which he stood after the Royals won the World Series in 2015.
When Wade Davis struck out the Mets’ Wilmer Flores to end the clinching Game 5, Moustakas in about one motion flung up his glove, tossed off his hat, untucked his jersey and locked eyes with Eric Hosmer across the diamond.
As the cornerstones of mere hope transformed into unforgettable reality, words couldn’t express what went into that hug.
More movingly, that run was made in the months after Moustakas’ mother, Connie, had died and Moustakas had taken to still leaving her tickets at will call and scratching her initials in the dirt.
So after the final game, he shared special time with Chris Young and Edinson Volquez, each of whom also had recently lost a parent — Volquez less than a week before he started Game 5.
One of the most indelible moments I’ve ever seen up close and personal was late that night near the mound on Citi Field, when Moustakas presented Volquez with the World Series trophy and whispered “I love you” to him.
In fact, resilience under emotional duress has defined Moustakas’ time with the organization.
When he struggled in 2014 and got sent down to Class AAA Omaha, he ultimately came to see the demotion as revitalizing. Sitting on a cooler in the aisle of a wobbly bus and playing cards again was good for the soul, as it happened.
“I needed to go,” he said, looking back a year ago. “I didn’t want to. Nobody wants to get sent down. But I needed a break. I needed a restart and to take a deep breath and kind of relax.”
A year after becoming an All-Star for a World Series champion in 2015, Moustakas lost most of the season to injury after a freak collision with Alex Gordon. But he later took solace that the injury allowed him to be present in the first few months of daughter Mila’s life after Stephanie gave birth that August; then he had his best personal season in 2017.
Moustakas came to have the same sense of perspective about not reaping the payday he’d earned in the offseason: After all, it enabled him to be home for the birth of his son, Michael Carter.
“Best offseason ever. This morning we were blessed with a beautiful baby boy. Michael Carter Moustakas. My wife is an absolute rockstar. I love our growing family,” Moustakas posted March 8 on Twitter.
When he rejoined the Royals a few days later, he called it all a “blessing in disguise. … For some reason, when unfortunate things happen, like my ACL or this offseason, I’m blessed with a great outcome.”
Just like it’s been overall here in what became a reality show that anyone could embrace. This really just happened. And whatever comes next, the hard-earned triumph will keep Moustakas forever entwined to Kansas City.
This story was originally published July 25, 2018 at 12:26 PM.