A few weeks after the Royals won the title, Dayton Moore boarded a Southwest flight from Kansas City to Phoenix. He sat next to Gen. Robert B. Brown, the commander at nearby Fort Leavenworth. The two men had gotten to know each other over the years. The general and the general manager talked about leadership. Brown said something that stuck with Moore: “Managers get paid to make sure things are done right. But leaders always do the right thing.”
The conversation resonated as Moore considered the situation with his catcher. In the spring of 2012, the Royals had inked Pérez to a five-year, $7 million extension with three club options. Kansas City officials were always quick to insist that the contract was risky from their perspective, given their limited financial resources and Pérez’s 39-game track record in the majors. Pérez, they were also quick to point out, tore his meniscus only weeks after signing the deal and missed three months.
But the contract still became preposterously team-friendly. The Royals paid Pérez $1.75 million in 2015, the year he made his third-consecutive All-Star team. He got teased by his peers. “A lot of people were talking bad about me,” he says. “Like ‘Why did you sign that?’ ‘You need some food?’” Pérez was due $2 million for 2016. The three option years netted him a total of $14.75 million. “We felt,” Moore says, “he was an underpaid player.” That was not fair, Moore decided.
“That directive by Gen. Brown, to me, reminded me of the importance of doing the right thing for Salvador Pérez,” Moore says. “If you reflect back on our mission statement when we came here to Kansas City, we wanted to build an organization that we would want our own sons to be a part of and play for. So would you want somebody to treat your son like that?”
