We may never know to what degree, if any, Alex Gordon absorbed a so-called “hometown discount” along the way to his once-improbable re-enlistment with the Royals in the deal that was offered on New Years’s Eve to become the exhilarating final exclamation point on their 2015 penchant for the comeback.
“Do my instincts tell me that Alex took less money to come here? Yeah, that’s what my instincts tell me,” general manager Dayton Moore said Wednesday. “But I don’t know that for a fact, and that’s between Alex and his family.”
And we almost certainly will never know how close Gordon came to signing elsewhere before the Royals were able to keep the thrills coming for fans with a four-year, franchise-record $72 million deal that more or less will make him an eternal Royal.