Former KC Royals All-Star and World Series champ to end career where it all began

The Kansas City Royals made big news just hours before taking the field for their March 3 Cactus League game against the Texas Rangers. No, they didn't reveal who will begin the 2025 season in left field or who will complete their starting rotation. Nor did they unveil any spring camp roster cuts. Instead, the Royals announced something entirely different.

The Moose is coming home.

As reported by several media outlets and confirmed by MLB.com KC beat writer Anne Rogers, Mike Moustakas — a long-time Royals fan favorite who helped propel the club to two straight World Series and the 2015 title — is retiring. He'll return to Kauffman Stadium on May 31 for a day in his honor.

And he'll bow out of the majors just the way he broke in during the 2011 season — as a Royal. The club will give Moustakas a one-day contract (not an official deal, of course), so he'll retire with the team with which he spent most of his 13-year big league career.

Mike Moustakas deserves to retire as a member of the KC Royals

That Moustakas will leave the game as a Royal makes perfect sense. For the better part of eight seasons, he gave the club a robust blend of power, decent defense, and fiery leadership. A two-time All-Star while playing for Kansas City (he later nailed down another All-Star berth with the Milwaukee Brewers), Moose hammered 139 of his 215 career home runs as a Royal. And the 38 homers he clubbed in 2017 broke the team single-season record set by Steve Balboni 32 seasons before.

Moustakas' record didn't last long — Jorge Soler shattered it with 48 in 2019 and Salvador Perez tied Soler in 2021 — but his Kansas City legacy will. Playing 934 games for the Royals, he added 44 RBI, 184 doubles, and a .251/.306/.430 line to those 139 homers. He also won the AL Comeback Player of the Year Award in 2017.

Moustakas spent almost all of his KC time at third base, a position that lost a good bit of its stability after the Royals dealt him to Milwaukee in the 2018 trade deadline deal that netted them Jorge López and Brett Phillips. That was after Moustakas returned to the Royals after unsuccessfully testing the free-agent market during the 2017-2018 offseason.

Mike Moustakas enjoyed limited success after leaving KC

Moose's 2018 return to Kansas City from free agency was excellent. He broke Balboni's record and secured his second All-Star selection that season, and slashed .272/.314/.521. And he'd hit 20 homers and driven in 62 runs when the Royals shipped him off to Milwaukee the following season.

He enjoyed two productive seasons with the Brewers — after the trade, he hit eight down-the-stretch homers to help them win the NL Central, then added 35 more and made the National League All-Star team 2019.

Unfortunately, the rest of Moustakas' career wasn't good. After the 2019 campaign, he signed a big four-season, $64 million free agent contract with the Cincinnati Reds, a deal that rendered his ever playing for the Royals unlikely. Sadly, though — and after an injury-riddled stay in Cincinnati during which he hit only .216 with 21 homers — Moustakas found himself released before spring training began in 2023.

He hit 12 homers with 48 RBI and a .247 average across stops with the Colorado Rockies and Chicago White Sox in 2023, then signed a minor league deal with the Chicago White Sox for 2024 but was released before the season began. He never played in the majors or minors again.

Now, Moustakas will close out a chapter of his baseball life when the Royals honor him at The K on May 31. Look for his selection to the club's Hall of Fame as soon as he becomes eligible.