How Dayton Moore helped the 2024 KC Royals make the MLB Playoffs

It's been over two years since the Kansas City Royals fired general manager Dayton Moore, but it's hard to deny that he deserves some credit for the team's success this season.

This time last year, the Royals were three days removed from closing their miserable 2023 season with a victory over the New York Yankees. It was a face-saving win of sorts, enabling the Royals to share with the 2005 team, rather than owning it for themselves, the shame of posting the franchise's worst season ever.

Beaten down by the sting and stigma of losing 106 times, the players drifted home for the long winter with at least some hope that 2024 would somehow be better.

A year later, the pain of the wrecked 2023 campaign is gone, washed away by the season-long success of the astonishing 2024 Royals. Not content to merely improve a bit, they shockingly snatched a spot in the MLB Playoffs, then swept the Baltimore Orioles in the AL Wild Card Series to storm their way into the AL Division Series, where they'll face old postseason nemesis New York beginning Saturday.

Salvador Pérez has meant a lot to the KC Royals this season

While some present Royals have played postseason baseball, only one — team captain and pulse Salvador Pérez — has done so as a Royal. Pérez was a leader of the 2015 Royals who wiped away another terrible memory by disposing of the Mets in the World Series just a season after losing to the 2014 Fall Classic in an epic seven-game war with San Francisco.

Much of what Kansas City has accomplished this year is due in no small part to Pérez. A major player even at 34, an age too often deemed old for the primary catcher he still is, he put in one of the finest regular season performances of his career.

But more on that in a moment; first, let's consider Dayton Moore and what part he played in this season's KC success.