MAJOR BLOGS - www.majorblogs.net - Kansas City Royals general manager Dayton Moore spoke about family and baseball, and knowing the difference between the two yesterday morning at the Baseball Chapel Breakfast.

"God is not impressed with your stats here on Earth," Moore told the crowd of 200 minor league executives and front office staffers gathered in the Las Vegas Convention Center meeting room. He shared his decision to leave the Atlanta Braves organization to come to Kansas City, and the challenges of taking over a baseball club that has not had a winning tradition.

"The hardest thing is to lead yourself," Moore said of making wise choices in the management of a professional baseball club. "You need accountability around you, and to hang with like-minded people around you who encourage you when you get off-track."

Moore said that of his sixteen key positions in the Royals front office, nine of them had been filled with people who were from world-champion teams, but who also understood that baseball is just a part of the puzzle. Moore himself came to that realization when his wife confronted him.

"'You guys are in a cult, she said," Moore related to the room. She told him that the obsessions with building the team and reacting to the media, and worrying about what the public thought of all of that was all-consuming for a lot of people in baseball.

"Do not miss birthdays and special events," Moore reminded the executives, but framed this section of his talk with the sobering reminder: "Your team isn't home."

The Baseball Chapel is a program that ministers to the spirtual needs, and the practical daily living challenges that everyone in the game of baseball, from the field to the front office, face. Their ministry covers both Major and Minor League Baseball, across North America where the game is played, and also in leagues in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Japan.

The breakfast is conducted annually at the MLB Baseball Winter Meetings to increase awareness of the work of the Baseball Chapel and to provide the executives gathered at the meeting focus and perspective on the big picture in which the game of baseball is played.