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The Yoán Moncada Era on the South Side?
It might have just come to a sudden, surprising end.
Indeed, White Sox fans have learned by now that injuries to any member of the last rebuilding project’s core shouldn’t come as a surprise. That’s not these players’ faults, but it has been their defining feature.
Why didn’t Rick Hahn’s rebuild reach its expected heights? There’s more than one reason, but consistent injuries that sidelined the likes of Moncada, Eloy Jiménez, Luis Robert Jr., Tim Anderson, Michael Kopech and Yasmani Grandal for weeks and months at a time have a place at the tippy top of the list.
And now, with a new rebuild underway and the 2024 edition of this White Sox team expected to do little in the win-loss department, the same story continues.
Moncada is the latest victim of a shockingly condensed rash of early-season injuries, joining Jiménez and Robert on the injured list Wednesday with a strained left adductor. Different, though, is that Moncada is expected to miss a very long time, three to six months. We’ll have to wait to learn when, exactly, Moncada will be healthy enough to return to the field, but should his absence extend to the upper extreme of that window, it would knock him out for the remainder of the season.
Given an expensive team option on Moncada’s contract for 2025, Tuesday night’s game in Cleveland, in which he collapsed in a heap and writhed on the ground in severe-looking pain just shy of first base, could be the last we see of him in a White Sox uniform.
Of course, this wasn’t how that Moncada Era was supposed to go.
He was the first of the hyped prospects Hahn acquired in rebuild-jumpstarting trades to reach the major leagues, doing so in July 2017, when foul balls and walks earned huge cheers from White Sox fans. This was after all, the former No. 1 prospect in all of baseball, and though he might have just been one piece of a projected lineup that would terrorize opposing pitching for years to come, he was anticipated to be among the most important.
Moncada had a miserable 2018, followed it up with a breakout 2019 that earned him a big-money contract and spent the next five years battling one injury after another. Some were visibly devastating, like the aftereffects of a COVID-19 infection in 2020 and last year’s season-long back issue. Some were of the normal baseball variety, but they hampered what was supposed to be a consistent producer, meaning White Sox fans only saw the player that was promised in spurts.
This year was, again, supposed to be different.
“The way I’m preparing myself for this coming season is to play 202 games,” Moncada said, with intended hyperbole, through team interpreter Billy Russo in January. “I want to be healthy. I want to be on the field every day.
“I think god has saved something good for me. Hopefully, we are going to see that. Hopefully, I’ll be able to be healthy and really show and really display all I can do on the field.”
He made it 11 games.
None of that is meant to rip the player, who was a frequent flashpoint for a frustrated fan base throughout the last half decade. He was unfairly saddled with jeers for little more than the way he moved his body or the expression on his face, targeted by the uninformed looking for scapegoats on an underachieving team.
Those closer to the man, however, described the opposite.
“The one thing I like about him — one of the things I like about him, because I like a lot of things about him, and I think he’s a wonderful person, I really do — is that he’s a team guy,” manager Pedro Grifol told CHGO in February. “And that might be hard for people to see, but he truly wants to win. He wants to win, he wants to be a big part of this thing.
“I’m going to be pressing on him pretty hard, because I know the ability he’s got and the impact he can make on this team and this whole organization.”
In actuality, for someone whose White Sox tenure will be remembered for his failings to stay on the field – even that’s an overstatement; he played in more than 87 percent of his team’s games from 2018 to 2021 before playing in only 60 percent of them in 2022 and 2023 – Moncada made a habit of playing through these injuries. Former manager Rick Renteria fanning him off with a towel after a sprint around the bases in 2020 is a lasting image. So, too, were these comments from June 2021:
“The team needs me. My teammates need me,” Moncada said, describing playing through his then-latest affliction. “I know that even though I’m not feeling good, the easy response would be, ‘I don’t want to play.’ But no, I want to play, I want to help this team, I want to help my teammates to win games. And that’s why I have to find a way to get through this.
“I have to keep grinding and doing the best that I can to help this team, no matter what, if I’m feeling 100 percent or not. But I know that even though I’m not 100 percent, I can still help this team do better and to win games.”
But whether healthy or not, productive or not, this season might have been Moncada’s last on the South Side anyway. Chris Getz’s organizational makeover might not make one-year, $25 million investments sensible as soon as 2025. If anything, the White Sox showed a preference for spending small this past offseason. We’ll see, after this supposed season of learning, whether that continues into next winter or not.
This injury, though, seemingly makes the decision on Moncada an easy one. Even if he returns before season’s end, he will not have done anywhere near enough to make that sort of investment a logical one.
Until we see what the future holds, this injury and the months long absence that comes with it stands as just the latest blow of negativity to a White Sox team that was hoping for a different-looking 2024 after the massive disappointment of 2023’s 101-loss finish.
Grifol has seen the Nos. 2, 3 and 4 hitters ripped from his lineup in the span of a little more than a week. The season is just 11 games old, but there’s been nothing but injuries and a near complete lack of offense, even though the White Sox scored seven runs in a win the night Moncada went down.
Jiménez is expected back relatively soon from his own adductor injury, but Robert’s estimated recovery from a strained hip flexor is reportedly anticipated to last six to eight weeks, with one national report saying the team privately believes it could last much longer. That means the White Sox will be without Robert and Moncada for months, a devastating blow to the lineup, even under circumstances in which the team wasn’t struggling mightily to push runs across the plate.
Again, these players have been injured so many times over the last several years that frustrated fans have almost come to expect this sort of thing. But even the most jaded wouldn’t have predicted all this in such a short span of time at the very outset of the season.
A season that could already be over, potentially, for Moncada.
If that’s the case, it seems there is a good chance his time on the South Side could be over, too.
“I would love to stay with the White Sox if they want me here, but I don’t know,” he said in January. “I’m very thankful for the White Sox, for the opportunity they have given me after I was traded from the Red Sox. They’ve been treating me very well.
“I like the organization. I like the city. I like the fans. I would like to stay here.”
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