On a Sunday five months ago — a picture-perfect, early fall day at Kauffman Stadium — third baseman Mike Moustakas played what he thought was his last game in a Royals uniform.
He was paraded onto the field for a tribute video, and he was sent into the home dugout for the final time with the roar of Mooooose resonating through the ballpark.
If free agency hadn’t failed him, if the major-league market for third basemen hadn’t crashed, that really might have been the last time he wore a Kansas City ballcap.
But 166 days later, the pomp and circumstance of that meticulously planned farewell behind him, there stood Moustakas on Friday afternoon, his cleats dug into the left-handed batter’s box at Peoria Stadium and a mid-March Arizona breeze rippling through the back of his No.