Royals: All in

“I like good baseball.”

— Dayton Moore

All season long, people — present company included — have assumed that the Kansas City Royals would be sellers this year. Well, it just stands to reason. When the season ends, the core of this Royals team (Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Lorenzo Cain and Alcides Escobar) will be free agents.

The Royals will not be able to sign all of them. They might not be able sign any of them.

And so: The smart money was on the Royals wheeling and dealing to protect their future. We have seen mess this up again and again, year after year — they have some success and they sit on it, they hold on to players too long, they watch their stars sign elsewhere, they see their once-vibrant minor league system atrophy, and they go into a terrible Philadelphia Phillies sort of nosedive that is all but impossible to escape.

Dayton Moore is a smart guy, and it seemed like he would counter this sort of dystopian future by trading off a few key parts before winter comes.

But, you know what? It’s become entirely clear to me now: He won’t. The Royals are not going to be sellers this year. If anything, they will be (small-time) buyers. And then they will face the future, come what may.

There are three reasons I believe this after talking with Dayton Moore.

1. There is enough parity in the American League to offer postseason hope.

You probably have seen this: In the National League, only the National League Central feels wide open, and no team is within 5 1/2 games of the two Wildcard leaders. The National League has become the league of disparity, with three teams playing great — Washington, Los Angeles and Arizona — and every other team (including the fading Rockies) trying to figure things out.

But in the American League, Ten teams are within 5 1/2 games of the two wild card spots, and both the AL East and Central feel pretty winnable for just about any team. The Astros are the only great team in the American League at the moment, but there are a lot of good teams that can get hot — Dayton Moore believes the Royals to be one of those teams.

There is evidence to suggest that Moore is deluding himself. The Royals are dead last in the American League in runs scored with all of the contributing factors (last in on-base percentage, 14th in slugging, 11th in homers, 14th in doubles) to suggest that last in runs isn’t a fluke. Their pitching staff is a whole lot of meh, aside from veteran Jason Vargas who has been stubbornly awesome and should have a his own section of Vargonauts at every game.*

*Come on: Jason and the Vargonauts? How has this not become a thing?

But, let’s be honest, the Royals didn’t score a lot of runs when they won back-to-back pennants either, and their rotation was a whole lot of meh (though their bullpen was way better than this one, at least so far). Dayton Moore’s Royals have long played with logic-bashing black magic, and Moore believes that they still have it.

Which leads to the second point.

2. If the Royals DO sneak into the playoffs, even as a wildcard, Moore has complete confidence that they can go to the World Series and win it.

Well, of course he thinks that. The 2014 Royals weren’t a great team. They were down 8–3 to Oakland in the late innings of their wildcard game — and with Jon Lester on the mound for the A’s. Next thing you know, the Royals had obliterated Mike Trout’s Angels and Buck Showalter’s Orioles and they got the seventh game of the World Series before finally being vanquished by Lord Bumgarner.

The 2015 Royals were a better team, but they too were impossibly down against Houston, mostly dead, and next thing you know Eric Hosmer was racing home, stopping New York cold, and the Royals were holding the biggest parade in the Midwest since the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.

So yeah, if Moore can get a ticket — even a standing-room only ticket — to the postseason, he will take his chances.

3. Moore likes good baseball.

That’s the quote from above, and I think it probably gets to the heart of things: Moore has never WANTED to sell. Sure, he’s smart, and he knows the score, and he knows how bleak it might get if the Royals just lose their best four or five players and have to start again.

But as bleak as that might be, it won’t be as bleak as 2006 when he took over the Royals. He saw what it was like when the team had no talent, when the team had no money, when the Kansas City fans were disengaged or disgusted, when the Royals represented baseball’s great punchline. “Nice hat,” the comedian Paul Reiser once said to me when he saw my Royals hat. “Let me ask you, do they TRY to find bad players? Do they see good players and say, ‘No, not for us?”

Moore figures life is too short to voluntarily go back to that. His feeling is that as long as this window is even slightly open, he owes it to the fans, to the players, to ownership and to his own distaste for bad baseball to ride it out, to go for it one more time. There are deeper reasons to keep it together — the Royals are negotiating a new TV deal, for example, and diving head first into rebuilding mode doesn’t help negotiations. Also, Moore has been largely unimpressed with the offers coming his way and is unconvinced that he couldn’t do better with the draft picks should he be unable to sign the players.

But mostly, I think Dayton will go all in because life is short. The Royals’ rise reinvigorated Kansas City, brought baseball back to the center of the heartland, inspired a whole new generation of fans all over. He knows, of course, that some hard monetary realities lie just ahead, and the Royals could find themselves in a deep rebuilding mode, something that would not be a lot of fun for anybody in Kansas City who already endured it once.

But the Royals are playing better, and this team has shocked people before, and Moore figures that it would be a shame to let this last summer go by without trying to win it one more time.