The rocky, injury-riddled street that was Yoán Moncada’s 2024 season with the Chicago White Sox has led the 29-year-old to free company.
Chicago declined Moncada’s $25 million choice on Friday for the 2025 season and elected to go along with a $5 million buyout as a substitute. Moncada performed simply 12 video games final season after struggling a left adductor pressure, giving the nine-year veteran 208 appearances logged — or 69 on common — for the previous three seasons with the White Sox.
Moncada, the previous No. 1 prospect in baseball, was traded from the Boston Purple Sox — alongside pitcher Michael Kopech and minor leaguers Luis Alexander Basabe and Victor Diaz — to Chicago in 2016, in change for eight-time All-Star pitcher Chris Sale. Moncada was touted as the following massive identify factor in Boston, projected to ascertain himself in Boston’s infield however finally didn’t stick round.
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The franchise had different concepts with then-prospect Rafael Devers on the rise in Boston’s farm system, plus with Sale — a longtime ace-caliber arm — within the rotation, the Purple Sox put collectively a star-studded rotation. Sale, Rick Porcello, the reigning American League Cy Younger Award Winner on the time, and David Value, the 2012 AL Cy Younger Award recipient, joined forces and received the 2018 World Sequence collectively the next yr.
In the meantime, Moncada was given the room and endurance to develop in Chicago however didn’t reside as much as the hype that caught by his identify when signed by the Purple Sox in 2015 out of Cuba for $31.5 million — the most important ever given to a global free agent on the time.
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Moncada’s spotlight marketing campaign got here in 2019 when he slashed .315/.367/.548 with a career-best 25 dwelling runs, 34 doubles and 79 RBIs in 132 video games performed. Chicago was impressed sufficient to lock Moncada to a five-year, $70 million extension the next offseason, simply earlier than Moncada’s regression and damage struggles started to catch as much as him. Nonetheless, Moncada’s inventory worth — as is — ought to earn himself an enormous league spot elsewhere.
A veteran infielder with defensive versatility and reliability, Moncada won’t have to attend too lengthy in free company till one other group takes him off the open market.
