If you only looked at the 40-man roster listed on the official White Sox website -- and nobody would blame you for going straight to what should be the source -- you'd be led to believe that Yoán Moncada was still a part of the team well after they should have declined his $25 million club option for 2025.
Here's the screenshot as Monday, 11/11 at 11:11 p.m.:
There's no need to panic. The White Sox did indeed document the declining of said option in an official press release, also on the team site, 10 days earlier. The Sox went 1-for-2 in clerical tasks here, but at least they completed the one that counted.
Still, it's fitting that Moncada's White Sox career died as it died: being around and not around at the same time, semi-existing as Schrödinger's Bat. During the last two weeks of the season, he was still on the roster, but he might as well been out of the organization entirely, given that the White Sox only called upon him once, and under the most extreme of circumstances (a 12th-inning pinch-running appearance). Now he's out of the organization entirely, but his name remains as a ghost image, burned onto a screen that stayed the same for too long.
That wasn't what Rick Hahn had in mind when he traded for Moncada as the headliner in the Chris Sale trade that kicked off the Second Rebuild, which now gets both letters capitalized to denote the confirmed end of a historic era.
It also wasn't what Hahn had in mind when he extended Moncada for five years and $70 million about a week before world shut down in March 2020. When spring training resumed in the summer, Moncada had contracted the novel coronavirus, and he'd never come close to matching the career year in that inspired the extension.
COVID-19 played a part in it, at least initially. Moncada's admission of the virus taking a toll on him merely confirmed the numerous scenes where he looked detectably depleted. When normalcy gradually returned and Moncada still didn't come close to reaching the power he showed in 2019, when he hit .315/.367/.548 with 25 homers in 132 games, long COVID remained a possibility, especially when a similar-sounding malady identified as a sinus infection dragged him down the following June.
But the fact that the White Sox committed to Moncada after the specific season of 2019 probably did more to warp expectations, because time revealed it to be a particular perverse power environment, That was the year in which the Twins (307 homers), Yankees (306), Astros (288) and Dodgers (279) each cleared the previous MLB single-season record for homers by one team, which the Yankees set with 267 one year earlier.
When you go through the leaderboards from 2019, Moncada has plenty of company in posting home run numbers that he's never approach in his next-best season. Here's an incomplete list:
| Player | 2019 | After |
|---|---|---|
| Yoán Moncada | 25 | 14 |
| Eloy Jiménez | 31 | 18 |
| Cody Bellinger | 47 | 26 |
| Joc Pederson | 36 | 23 |
| Max Kepler | 36 | 24 |
| Mitch Garver | 31 | 19 |
| Gleyber Torres | 38 | 25 |
| Alex Bregman | 41 | 26 |
| George Springer | 39 | 25 |
| Trey Mancini | 35 | 21 |
| Kole Calhoun | 33 | 16 |
| Christian Yelich | 44 | 19 |
| Jeff McNeil | 23 | 12 |
| Michael Conforto | 33 | 20 |
And that doesn't include other strange career highs, like Eugenio Suarez and Jorge Soler making runs at 50 homers, Miguel Sanó blasting 34 dingers over 105 games, or Brett Gardner popping a .503 slugging percentage at age 35. It turned out the ball was rocketing over fences due to a considerable loss of drag, and in 2021, Major League Baseball announced plans to deaden it.
The quality control at Rawlings still leaves a lot to be desired, but the league generally accomplished its mission, and a lot of careers followed the shape of Moncada's. Moncada's just happened to unfold in one of the more frustrating fashions, for reasons in and out of his control.
Scouts who watched Moncada in the minors consistently documented his flat bat path, which made peak home run totals in the teens less of a shocking result than 2019 suggested. Health played a huge part, which is apparent when someone who once stole 49 bases in 81 games for Class Greenville in 2015 goes on to nab 32 bags total across parts of nine big league seasons. And while Moncada gamely played at less than 95 percent through sustained stretches, his detached affect didn't generate a whole lot of sympathy when everything started slipping away. This is where we get into perilous territory involving aesthetic choices, language barriers (body and spoken), and stereotypes that reduces a lot of the conversation to armchair psychology and phrenology, but even if you did your best to transpose Moncada's injury history onto, say, the reputation of Yelich, you'd still have trouble squaring up some episodes.
The "anticipated soreness" shutdown this July, for instance, followed by the team's handling of him at the very end of the season, indicated some disconnect in desire that brought the concerns about his makeup during his prospect days full circle. I just wouldn't pin everything on him, either, because the dominant recurring theme from the last two seasons is the White Sox being so convolutedly run as to render success on any level a happy accident.
There are a lot of players on whom the fate of the White Sox's Second Rebuild seemed to hinge. When Tim Anderson stopped being able to stir the drink, when Jiménez wasn't able to take the middle-of-the-order torch from José Abreu, when Yasmani Grandal's body remembered it was that of a catcher in his mid-30s, all were felt and felt acutely.
Big picture, however, Moncada's ability to hit right-handed pitching, play strong defense, draw some walks and steal some bases probably meant the most to the roster having any semblance of well-roundedness, and as 2019 faded further into the rearview mirror, Hahn and the White Sox front office couldn't produce a countermove to restore balance.
Now, the onset of Moncada's post-Sox chapter resembles that of Anderson, in the sense that he'll have to settle for a one-year prove-it deal and consider learning multiple positions. He's not even a consensus top-50 free agent at this point, showing up at No. 40 on Keith Law's list and No. 46 at CBS Sports. I wouldn't be shocked if he benefited from a change of scenery and resembled his useful 2021 form, and I also wouldn't be stunned if he didn't last a spring training.
The sky is no longer the limit, but the range of outcomes remains pretty wide. It's just that because he played for the White Sox, that range just happens to expand into some pretty depressing territory.
