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

Fired two years ago, the former Kansas City GM deserves some credit for this season.

By Mike Gillespie |
/ John Sleezer/GettyImages
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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.

Dayton Moore defied history when he gave Salvador Pérez a new contract

Lauded for his deft assemblage of Kansas City's 2014 and 2015 World Series teams but maligned and blamed for the disrepair and despair that befell the club for so many subsequent seasons, and fired shortly before the 2022 campaign ended, Moore took a huge chance in 2021 — he gave Pérez the then-franchise record multi-year deal that he now plays under. Only the mega-deal Bobby Witt Jr. signed last February exceeds the four-season, $82-million contract (with a $13.5 million one-year club option on top of that) arrangement Moore and Pérez agreed to.

Moore's bold move was packed with risk. His was a bad club getting worse, the frugal Royals weren't flush with cash, and questions surrounded Perez — just a year after struggling to a career-low .235 average, he missed the entire 2019 season with Tommy John Surgery, and his improved 2020 pandemic-season .333 average was the uncertain product of playing only 37 of the club's 60 games while battling a pesky eye issue.

And a foreboding cloud of multi-year contract disappointments hung over Kauffman Stadium. Gil Meche signed a $55 million deal to pitch five seasons for KC, but shoulder issues plagued him in the third and fourth years and he retired before the fifth, for which he refused to accept guaranteed pay, began. Then, just before the 2017 season began, the club gave Danny Duffy $65 million for five years, but he posted a full-season winning record only once (7-6 in 2019) before twice suffering flexor problems and being dealt to the Dodgers during the deal's final year.

And although his defense never failed, franchise icon Alex Gordon slashed only .237/.320/.366 with a dismal 84 OPS+ over the four-year life of the $72 million contract that ended after the 2019 season.

Kansas City's tortured experience with big, long-term contracts had to weigh on Moore and ownership as they pondered a new deal with Pérez. And adding to the intrigue of it all was the financial magnitude and effective date of the contract— $82 million for four years with a $13.5 million club option for a fifth, with the first year delayed until 2022. The deal closed, then, before Pérez played even a game in 2021, meaning the Royals had to hope without proof that he wasn't in the decline many thought had already arrived.

Risky? Obviously, but...

Salvador Pérez made Dayton Moore look pretty good

To say Moore's gamble on Pérez paid off understates the obvious. Since signing his big contract, Pérez has made three All-Star teams and hit .264 with 121 homers — including the club record-tying 48 he slammed during his remarkable 2021campaign — and 381 RBI. And he's at .261 with 73 homers and 260 RBI over the first three years of the new deal's life.

And this season? Pérez homered 27 times, drove in 104 runs, hit .271, and missed only three of his club's games. Only once in his 13-year career has he collected more home runs or more RBI, only twice has he had a better full-season average, and only once has he played in more games.

Safe to say, then, is that these amazing 2024 Royals wouldn't be where they are without Perez. Say what you will about Moore, but his foresight in securing Pérez's services for several years has certainly paid the dividends he sought.

How this surprising and exciting 2024 season will ultimately end for the Kansas City Royals remains to be seen. But it's a sure bet that Salvador Pérez will have a lot to do with any further success they achieve.

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