The Royals’ continuing challenge with Adalberto Mondesi: can sitting one out be enough?
Adalberto Mondesi stinks right now. We can say that out loud, right? We know it. He knows it. He knows we know it, and what’s worse than all of that is that he knows the other pitchers know it.
This is obvious to all. You can see it in statistics: He has 42 strikeouts, three walks, just two RBIs.
You can see it in his plate appearances: He is often lost, guessing, swinging at pitches outside the zone and taking fastballs over the plate for strike three.
You can even hear it on the broadcasts, like this line from Ryan Lefebvre when Mondesi was hitting in the eighth inning Monday: “At some point, he’s going to have to get a big hit for some confidence, and this wouldn’t be a bad spot.”
Mondesi then struck out, on a changeup that split the plate.
Now, you can see it in the lineup: Mondesi did not start Tuesday, the first time all season he hasn’t been in the lineup for the first pitch.
Mondesi is not the first talented baseball player to stink. Baseball is hard. Mike Trout made 342 outs last year, 120 by strikeout. He won MVP.
The Royals are not the first team to see someone they believe in their core to be a future star stink. Right now, the Royals and Mondesi are engaged in the same dance that struggling talents and the teams that need them have practiced for decades.
Mondesi is hitting .186 with a .211 on-base and .240 slugging percentage. He is at or near the bottom of most statistics.
That might qualify as unplayable for some, but the Royals have seen success, real success, from him as recently as two years ago, when Mondesi hit .276/.306/.498 with 30 extra-base hits in half a season.
The gap between these versions of a man with objectively elite physical gifts is stunning, and the path from here will determine whether he’s remembered for what he accomplished in baseball or for what he was supposed to accomplish.
“It’s just a tough moment right now,” Mondesi said.
“We try to almost insulate him from a lot of the results-oriented thought processes,” manager Mike Matheny said.
This is the way it goes. The player works, and the team encourages. Mondesi takes extra looks from the slider machine; Matheny and his assistants encourage him to stay positive and highlight other ways he can help the team.
Men don’t often reach the major leagues without powering through doubt. Baseball is the ultimate game of failure, which is why those who do it for a living at the highest level prioritize positivity. Mondesi has had success. He’ll have it again. He has to believe that.
Same with the Royals. They have too much invested. They won a bidding war for his signature nine years ago, and on that day, you should’ve seen the scouts. They were elated. One said they’d just signed their most talented prospect, and this was when the Royals had the game’s best farm system. They’ve seen it. They’ve felt it. They have to believe it will come back.
“I work to get better every day, but I just need it to happen in the game,” Mondesi said.
“I’m watching this guy walk through that clubhouse and I swear each day I see him and his demeanor and it’s like, ‘Today’s the day,’” Matheny said.
But, at the moment, Mondesi stinks. He’s stalled. He’s stuck in the mud, enough that discussions about whether to give him a break — a day off, maybe more — are natural. For now, he is something like the ominous noise in your car that you hope will fix itself. Mondesi hit second or third in the Royals’ first five games. He has not batted higher than seventh in more than two weeks.
Here’s the good news: Mondesi remains as naturally gifted as anyone in baseball. He has enough power for a 443-foot home run last year, and only 10 players have faster sprint speeds. He’s just 25. Mike Moustakas was demoted at 25. Alex Gordon was a broken prospect at 25, a bust, told to switch positions for the next big thing.
At that age, neither had a season as productive as Mondesi’s 2018. Each became All-Stars and important parts of a World Series champion.
Here’s the bad news: Mondesi’s struggles are worse the more you look at them. He has baseball’s lowest walk rate. Only 11 hitters are striking out more often, and all of them have at least four home runs and an average slugging percentage of .443. Mondesi has zero homers and is slugging .240.
Using FanGraphs’ WAR calculations, Mondesi is not just baseball’s worst offensive player of 152 regulars but is so bad that the difference between him (-13.0) and No. 151 is the same as the difference between Nos. 151 and 109.
Mondesi’s most glaring weakness as a hitter has been offspeed pitches outside the zone, and while it’s true that he is seeing 7 percent fewer fastballs than last season and 11 percent fewer than 2018, it’s also true that he is struggling against everything now.
Again, using FanGraphs, Mondesi is baseball’s least productive fastball hitter. The only pitch he’s performed above average against is the splitter, which he’s seen on fewer than 1 percent of pitches.
This is more than a slow start to a weird season, too. Going back to the beginning of 2019, only two players have more plate appearances with a lower OPS than Mondesi.
So, look. At some point, this begins to feel like piling on. We know there’s a problem now. We know there’s potential for him to succeed.
The question — and it’s among the most important for the organization moving forward — is how to best help Mondesi improve.
The Royals, like most franchises, believe major development decisions with high-end talent should be about more than statistics.
They promoted Eric Hosmer faster than they originally intended in 2011, for instance, but it was about more than his .439 batting average in Omaha. They believed the minor leagues no longer served a purpose for him. They wanted him challenged. He ended up third in Rookie of the Year voting.
The demoted Moustakas in 2014 not because of his .152/.223/.320 line but because they sensed from his body language and interactions that he was taking the struggles so hard it was counterproductive. They wanted to give him a break, to allow baseball to be fun for him again. He was back within two weeks and homered five times that postseason.
The Royals have always been aggressive with Mondesi. They debuted him in the 2015 World Series, for crying out loud, and chose him over Whit Merrifield as their opening day second baseman in 2017. Backing off now would be a significant shift in the organization’s approach.
For now, we can see some signs. Every night after games, Mondesi watches video of himself from 2018, when stardom seemed so close. He watches to feel better, sure, but also to see what he did then that he doesn’t do now, and vice versa. But most nights, the only differences he sees are the results.
Matheny and his coaches have talked about Mondesi’s struggles for a while now. Maybe this day off can help, but it’s rarely that simple, for lots of reasons: Mondesi remains a good defender at a premium position, he wants to play and the staff had been confident the breakout was coming.
But on Monday, what they saw on the field (and what all of us see) tipped the scales past what they see away from the field (and what we don’t see). The frustration. The doubt. It was too much. They gave him a day, and now they hope it unlocks what they still believe is inside him.
Like the man said: We need to see it in a game.
This story was originally published September 1, 2020 at 5:18 PM with the headline "The Royals’ continuing challenge with Adalberto Mondesi: can sitting one out be enough?."