Here’s why Adalberto Mondesi’s bounce-back means so much to the Kansas City Royals
Shortstop Adalberto Mondesi’s progression as a big-league player matters more to the Kansas City Royals than any other young talent in recent years. For better or worse, it just does.
The fact that Mondesi finished this season on a tear certainly creates optimism that he can still be the game-changing force the Royals have forecast for several years — a mixture of elite fielding, throwing, speed, hitting ability and power all rolled up into a switch-hitting shortstop who could anchor this major-league club for a decade.
If Mondesi, 25, can be that player, it greatly affects the overall expectations for the Royals.
While he remained healthy and continued to excel on defense, Mondesi’s offensive struggles were so pronounced that it became a primary storyline for the first month of the pandemic-shortened season.
His consistency, or lack thereof, has ramifications on the roster and the results, as well as reverberations throughout an organization built around scouting and player development.
General manager Dayton Moore and his top lieutenants, such as vice president/assistant general manager for international operations Rene Francisco, have hitched their wagon to Mondesi, and they’re not backing away from that. It’s something they reinforced in a sit-down with Mondesi going into the final month of the season.
“Just continue to have fun,” Moore said of their message to Mondesi. “We love you. You’re not going anywhere. You’re here as long as we’re here. We’re not giving up on Adalberto Mondesi. There’s no need to give up on yourself. We’re going to be here for you.”
As recently as July, Moore doubled down on his stance that Mondesi will be a star, not just in Kansas City but across baseball.
Francisco has gone on the record in dubbing Mondesi’s overall talent “the best I’ve seen” in nearly 30 years in professional baseball.
“Mondesi is just so talented,” Moore said. “But I’d rather have productive players than talented players. Obviously, if you have both, you’ve got guys that have a chance to be Royals Hall of Famers and Major League Baseball Hall of Famers and they win MVPs.
”Mondi is hopefully getting to a point where he’s just going to be more consistent.”
Unique production
Through his first 30 games, Mondesi dragged around a slash line of .213/.234/.278, with five doubles, a triple, two walks, zero home runs, two RBIs, 10 runs scored and seven stolen bases in 11 tries.
In his final 29 games, Mondesi exploded for a slash line of .297/.350/.550, with six doubles, two triples, nine walks, six home runs, 20 RBIs, 23 runs scored and 17 stolen bases in 21 tries. Not coincidentally, his surge turned the top third of the Royals’ lineup — with Whit Merrifield batting ahead of him and star Salvador Perez behind him — into a powder keg for opposing pitchers.
“I’m being patient and not missing my pitch,” Mondesi said matter-of-factly about his late-season success. “I’m just trying to do my job.”
Mondesi offered no revelations about changes or tweaks that kick-started his offense. He simply stuck to the old standbys of staying focused, working on his pitch selection, knowing the opposing pitcher, staying behind the ball and playing hard.
Even while struggling, he maintained that he always knew things would turn around if he just kept working at it.
“I was very happy that I was able to have a front-row view of Mondi being Mondi and watching the excitement of every at-bat being able to change the course of a game,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said. “And watching the progression. There for a while, he was just stuck where he was trying to make adjustments and the adjustments weren’t really coming through with any real positive results.”
This was Matheny’s first season overseeing and interacting with Mondesi on a daily basis.
While Mondesi spent all of last offseason rehabbing from season-ending shoulder surgery, he also repeatedly told anyone who asked that he was healthy and his shoulder wasn’t an issue this year.
Matheny said the lack of results made it difficult for Mondesi to build confidence in himself. But by the end of the season, Matheny saw a significant difference.
“There is a swagger when he gets on the bases because he knows he’s got everybody on pins and needles,” Matheny said. “Then he walks into the box and you can tell he knows that he had an idea of what he’s going to do, and he can pull through with it. That, for any player, is fun to watch, especially after there has been so much adversity.”
Supporting Mondesi
That adversity was felt deeply throughout the Royals organization, all the way up to the highest levels of the baseball operations staff.
Sure, they’ve invested money in Mondesi, but it goes beyond that. After all, the signing bonuses handed out to recent draft picks such as Bobby Witt Jr. and Asa Lacy were three times the $2 million Mondesi commanded as an international free agent.
Mondesi is more than an athletic unicorn. He’s also someone Royals leadership has watched grow up and who they’ve helped raise in the game since he was 16. Someone they’ve been with through tragedy, like the loss of close friend and mentor Yordano Ventura and the incarceration in the Dominican Republic of Mondesi’s father and former All-Star outfielder, Raul.
“We’ve known him for a long time,” Moore said. “I’ve known his father. He’s family.
“It’s just as simple as that, and he knows that. It’s like anything else, your kids, your family members need to know that you care about them and you love them. We’ve always kind of shared that with Mondi.”
For Moore, Mondesi’s season-ending hot streak was different from flashes he’d shown in the past, because Mondesi had to demonstrate that he could get up off the mat after reaching what was probably an all-time low for him in terms of production.
Moore said he believes Mondesi was at that point where the mental toll associated with the pressure a player puts on himself turns into a physical inability to perform.
Anecdotal evidence appeared to support that, considering there were times Mondesi seemed out of sync even when he tried to bunt.
For Mondesi to come out of that on the other side and play as well as he did, the Royals will cling to that as a significant step.
“I think from a standpoint mentally, you definitely saw a player progress and maybe get to a level where, ‘I can play my way out of this,’” Moore said.
This story was originally published September 30, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Here’s why Adalberto Mondesi’s bounce-back means so much to the Kansas City Royals."
