On the national stage, it's hard to know how Wednesday's firing of Kansas City Royals team president Dayton Moore registers in the baseball universe. Is it a shock? An occasion to shrug? A collective sense of utter indifference?
On the surface, it can hardly be termed a surprise. Sixteen years into Moore's tenure in Kansas City, the Royals are on pace to reach the upper 90s in losses this season, the fifth full season of the club's current rebuild. Since the end of the 2017 season, the Royals have lost 98 of every 162 games they have played, a rate worse than all but two teams across baseball.
But in Kansas City, Moore's departure from the Royals marks the end of an era -- one that was highlighted by two American League pennants and the 2015 World Series crown, the second title in franchise history.
Those peak seasons from 2013 to 2017 were part of a five-year run in which the Royals won 80 or more games each campaign. The first of those seasons snapped a decade-long drought in Kansas City without a winning season and was just the Royals' second season on the right side of .500 since 1994. Still, those five seasons were the only ones during the Moore era in which the Royals reached as many as 80 wins.
Moore inherited a catastrophe of a baseball operation when he took over the front office in Kansas City in 2006. The team didn't spend, either on the big league roster or in the areas of drafting and development. As someone who lived in Kansas City during those years and grew up following the franchise, I vividly recall how without hope that era felt.
Though the organization's rebuild took more than a half-decade to come together, it was about more than restoring the Royals to competitiveness on the field. It was about restoring the integrity and credibility of a franchise that had once been the model operation in the majors during the days of Cedric Tallis, Joe Burke and John Schuerholz. Bringing back a whiff of that credibility, as much as the pennants and the championship, will be Moore's legacy in Kansas City.
In sabermetric circles, Moore was always a bit of a punching bag for his affinity for traditional approaches to scouting, development and roster building. Initially, he was kind of the anti-Billy Beane in terms of his strategies, even as the age of analytics dawned around baseball.
Eventually, though, he evolved. While the Royals would never be confused with the Rays, Astros or Dodgers in terms of a numbers-based approach, Kansas City did modernize their processes. Maybe not to the extent some would like, but there was a concerted effort to adapt. As recently as the past couple of years, the Royals overhauled their development methods with young hitters, and it helped to accelerate the development of young hitters like Bobby Witt Jr., Nick Pratto, Vinnie Pasquantino and MJ Melendez, all of whom reached the majors this season.
Still, Moore is not and never will be a numbers guy. He is about people and values and integrity and traditional methods -- and he instilled his beliefs all through the organization he leaves behind. A native of the Midwest who rooted for the Royals as a young man, Moore was an ideal fit in the Kansas City community, as well as the baseball franchise. I admire him as much as I admire anyone in baseball.
Yet Moore would be the first to tell you that MLB is about winning games. And the Royals just haven't won enough of them. While this year's team is laden with rookie hitters, the current rebuild was supposed to be constructed on the backs of young starting pitching, which Moore has always said is the currency of baseball.
Despite this philosophy, the Royals of recent vintage have never been particularly adept at turning young pitchers to big league producers, especially starters. The outstanding teams in 2014 and 2015 featured historically great relief pitching and above-average starters largely acquired from other teams, like James Shields, Edinson Volquez and Johnny Cueto.
During the Moore era, the franchise leader in pitching bWAR is Zack Greinke, who was drafted and developed during Allard Beard's tenure in Kansas City, and whom Moore traded as one of the foundational transactions for the pennant teams. Danny Duffy, a Moore success story, ranks second, but that's about it.
Ironically, third-year starter Brady Singer has enjoyed a breakout season in 2022, going 9-4 with a 3.07 ERA and 132 ERA+ through Tuesday. But fellow young starters, like Daniel Lynch, Kris Bubic and Jackson Kowar, have struggled to become big league producers. If those and the other young pitchers in the organization fail, so too will this current Royals rebuild.
This is where we have to remember the background of Royals owner John Sherman, who inherited Moore when he acquired the franchise in 2019. Before that, Sherman was a minority owner in Cleveland, another smaller market that has contended regularly (often with low payrolls, such as this season) with advanced programs of scouting and development on the pitching side that have churned out a steady stream of big league hurlers.
Could the Royals have forged a new path along those lines under Moore? Maybe. (If that's what they're in search of, though, Sherman didn't exactly clear the deck by promoting J.J. Picollo to replace Moore. Picollo has worked with and under Moore for decades.)
Still, some kind of new voice with some sway needs to be added in Kansas City, and maybe this move creates the space for that. Someone could be added who has some insight in developing a pitching lab along the lines of baseball's more cutting edge franchises (such as the Rays), someone with a proven track record of turning arm talent into productive big league production.
As for Moore, his mark on Kansas City will endure. In this age, where so often baseball executives talk in corporate speak as if they are running Wall Street firms and baseball players are referred to as "assets" or "pieces," Moore has always been there to remind us about the human side of the game. He'll still be around somewhere in baseball.
Fans in Kansas City should always remember what Moore accomplished in bringing hope back to a fan base that had little to none of it when he arrived. But they should also be excited about this new chapter, with a roster full of young talent and -- with the right decisions going forward -- some new perspectives about how to turn that collection of talent into the Royals' next winning team.