Reactions to the Mike Moustakas signing

The Royals signed Mike Moustakas to a one-year, $6.5 million deal, surprising much of the baseball world. Moose can earn $2.2 million in incentives with a $15 million mutual option for 2019 that has a $1 million buyout. How did the baseball world react to this stunning development?

Sam Mellinger at the Kansas City Star writes about Moose’s frustrating off-season.

A week earlier, Royals officials all but dismissed the possibility. Moustakas turned down a so-called qualifying offer worth $17.4 million. Early in the offseason, according to league sources, he and his agent Scott Boras turned down a three-year deal from the Angels worth around $45 million.

In most offseasons, a man with his track record — franchise home run record, playoff success, world champion, good defender, terrific teammate — could’ve signed for $60 million. Maybe more. This wasn’t most offseasons, and after Moustakas turned down the Angels the bigger offers never came. The Yankees reached out about a short-term deal, but those talks didn’t go far.

Rustin Dodd at The Athletic writes that Moustakas kind of fell into Dayton Moore’s lap.

The Royals did not plan this offseason. Nobody could account for what happened to Moustakas. Yet all winter, general manager Dayton Moore did not wish to close the book on this class of free agents. He pursued Eric Hosmer to the end, losing out to the San Diego Padres when ownership balked at the price. Club officials kept weekly tabs on Lorenzo Cain, walking away when he landed an $80 million deal from the Brewers.

The Royals did not wish to overspend with their pitching staff full of question marks. But they did see value in their homegrown players. When the bottom fell out of Moustakas’ free-agent market, Moore sensed a bargain.

Jeff Sullivan at Fangraphs writes about how this could have happened.

Moustakas is a Scott Boras client. A big factor, I believe, is that the right market just didn’t exist. A certain amount of that is just bad luck. No one can perfectly forecast how an offseason is going to play out. Yet it’s also Boras’ job to come up with the best forecast possible. So I think another factor was relatively poor representation. I think Boras generally deserves a lot of credit, and, clearly, he’s developed a strong reputation for finding money for his players. But in this case — in this particular case — it appears Boras misled Moustakas on what would be reasonably possible.

Carson Cistulli at Fangraphs thinks the Royals are getting tremendous value.

What all this information suggests is that Mike Moustakas probably should — to the extent that anyone should — be earning something just shy of $20 million in 2018. He won’t be, though. He’ll be earning probably $6.5 million, as noted above.

Craig Brown at Baseball Prospectus Kansas City doesn’t think this will hurt the rebuild.

I’ll continue to cling to the idea this is still a team in transition, but another one-year signing doesn’t delay the rebuilding process in the least. You can bemoan about not playing “the youth” all you like, but that doesn’t change one important fact which is there’s simply not much talent in the upper reaches of the farm system. There may be a steady player or two yet to be uncovered, but there’s certainly not a transformative, impact talent that is necessary to elevate this team back into postseason conversation in the near future. Dayton Moore loathes the idea of tanking more than anything (except apparently, porn) and while he faces a major rebuild that will likely take four to five years, he’s still determined to wring every win he can out of his organization. Maybe that’s the wrong play, but there’s absolutely no guarantee losing today will mean winning tomorrow.

The baseball world is amazed at how little money Moustakas signed for.

Craig Calcaterra at NBC Sports thinks this means free agency is broken.

Every single one of those teams’ decisions not to pursue Mike Moustakas, in a vacuum, is defensible and even reasonable. That the Royals were able to get him so cheaply is totally logical if you take it all on a step-by-step basis given the prevalent conditions in the market.

Those conditions are a function of a broken system, however. A system which exists because the Major League Baseball Players’ Association negotiated a series of Collective Bargaining Agreements that have harmed its membership. A system for which now Mike Moustakas is the most prominent poster boy and greatest financial casualty.

But does this make the team a contender?

What does this mean for Cheslor Cuthbert?

His teammates were happy.

And fans were pretty pleased.

And Scott Boras is taking a bit of a hit to his reputation.