MILWAUKEE — Sometime over the next few months, Royals owner David Glass may have to make a decision.

Luke Heimlich is an Oregon State pitcher and convicted child molester who pleaded guilty to abusing his 6-year-old niece when he was 15. He went undrafted in all 40 rounds of the MLB Draft earlier this month. He also has an unlikely public advocate in Royals general manager Dayton Moore, who said he believes the 22-year-old left-hander deserves a second chance.

“The truth of the matter is, I was hoping, as the general manager, that somebody else would draft and sign him,” Moore said last week, in a televised interview with Fox Sports Kansas City. “Maybe I don’t have enough courage.”

In an interview with The Athletic on Monday, Moore confirmed that the club continues to vet Heimlich as it comes to grips with the situation. He declined to comment further, pointing to his previous comments last week.

The Royals are not close to signing Heimlich, nor do they have any framework for a deal in place, according to a source familiar with the situation. Any pact between team and player would likely come at some undetermined time in the future. It would not be soon.

The final decision would rest with ownership, which offers its own uncertainty. The Royals continue to gather information as an organization, Moore said.

Yet as teams across baseball do the same, Moore has emerged as an unlikely public supporter for Heimlich, the college senior at the center of one of the most fraught baseball stories of the last decade.

His public comments began last week, when Fox Sports Kansas City aired a two-part interview with Moore and broadcaster Ryan Lefebvre. The story was fueled over the weekend when Moore confirmed the club’s interest in Heimlich to The Kansas City’s Star’s Vahe Gregorian.

Moore points to the club’s lengthy relationship with Heimlich — team officials and scouts have known him for nearly five years. He points to the fact that the Oregon State baseball program trains at the Royals’ complex in Surprise, Ariz. in the spring. He cites the club’s history of giving “second chances” and said Heimlich has “earned” an opportunity to receive one.

Yet strangely enough, Moore’s most lengthy and formulated comments on the situation came last Tuesday in a televised interview that generated little immediate coverage and little controversy. Sitting inside Kauffman Stadium with Lefebvre, the longtime Royals broadcaster, the conversation shifted away from the franchise’s rebuilding process and to the recent MLB draft. And then Lefebvre asked just one question about Heimlich.

“There’s a really interesting topic being tossed around right now,” Lefebvre said. “There’s a pitcher at Oregon State named Luke Heimlich. As a 14-year-old [Heimlich was 15 when he pleaded guilty], he was I guess convicted because he pleaded guilty to molesting a 6-year-old relative of his.

“From what I’ve read, he’s done everything that the state of Oregon asked him to do, and he continued to pitch. Some think he’s a first-round, second-round type of talent. Somehow, his record became public, and now all 30 teams passed on him in all 40 rounds. I know you care a lot about people, you care a lot about character, and No. 1, what do you know about Luke Heimlich? And No. 2, what is fair and what is unfair about his situation?”

“You know, Ryan, it’s extremely complex,” Moore said, beginning a long response with no follow-up questions.

“We were very interested in Luke last year. And obviously this accusation came out. So we immediately put everything on pause, as we should, to gather facts, gather information. He went out and performed this year. Not only did he achieve athletic excellence, he achieved academic excellence along the way. He went undrafted, all 30 teams. I think teams are still trying to find out more and more information. They’re trying to come to grips with this. This is something that happened in their family. Their family has dealt with this. Their family remains very close today, all parties involved.

“It’s a very complex deal.”

The story initially became public when Heimlich’s status as a sex offender was first reported by The Oregonian newspaper last year. Heimlich’s case was flagged in an open-records request after he failed to update his status in Oregon’s sex-offender registry; in the months after the story was published, he maintained his silence and returned to Oregon State for his senior year.

Prosecutors in Pierce County, Washington, first charged Heimlich with two counts of molestation, ranging from when the victim was 4 to 6 years old, according to court records first obtained by The Oregonian. Heimlich later pleaded guilty to one count of molestation from 2011, when he was 15.

In May, Sports Illustrated and The New York Times published stories in which Heimlich denied the accusation and said he pleaded guilty in order to protect his family from the painful legal proceedings. The mother of the victim — and Heimlich’s former sister-in-law — still believes that Heimlich molested her daughter.

“Even back then, he said he didn’t do it,” the mother told Sports Illustrated’s S.L. Price. “I understand. I get it. But I heard it come out of her mouth. And I know the way she was raised, and what she was allowed to see. There’s just no doubt in my mind that he did what she said he did.”

The Royals are not the first, or only, team to consider signing Heimlich. The Baltimore Orioles nearly signed him last year following the draft, according to Yahoo Sports’ Jeff Passan. Moore, however, is the first executive to speak on behalf of Heimlich and his career.

In his interview with Fox Sports Kansas City, Moore cited his club’s stance against pornography, which was documented earlier this year by The Athletic, as he spoke about the team’s willingness to tackle sensitive issues. In one story, Moore spoke of meeting an inmate at Lansing Correctional Facility who said he had committed rape when he was 15 years old.

“I asked him when he first saw pornography,” Moore said this spring. “He said when he was 12. He felt that that had a major impact.”

The link between pornography and violent crimes, according to academic researchers, is thin, limited to a fraction of the population exposed. Yet in the Fox Sports interview, Moore used the subject as an avenue to segue into an argument for second chances.

“We’re an organization that made a stance against the harmful effects of pornography,” Moore said, “and how it affects our young players and our young people and young minds. We’re very sensitive to these types of things.

“We also believe in giving players second chances. We’ve given some players third and fourth chances.”

Moore used former Royals outfielder Jarrod Dyson as an example of a player who received a second chance because they “believed in his heart.” He said the club would continue to monitor whether Heimlich was worthy of such a chance.

“Do we know the player?” Moore continued. “We do know the player. We do believe in the player and the person, in Luke Heimlich. It’s just more complex than that.

“I didn’t say we were going to sign him,” said Moore. “Do I believe that he has earned an opportunity to play professional baseball? I do, because of his character over the last four or five years, what we know about him, and how he performed. I’m not going to sit here and say he ‘deserves’ it, because I don’t know all the facts.

“I’m not going to sit here and say that I deserve to be a general manager of a baseball team, because I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, mistakes that could have disrupted my career path and put me in a whole different area, and a whole different experience in my life.”

For now, Heimlich is not yet eligible to sign with any major-league team. He is still pitching for Oregon State, which was scheduled to begin the College World Series Championship Series against Arkansas on Monday. In his last start, he allowed three runs in 2 2/3 innings in an 11-6 victory over North Carolina in Omaha, Neb. In his senior season, he is 16-2 with a 2.80 ERA and 154 strikeouts in 125 1/3 innings.

Based on numbers and talent, Heimlich likely would have been drafted somewhere in the first two rounds in early June. His guilty plea for molesting his niece changed the calculus. So the Royals, along with other teams, will continue to gather information on the situation.

In the last week, Moore confirmed the club’s interest and advocated on Heimlich’s behalf. Yet the situation is so fraught, the crime so heinous, that the decision may not be Moore’s in the end. The Glass family has not offered any hints as to what it will decide. Moore, however, has made his thoughts clear.

“I think the player has earned an opportunity to play professional baseball,” Moore said, finishing his interview on Fox Sports Kansas City. “Again, based on what he has—how he has conducted himself since we’ve known him, for four or five years, and how he’s performed on a baseball field. That’s as transparent as I can be. That’s my heart in this situation.”

(Top photo of Moore: Ed Zurga/Getty Images)