The rocky, injury-riddled highway 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 together with a $5 million buyout as an alternative. 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 Crimson Sox — alongside pitcher Michael Kopech and minor leaguers Luis Alexander Basabe and Victor Diaz — to Chicago in 2016, in alternate for eight-time All-Star pitcher Chris Sale. Moncada was touted as the following large identify factor in Boston, projected to determine himself in Boston’s infield however in the end 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 Crimson 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 Collection collectively the next yr.
In the meantime, Moncada was given the room and persistence to develop in Chicago however didn’t dwell as much as the hype that caught by his identify when signed by the Crimson Sox in 2015 out of Cuba for $31.5 million — the biggest 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 residence 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 harm 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.
