Adalberto Mondesi trade reflects more pragmatic Royals approach and frees both sides
Speaking with owner John Sherman in the winter of 2021, then-Royals general manager Dayton Moore outlined a vision of the pillars of the franchise’s future: to maximize the amount of time that then-31-year-old Salvador Perez, Adalberto Mondesi (then 25) and Bobby Witt Jr. (then 20) would play together.
“‘We’ve got to figure out how to do that as long as we can,’” Moore recalled telling Sherman as he sat at Arvest Stadium that May in Springdale, Arkansas.
Moore was about to watch the ascending Witt and rehabilitating-from-injury Mondesi play alongside each other for the first time in a regular-season game. And the notion of aligning the breathtakingly talented — and equally star-crossed — Mondesi at shortstop alongside Witt (then the top prospect in baseball) at third, Moore said that night, had “a chance to be special.”
Sure did.
But the near-term dream faded out after just 15 games last season, when Mondesi suffered yet another debilitating injury that ended his season.
And the prospect vanished altogether on Tuesday, when the Royals announced they had traded the enigmatic Mondesi and a player to be named later to Boston for 29-year-old reliever Josh Taylor — who missed all of last season with a back injury.
The trade was announced a day after the Royals dealt outfielder Michael A. Taylor to Minnesota for minor-league pitchers Evan Sisk and Steven Cruz.
That made for two moves that especially taken together speak to a shrewd strategy to seek value for veteran players whose contracts will come due in the next year — a dynamic the Royals haven’t always embraced and that in some ways thus was at the crux of their downfall after winning the 2015 World Series.
Now, it might be debated when these values would be at their highest, Royals general manager and vice president of baseball operations J.J. Picollo said. And, he noted, the Royals certainly didn’t feel any rush to make the deals.
But one particular element of those considerations stood out as Picollo spoke with the media on a Zoom call Tuesday afternoon.
“If either player is injured at the deadline,” he said, “then there is no value.”
While Picollo wasn’t referring directly to Mondesi’s injury history, surely that had to be part of the calculus.
But now the wait here is over for Mondesi.
And also gone with that is the weight of it all ... on him and on the Royals.
Because behind them now is all that anticipation and exasperation over a player with transcendent potential who only was able to play an average of 51 games annually over the seven years since being called up during the 2015 postseason.
If Mondesi had been able to stay healthy, heck, these largely woeful last five years in particular might have looked and felt different.
But, confoundingly, over and over, he couldn’t stay on the field.
At least not here, no matter how much time and effort the Royals and Mondesi himself invested in that.
So this move offers Mondesi a reset that perhaps could help him realize at least some semblance of his potential as or before he turns 28 in June. And it provides the Royals with clarity as they have sought to prioritize Witt as the everyday shortstop.
It should be said that Picollo politely disagreed with the suggestion it stands for a broader organizational shift. With only a year remaining on Mondesi’s contract, he said, “It was likely he was going to end up playing somewhere else in the future, anyway, so I don’t think it’s the end of an era.”
It sure seems like another statement of an ongoing transition from one, though, gradually at first with Picollo’s ascent to the GM role in late 2021.
And all the more so through last season and further yet in the wake of Moore being fired last fall, a momentous change in itself after 16 years. Soon thereafter, and surely not as Moore would have done, manager Mike Matheny was fired and replaced by Matt Quatraro.
Framed in that context, these trades reflects the more transactional recent trend (from June 27 through the trade deadline last year, the Royals acquired 13 players) and an increasingly more pragmatic approach over the sentimentality anyone might feel about Mondesi in particular.
For that matter, Picollo called the 40-man roster “a work in progress” and that its configuration is not “complete whatsoever.”
(He declined comment on the reported but not officially announced signing last week of reliever Aroldis Chapman, but it might be surmised that another reason to trade Michael A. Taylor would be to clear a roster spot for Chapman.)
Coincidentally or not as the roster keeps churning, it’s no wonder that when I spoke with Quatraro last week he said he hadn’t so much as scrawled out a potential lineup on a napkin.
Good thing. Because whatever the parts might have looked like then, it looks plenty different already.
Beyond the new bullpen reinforcements providing more versatility and depth even since the Royals added Jordan Lyles and Ryan Yarborough this offseason, the center field job previously held by Taylor (who earned a Gold Glove in 2021) will at least initially be contested between Kyle Isbel and Drew Waters, Picollo said.
At its most practical, that trade enables the Royals to clear space to see what they really have in Isbel and Waters … and thus help plan for 2024, 2025 and 2026.
Moreover, even if the moves weren’t driven by financial considerations, they “freed up some money, and that’s OK,” said Picollo — who said he expects the money to help fill the roster with a payroll expected to be around $85 to $90 million.
And let’s not forget, as Picollo put it, that each of these deals “hinged on the return” … one we won’t really know for years to come.
Until we know what all these things mean, though, we know this:
It’s really a shame that it came to this with Mondesi.
But as much as I’ve wanted to see him emerge with the Royals, at some point maybe the hope came to resemble that one definition of insanity: essentially doing the same thing over and over (in the sense of him being part of the Royals, that is, not an absence of changing approaches) and expecting different results.
So call it the end of an era or not, it’s still momentous. And here’s hoping it’s as liberating and productive for Mondesi as it is for the Royals.
This story was originally published January 24, 2023 at 4:50 PM.