The Full Mondi: Despite injuries, upside of Kansas City Royals’ Mondesi is so enticing
To watch Adalberto Mondesi play baseball is to hold your breath in anticipation of the spectacular moments he might unleash at any given time. Alas, it’s also to hold your breath over an ever-present anxiety his injury-prone career with the Royals has come to conjure.
So we got what might be called The Full Mondi against Pittsburgh on Monday night at Kauffman Stadium in his first home appearance of the season after missing 45 games with an oblique strain, a display that reiterated the dilemma he poses in certain ways.
There was that exhilarating first-pitch two-run homer that gave the Royals a 5-2 cushion on their way to a 7-3 victory that restored them to .500 (26-26) a little over two weeks since they doused an 11-game losing streak.
(A night later, they re-emerged above sea level with a 10-5 victory over the Pirates stoked by Andrew Benintendi’s grand slam and two home runs by Sal Perez. “I hope it’s the last time we look at” .500, manager Mike Matheny said after the game.)
Later Monday came Mondesi’s defensive gem, charging a chopper and throwing with such fluidity that it almost appeared as one natural motion on a play Matheny correctly reckoned few others could make.
Accentuating the bubbling narrative of the Mondesi Experience, though, in that moment he tweaked a hamstring muscle and soon was pulled from the game as what the Royals on their Twitter account called “a precaution.” On Tuesday, Matheny said it was “a great bit of news to get first thing in the morning” that Mondesi was feeling better and was vaguely optimistic about the timeline for his return.
Still, even with no sense of the extent of it, the development tapped loose some looming misplaced Twitter anger at Mondesi … as if he’s weak or doesn’t want to be playing as much as he’s ever wanted anything.
And it surely cued anew some calls for the Royals to reassess the belief that he is a pillar of their future — a notion most recently strongly reinforced by general manager Dayton Moore:
As he was about to watch Mondesi alongside Bobby Witt Jr. during Mondesi’s rehab assignment at Class AA Northwest Arkansas, Moore said he considers it a franchise priority to maximize the amount of time those two can be on the field with Perez.
So, exasperating as this trend has been with Mondesi, who was limited by injuries to 25, 75 and 102 games in his first three full seasons (2017-19) with the Royals, understandable as it might be to ponder the practicality of expecting someone with his history of volatile health to stabilize, let’s step back for a second.
Mondesi still is just 25, which perhaps is an eye-of-the-beholder age by now but nonetheless is young enough that it might be considered that his best years are ahead of him.
In fact, he could still enjoy such a long career that these years are reduced to a blip.
And his ceiling in those years, in this year, for that matter, is nothing short of transformative in what it could offer the franchise.
That’s something about any teammate of his will tell you, something that in itself is another element of what he means to both this group and the future.
At least in part because of the different natures of the role of shortstop vs. the role of quarterback, that potential isn’t quite along the lines of what Patrick Mahomes has done for the Chiefs — though Moore has told him in the past that he has “that type of athletic ability. You have the ability to take over a baseball game. You’re one of the very best athletes who puts on a baseball uniform each and every night.”
But the comparative point is about as substantial as it could be in the context of baseball, in which any one facet of Mondesi’s distinct skill set of power, speed and defense can alter the course of a game … something plenty evident in most of the seven games in which he played before suffering the hamstring injury:
In that span, he hit .360 (9 for 25) with four multi-hit games and five extra-base hits (including two home runs).
Sure, that’s a small sample size. But it also was much the same sort of stuff he was producing last September, when he had 20 RBIs, scored 23 runs and became just the eighth player in MLB history to amass 14 extra-base hits and 16 steals in a calendar month.
Meanwhile, Mondesi could well be back in days with a team that is treading water without him (23-23) and 4-3 with him.
They’re 11-6 now since that wretched losing streak in part because of much better situational hitting, an improved bullpen with an ERA below 2.00 in the last 19 games … and because Mondesi was back in the equation.
With Witt’s major-league debut nearing but not necessarily imminent, and given the likelihood that he’ll face some time of flux and transition whenever he arrives, Mondesi is the one variable with the capacity to elevate them from competitive to downright intriguing right now.
At minimal cost, we might add, considering his salary this year is $2.525 million and he has two seasons of arbitration eligibility remaining while under club control through the 2023 season.
While the Royals almost always avoid arbitration and often seek to sign young talents to long-term deals before they have to, they’d seem well-advised to wait to see Mondesi make it through a whole season before firming that up just now.
Time is on their side, in other words, and reasonable minds can disagree over whether Mondesi’s long-term future is one to have full faith in.
But it’s also certainly worth taking the long view on a player with virtually infinite upside ... and chances are Mondesi will be demonstrating just why all over again in the weeks to come.