Late last night it was announced that the Chicago White Sox will be placing top prospect Yoan Moncada on the seven-day disabled list with a sore thumb.
The Chicago White Sox aren’t expected to contend this season, and so far they’re 17-21, 3.5 games back in the AL Central. The hope for the Sox and their fans revolves around the players that will make them a contender in the near future. Yoan Moncada is the most well-known of those players, and is the top talent in all of the minor leagues according to numerous outlets.
Moncada came to the White Sox as the headline piece in the deal that sent Chris Sale to the Boston Red Sox. While Moncada spent a brief stint in the big leagues last season with Boston, he struck out in 12 of his 19 at-bats after skipping Triple-A altogether. Given the White Sox timeframe for contention and Moncada’s lack of Triple-A experience, he joined the Charlotte Knights to begin the 2017 campaign.
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As a member of the Knights, Moncada has still been striking out at a relatively high rate of 27.4%, but there really hasn’t been much else to complain about with his offensive performance.
He’s batting .331 for the season (34 games, 157 plate appearances), and in 13 May games he’s actually seen his production go up with a .358 average and .426 OBP. All in all he has six home runs, 15 RBI and ten steals in 12 opportunities.
In other words, he’s living up to the billing as a top prospect and he’s proving that he’ll be a big part of the White Sox future with the strides that he is making. He’s still just shy of 22.
In the Tribune article linked above, they mention that the Knights were placing Moncada on the disabled list even though his X-Ray and MRI came back clean, instead wishing to give him some time off to “heal the nagging bruise.”
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With that, it doesn’t look as though he’ll be missing much time. Even though he’s due to miss a week, it shouldn’t do anything to disrupt Chicago’s plans with their top talent in terms of when they’ll call him up. That will rely more upon his development on the whole and whether or not they feel that he is ready to hang in the big leagues. Because once he makes it to Chicago, they don’t want him back in Charlotte.