Kansas City Royals Mike Moustakas: His Journey

It has been a long, and often times difficult, journey for Mike Moustakas. Mandatory Credit: David Richard-USA TODAY Sports

Mike Moustakas has maneuvered expectations, disappointment, and tragedy in route to becoming one of the best third basemen in Major League Baseball

As the Royals take the field Thursday for game one of the American League Divisional Series against the Astros, Mike Moustakas will trot out to his spot at third base.

This is normal.

As he steps onto the field Thursday, he will be doing it as a third baseman for the Kansas City Royals for the 677 time, including playoffs.

Only four Royals in the franchise’s 46 year history will have played more games at third base than Moustakas has, as he is set to pass Mark Teahen‘s 676 appearances on Thursday.

However, as Moustakas makes the familiar trek to his hot corner, he does so in a vastly different position than he had in previous years.

For most of the first three and a half years of his Major League journey, Moustakas jogged out to his position as arguably the worst hitter in baseball for a team fighting to rip a 25-year monkey off it’s back.

This time, he will be jogging out to his position, undoubtedly to a chorus of Moose calls, as one of the best third baseman in baseball for the best team in the American League.

This is Moustakas new found reality.

However, as most of you reading this already know, this reality was not always normal.

Next: The days without light

Mike Moustakas’ breakout season eventually included an All-Star appearance, after KC fans piled up 19.3 million votes in support of their third baseman. Mandatory Credit: David Kohl-USA TODAY Sports

“I knew it wasn’t good,” Mike told Ken Rosenthal of FoxSports.com. “I picked up. He was crying. I started crying. My wife started crying.”

I was as hard on Mike Moustakas as anybody.

Going into 2015, I was all but done with Moose. I appreciated what he had done for the Kansas City Royals that previous October, but 27-year old players with 2,000 failed plate appearances don’t just turn things around.

Even as Moustakas began defying the odds in April and May by raking out of the two-hole, I still wouldn’t have called myself a fan of him.

However, late last month, I read an article by Ken Rosenthal on FoxSports.com, in which Moustakas opened up about the death of his mother for the first time.

I had known that Moustakas had been placed on the bereavement list twice this season and there was a certain amount of speculation throughout the twitterverse that Connie Moustakas had passed on.

In that article, Moustakas talked about how his mom had been on the verge of death twice during the season, but somehow fought her way back.

He also talked about how he was able to give her his All-Star game jersey and how she was wearing it around the hospital.

As I read this, the Mike Moustakas I watched on television began that slow, often non-existent evolution into a real person in my mind.

It’s hard to explain sometimes. As fans, we watch, we analyze, and we critique, which is part of what makes sports so unique.

But it’s easy to forget, as we pummel players with bad numbers and anecdotes, that these are human beings, playing out their lives in front of a sea of people.

As I continued to read the article, my heart sank at my complete lack of perspective. Not just in the matters of his mothers sickness, but even of his struggles as a player.

I played baseball from the age of five until I was a sophomore in college. Over those years, my own mom struggled to understand how to deal with me when I struggled.

That thought brought me to the three and a half years I spent destroying Moustakas for his struggles in between the lines, and made my heart hurt.

As he struggled to pull himself up to even just mediocrity, his mom watched, and supported him, as she watched her son fight to keep his career alive.

Which makes Moustakas resurgence on the baseball field even sweeter, and all the more timely.

Next: What was a sign of things to come

Former Royals Melky Cabrera watches as Mike Moustakas’ (not pictured) first career opposite field home run goes over the left field fence on Opening Day. Mandatory Credit: Denny Medley-USA TODAY Sports

“What was most impressive about that was that it was an opposite field home run,” Bruce Chen said, after Moustakas’ Opening Day home run. “If he keeps hitting the ball to the opposite field, he’s going to make this team a lot better.”

It seemed that Opening Day 2015 came quick enough that Kansas City Royals fans were still catching their breath from the whirlwind of the 2014 season.

After the 2014 American League Champions flag was raised out above the Royals Hall of Fame in left field, Mike Moustakas trotted out to third base for his fourth consecutive opening day start for Kansas City.

Moustakas represented all that was on the Royals shoulders in 2015.

Both Moustakas and the Royals had experienced the depths of failure at the Major League level, only to find themselves on the top of the world for a few short weeks in October.

They also rode into April with the lofty expectations of being defending AL Champs, and an unwavering amount of doubters among the baseball world.

Each were looking to establish October of 2014, not as a fluke, but as what was to come.

Both did so rather swiftly.

The Royals cruised to a 10-1 victory over Jeff Samardzija and heavily-hyped White Sox, while Mike Moustakas went 2-3 with a home run in his first career start out of the two-hole.

In what was to become a vital part of his breakout season, Moustakas’ home run was to left field, the first opposite field homer of his career.

Moustakas left April hitting .356, while OPSing at a .942 clip, the second highest total for a month in his career.

Two and a half months later, Moustakas was facing Aroldis Chapman in the All-Star Game.

Fast forward another two months, and Moustakas was setting a Royals record with nine-RBI in one game, behind a grand slam and a three-run home run.

This was also the day that Moustakas opened up to Rosenthal about his mother’s passing.

Behind a vastly improved ability to hit the ball the other way, Moustakas heads into the playoffs as one of the Royals best players.

Moustakas 22 home runs are in a tie for the team lead, while his 3.5 fWAR is second to only Lorenzo Cain.

Moustakas comes in just behind Lorenzo Cain, Kendrys Morales, and Eric Hosmer in nearly every slash category, including OPS and OPS+, despite having a .289 BABIP that is 31 points lower than the next lowest of the three.

He has set career highs in every slash category, as well as hits, home runs, runs, RBI, OPS+, ISO, and wOBA.

Mike Moustakas’ career has done a complete 180.

Next: What lies ahead for Moustakas?

Mike Moustakas endured three and a half years of failure, only to become a postseason hero in a city weighed down by 25 years of failure. Mandatory Credit: Peter G. Aiken-USA TODAY Sports

“The first days after, I left her a ticket,” Mike told Vahe Gregorian of the Kansas City Star “I knew this would be her first stop. To come see me.”

Major League Baseball has seen its fair share of turnaround stories, but Moustakas’ is unprecedented.

Jose Bautista and David Ortiz went from complete unknowns to superstars, but neither of them endured near the sample size of failure that Moustakas did.

Josh Hamilton and Alex Gordon went from circumstantial busts to superstars, but even in the midst of their circumstances, still exhibited flashes of the players their respective clubs thought they had drafted.

Mike Moustakas experienced a vastly larger sample size of failure than Gordon and Hamilton, while having dealt with expectations that Bautista and Ortiz never even began to sniff during their ascension to the bigs.

For all intents and purposes, Moustakas was a complete and utter failure as a baseball player, and was given more at-bats to prove that he wasn’t a failure than most Royals fans prior to 2015 would have cared to see.

Yet, here we are, about to watch our Kansas City Royals defend their American League Championship, and Mike Moustakas is as much a reason for this fact as he is a key factor in bringing the Commissioners Trophy back to Kansas City.

In the coming days and, hopefully, the coming weeks, thousands upon thousands of fans will flood Kauffman Stadium and audibly shake it’s very foundations.

A good chunk of these audible calls will undoubtedly be calling out Moustakas, with  low-pitch, thundering “Moose” call that will churn the stomach of those calling and cause the nerves in each fans arms and neck to flinch at the sound.

The atmosphere will absorb the noise and send it flushing into the Kansas City sky above Interstate 70, surely to be heard by any in it’s path.

I’d be willing to bet that one of those souls is wearing a black and red baseball jersey with a big number 8 stitched on the back.

Next: Royals Awards for 2015 Season