Royals bring injured Adalberto Mondesi back to Kansas City for further evaluation
Shortstop Adalberto Mondesi’s path to a major-league return may have taken another detour.
The Kansas City Royals brought Mondesi back to KC on Sunday. He’s not in town to end his minor-league rehab assignment and join the active roster. On the contrary, Mondesi’s visit comes as a result of stalled progress.
Mondesi, 26, began a rehab assignment with the Triple-A Omaha Storm Chasers on Aug. 3. He appeared in five games and took 13 at-bats as part of what had been a designed slow buildup in his workload.
“He has had some tightness in his oblique, and we just wanted to get a better idea of what we’re dealing with,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said on Sunday morning. “So we brought him back.”
The switch-hitting shortstop has been on the injured list since June 21 because of a left oblique strain, his third IL stint of the season.
He began the season on the IL because of a strained right oblique that kept him out of games until May 25. He then went back on the IL from June 16-24 because of a left hamstring strain.
Mondesi has played in just 10 games this season for the Royals, who will play their 116th game of the season on Sunday afternoon.
In his 10 games this season, Mondesi has slashed .361/.378/.833 with four home runs, nine RBIs, five doubles and six runs scored.
Matheny said shutting down Mondesi for the rest of the season was not on the table at this point.
“That hasn’t been talked about,” Matheny said. “I think this is one of those where we’ve made so much progression that when you have a little bit of a setback, let’s not just keep pushing to where you have to go back to square one. Is there something we can do here, one, for peace of mind of the player, and, two, for peace of mind for the organization?”
The latest setback comes with a month and a half remaining in the regular season. Major-league rosters will expand from 26 to 28 players in September.
Earlier this month, Royals general manager Dayton Moore acknowledged that the club will not shape its roster going into 2022 expecting Mondesi to play shortstop on an everyday basis.
While Mondesi will certainly still factor into the roster, he’ll likely have regular days off as a means of workload management. Moore and the front office will build the roster with the guiding principle that the Royals must have at least two players capable of starting at shortstop.
The Royals’ top prospect, Bobby Witt Jr., made his Triple-A debut in July. He entered Sunday slashing .294/.368/.580 with 24 home runs and 20 stolen bases over the course of 84 games between Double-A (61 games) and Triple-A (23 games).
This season marks the first full season in the minors for Witt, 21, and he is not currently on the club’s 40-man roster.
The No. 2 overall pick in the 2019 MLB Draft, Witt has been rated the No. 3 overall prospect in the sport by Baseball America as well as No. 5 overall by MLBPipeline.com.
