Kansas City Royals: Can Mike Moustakas say “Bye Bye” to Balboni?

Mike Moustakas has a chance to break Steve Balboni’s 31-year-old single-season home run record for the Kansas City Royals.

At the one-third point of the season, Kansas City Royals third baseman Mike Moustakas has 14 home runs. His career high is 22. He also has the highest slugging percentage of his career. It appears as if Moustakas is selling out for power, which is the “in” thing in baseball these days. He’s pulling the ball more often than he has over the last two years and hitting the ball in the air more often than he has since 2012.

With 14 big flies at the one-third point of the season, Moustakas is “on pace for” 42 home runs. I put “on pace for” in parenthesis because it’s really not the best way to project a player going forward. It’s an easy way to do it, but a more accurate projection would be to take what Moustakas has already done and add what he’s projected to do. In his case, it would be his current 14 home runs plus his projected 18 more home runs (per the FanGraphs Depth Charts). A more realistic expectation for Moustakas is 32 home runs.

On any other MLB team, 32 home runs wouldn’t mean much, but the Kansas City Royals aren’t just any other MLB team when it comes to home runs. If Moustakas hits 32 home runs this year, he will be tied for seventh with Bo Jackson on the Royals’ single-season home run list. The Royals have been a franchise since 1969 and have had just six players hit 32 or more home runs in a season. In that same time period, the Atlanta Braves have had 39 seasons with a player hitting 32 or more home runs.

If Moustakas can beat his projection, he’ll be within striking distance of the all-time single-season team leader in home runs. That would be the iconic Royals slugger from the mid-1980s, Steve “Bye Bye” Balboni. The big first baseman with the 1980s mustache set the team record for home runs in a season in 1985, when he launched 36 long balls.

Balboni’s 36 taters in 1985 is a laughably low total for a franchise leader. The next-lowest single-season home run leader for a franchise is Carlos Beltran, who hit 41 for the 2006 New York Mets. Right above Beltran is Gary Sheffield, who set the Marlins’ record of 42 in 1996. Every other team is at 46 or higher, including four teams with single-season leaders at 60 or more (Yankees, Cubs, Cardinals, and Giants).

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Steve Balboni was originally drafted by the New York Yankees in the 2^nd round of the 1978 draft. He didn’t hit much in his first year, but started hitting long balls with regularity in his second season when he had 26 for the Class-A Fort Lauderdale Yankees. In five minor league seasons from 1979 to 1983, Balboni hit 152 home runs, including a combined 59 dingers in 167 games during his last two seasons in Triple-A. Despite these feats of strength, Balboni never became a regular with the Yankees. Some kid named Don Mattingly passed him on the depth chart in 1983 on his way to becoming the team’s regular first baseman and face of the franchise for the next dozen years.

Prior to the 1984 season, the Yankees traded Balboni and Roger Erickson to the Kansas City Royals for Mike Armstrong and Duane Dewey. Balboni would immediately give the Royals a home run threat like they’d rarely seen before. He led the team in home runs that year with 28 in 126 games. It was the second-most home runs a Royal had ever hit in a season.

Balboni took his homer-hitting game up a notch in 1985, when he hit 36 four-baggers and set the team record that still stands today. He continued to hit home runs over the rest of his Royals career, but a low on-base percentage, struggles on defense, and sloth-like speed on the bases hurt his overall value as a player. Despite hitting 119 home runs in 556 games in parts of five seasons for the Royals, Balboni provided just one win above replacement to the team, according to Baseball-Reference. He still holds the single-season home run record and remains a fan favorite.

Balboni’s record has been challenged on a few occasions. Two years after “Bye Bye” set the record at 36, Danny Tartubull challenged it when he hit 34 in 1987. That was the crazy “year of the home run” that saw an unexplainable surge in round-trippers around baseball ( it was the ball ). Twenty-six players hit 30 or more home runs in 1987 after just 13 hit that mark the previous year. In 1988, just five players would hit 30 or more home runs.

Not long after Tartabull came up two homers short of Balboni, the incredibly talented Bo Jackson hit 32 homers in 1989. This was at the right at the start of the “Bo Knows” days when Jackson was playing baseball and football. He came up short of Balboni’s record in the 1989 season in part because he missed a couple weeks with a pulled quad that landed him on the DL not long after he hit an epic leadoff home run in the 1989 All-Star game.

Even with the missed time due to injury, Jackson had 31 home runs through the Royals’ first 140 games in 1989. He was “on pace for” 36, but only hit one in the last few weeks of the season. He closed out the year by hitting .240/.305/.360 in his final 20 games.

Perhaps he was thinking about the football season that had just started. Two weeks after the baseball season ended, Jackson was in the Los Angeles Raiders lineup rushing 11 times for 85 yards. He finished that year with 950 yards on 173 carries, an average of 5.5 yards per carry. This made him the most unstoppable player in Tecmo Bowl history.

If not for the late start to the 1995 season following the 1994 strike, there’s a good chance Gary Gaetti would now be the Royals’ single-season home run record holder. The 1995 season didn’t start until April 26 and was shortened to 144 games. Gaetti hit 35 home runs, just one short of the Balboni’s record. Had the team played another 18 games to make a full 162-game season, Gaetti almost surely would have hit a couple more home runs.

Dean Palmer had a good run at Balboni’s record during the 1998 season. He had 17 home runs at the All-Star break and made the All-Star team for the only time in his career. He continued to hit in the second half and reached 33 home runs with 15 games left. He still needed three to tie and four to set the team record. Instead, he could manage just one more home run and finished with 34.

The last time any Royal came close to Balboni’s record was 17 years ago. At the height of the home run era, Jermaine Dye hit 22 long balls in the first half of the 2000 season and made the All-Star team for the first time in his career. He kept launching long balls and reached 32 home runs on September 1. The Royals had 28 games left and Dye needed four homers to tie Balboni. At this point of the season, he’d hit 30 doubles and 32 home runs. In his final 28 games, he hit 11 doubles and just one home run. He finished with 33 and Balboni’s record lived for another year.

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Since Dye’s 2000 season, no Royal has seriously challenged Balboni’s record. In fact, only one Royals player in the last 16 years has even hit 30 home runs. That was Kendrys Morales last year. Mike Moustakas is off to a good start. If he keeps hitting homers at the same rate he has so far this year, he’ll finish with around 42 homers. If he hits at them at his projected rate, he’ll finish with around 32 homers. If he’s somewhere in between, he could make it very interesting in September.