The Royals cannot trust Adalberto Mondesi.
This is an awful place to be. This is not what either side wants.
The Royals cannot trust one of the three players they have planned the next two to four seasons around.
This season, Mondesi has played in 10 games, finished seven, and gone to the Injured List three times. He’s averaged 88 games per season going back to 2015. The most he’s ever played in one year is 125, and that was A-ball. He was 17.
The problem with Mondesi is not talent. Well, actually, maybe the problem is talent, but not in the way it is for most:
If Mondesi wasn’t this talented, the Royals would not have a problem with his absence. Heck, if he was merely a nice player, and not a potentially transcendent one, the team would rest easier.
Mondesi hit two doubles on Sunday, scored twice and once again made playing big-league shortstop look like performance art. Then he left in the seventh, Royals manager Mike Matheny did not have much information afterward, and the next morning the team put Mondesi on the Injured List. Again.
He is the Royals’ best player when he’s healthy, but he’s now rarely healthy.
He can really play, as scouts might say, at least when he can play.
This time it’s his left oblique, which is not the same oblique as before, the one that kept him out for seven weeks. If you made this story up, people would roll their eyes. Nice try, they’d tell you.
When the Royals’ front office and coaches planned The Process 2.0, they envisioned Salvador Perez, Bobby Witt Jr., and Mondesi as everyday, high-ceiling, game-changing talents. Surround them with enough support — Andrew Benintendi, Whit Merrifield, Hunter Dozier and others — and a deep crop of young pitching, and you’ve got yourself a contender.
Perez is in the best stretch of his terrific career, Witt Jr. is on a homer binge and will likely be promoted soon to Class AAA, and Mondesi is injured. Again.
Baseball cannot be predicted. That’s why a lot of us love the sport. But parts of Mondesi’s career so far read like fiction.
He debuted in July 2016 and has since played in 318 big-league games.
Merrifield, by way of example, debuted in May 2016 and has played in 676 games.
In the last four seasons, Mondesi has been on the injured list with right shoulder impingement, a right groin injury, a left-shoulder subluxation, a right oblique strain, a strained hamstring, and now a left oblique strain.
Four seasons, six times on the IL.
If this oblique injury keeps him out as long as the last oblique injury, Mondesi will play his 11th game in the Royals’ 115th game of the season.
Theories have abounded: Perhaps he needs to know the difference between an injury and something to play through, or he needs more regular maintenance work, or he’ll figure it out once he hits arbitration. Maybe he needs to better pick his spots to go all-out.
Maybe switching positions would help, and the club has had informal discussions about this, but is that really a solution? Playing centerfield might be even harder on his body, and any other position significantly lowers his value.
These are all theories, and athletes change so rapidly. But the Royals need to know with as much certainty as possible whether this is a problem with his preparation, his ability to play through pain, a body that is simply not built for the brutality of a 162-game season, or the worst luck in professional sports.
Preparation would be the easiest fix. Royals head trainer Nick Kenney has a strong reputation in the business, and Mondesi should be extraordinarily motivated to do what it takes.
This is complicated and demands nuance, and many Royals fans understandably have no interest in complicated or nuance.
But the nuance is telling. The Royals waited five days to put Mondesi on the IL with the hamstring ailment, which indicates uncertainty about the injury — the team and/or Mondesi believed it would heal quickly, but then that absence stretched beyond two weeks.
When he returned, it wasn’t after a minor-league rehab stint. Not even for a day. He batted fifth against the Detroit Tigers in his first game back, homering in his first plate appearance. Who does that? He is not normal.
The Royals gave Mondesi the next day off. Then he homered and walked on Friday, rested Saturday, and we all saw what happened on Sunday. Not for nothing: The Royals beat the Red Sox in each of Mondesi’s games.
They are 6-4 with him in the lineup and 26-34 without. You can call that a small sample size, which is sort of the point.
Mondesi is not the first athlete to struggle with health. But there aren’t many with his combination of supernatural ability and this many problems simply staying on the field.
He turns 26 next month, which is young enough that the story of his career is still to be written, but old enough that his reputation is well-earned.
Mondesi has become a polarizing figure in Kansas City, which isn’t good for anyone. There are Royals fans who want him gone just to streamline things and eliminate the uncertainty.
There are Royals fans who drool at his .361/.378/.833 slash line in limited time this season — as well as .376/.424/.706 in the last 22 games of 2020, when he may have been the best player in baseball — and see the team’s highest-ceiling player since Carlos Beltran.
The truth is a little of both:
Mondesi is far too talented to give up on, and far too unreliable to count on.
That’s an enormous challenge. That’s the challenge for the Royals and Mondesi.
