Chicago White Sox Top Prospect Yoan Moncada on Fire to Begin 2017
By Jason Burke
The Chicago White Sox traded away Chris Sale this past offseason and a big part of the return they got for their former ace was prospect Yoan Moncada, who is the Sox top prospect and number two in all of baseball. He’s also off to an extremely hot start to begin the 2017 regular season in the minors.
The Chicago White Sox Triple-A affiliate, the Charlotte Knights, have gotten off to a 2-0 start largely due to the fact that their offense has put up an average of ten runs per contest. While there have some performances that have been noteworthy, Yoan Moncada is the player that is going to have all eyes on him while he remains in Charlotte.
In the early going Moncada is 7-for-11 (.636) with all seven hits being singles. This includes a three-hit night on Thursday and a four-hit night on Friday. The one downside here is that Moncada has also struck out three times in those eleven at-bats, but that’s part of the reason why he didn’t start the season in the big leagues. He’s barely played in Double-A, so this stint in Triple-A, no matter how long it lasts, will be good for the 21 year old.
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With the Knights scoring so many runs, there are bound to be some fun statistics to look at in small sample size theater, like six of the eleven players that have had an at-bat holding an OPS over 1.000 and five of them batting at .500 or better including utility-man Tyler Ladendorf (.750), catcher Kevan Smith (.667), catcher Roberto Pena (.600) and shortstop Jose Vinicio.
Ladendorf, a Park Ridge native, signed as a free agent this past offseason after parts of two seasons in the big leagues with Oakland. Smith was drafted by the South Siders. Vinicio signed a minor league contract after seven seasons in the Red Sox farm system, and Pena, a defense-first backstop formerly in the Astros system, signed a minor league deal of his own.
Even with runs aplenty in Charlotte there has yet to be a home run hit by a Knight, and every batter so far has recorded an RBI except for former MLBer Everth Cabrera, who was busted for PEDs back in August of 2013 and hasn’t been the same since. After bouncing around a little, Cabrera took 2016 off and played in his native Nicaragua.
The timetable for Moncada’s Chicago debut is not yet known and there isn’t really a rush to bring him up with the big league club in full rebuild mode. The two factors that could play a role, however, are how well he is performing in Triple-A (so far so good) and what ticket sales are looking like at Guaranteed Rate Field. If the turnstiles stop moving, a big splash may be in order leading to some on-the-job training.