The Red Sox need to give Yoan Moncada a chance
COMMENTARY
Yoan Moncada is the reigning No. 1 prospect in baseball. Yoan Moncada is in the major leagues. Yoan Moncada isn’t playing. Does that seem funny to you? It might not, because everyone has been telling you he isn’t ready. Here’s the thing – we really don’t know yet. What we do know is that the reasons for not playing him are hogwash. Let’s go through them.
The first and most glaring is that he isn’t ready. He can’t hit a breaking ball. You know how many breaking balls Moncada has seen so far? According to Brooks Baseball, 25 – 14 sliders, and 11 curveballs. Does that strike you as a lot of pitches? On a lot of occasions, 25 is the number of pitches Clay Buchholz throws in an inning.
But, say you want to entertain that argument. OK. You know who else couldn’t hit breaking balls when he came to the majors? This kid named Xander Bogaerts. You might know him. All-Star shortstop from Aruba? Best Red Sox shortstop since Nomar? Back in 2013, Bogaerts came to the majors in late August, and racked up 50 plate appearances before the end of the season. In that time, he saw 60 breaking balls – 21 sliders and 39 curveballs. He got just two hits off of them. In total, in those 50 plate appearances, he hit .250/.320/.364. I think you would agree, that’s not that terrific.
Of course, you might not remember Bogaerts’ debut that way, and with good reason. In the postseason, he hit .296/.412/.481. The point is simple – if you had judged Bogaerts by his miniscule sample of plate appearances in August and September of 2013 and deemed him bench-worthy, he never would have played during October. And for a time, he didn’t! Will Middlebrooks got most of the action at third base, starting every game through Game 4 of the ALCS. Then Bogaerts stepped in, and eventually become the youngest player to hit a triple in World Series history.
John Farrell decided to trust Bogaerts in the middle of the postseason, with the teams tied at two games apiece, about to play a pivotal Game 5 on the road. Until that point, Bogaerts had not started a postseason game, and had only garnered four plate appearances in the previous 17 days. Which makes the argument now that the Sox don’t have time to develop a player during a pennant race seem incredibly silly. Farrell made the change because it was glaringly obvious the Sox needed a change. While Middlebrooks had managed to hit .231/.375/.308 in the ALDS against the Rays, by the end of that CLS Game 4, Middlebrooks’ postseason batting line was .174/.269/.261. Continuing to play Middlebrooks would have been manager malpractice. Farrell swapped in Bogaerts. It was the right call.
Unfortunately, Farrell is not making the same right call right now. Yoan Moncada, like Xander Bogaerts before him, has not hit well in his rookie season that is in the thick of the pennant race – for context, on the day Bogaerts made his major league debut (Aug. 20, 2013) the Red Sox had a one-game lead on Tampa Bay for first place in the American League East. Are the two situations 100 percent comparable? No, Bogaerts had more time in the minors than did Moncada. But the person who was the team’s farm director in 2013 when Bogaerts was called up – Ben Crockett – is still the farm director today. Moncada wouldn’t have been called up if Crockett and the front office didn’t think he was ready.
Moncada of course, is not getting to play now, and the three players who are most responsible for taking his playing time are hitting nearly as bad as Middlebrooks did back in the 2013 postseason. They are Aaron Hill, Brock Holt and Travis Shaw. I include Holt in this mix because when Moncada was first promoted, it was said that Shaw might see time in left field. In other words, Farrell would give some of Holt’s time to Shaw, and in doing so grouped the three players together (at least in my mind). With the Red Sox this season, this trio has combined for 893 plate appearances. In that time, they have hit .249/.315/.406. This is not that great, as I’m sure you’ve already deduced. In his time with the Red Sox, Stephen Drew hit .236/.317/.417. Darnell McDonald hit .252/.323/.413. Rich Gedman hit .259/.310/.412. Cumulatively, these are guys who you don’t necessarily mind having on the team (I was a big McDonald fan) but you aren’t shedding any tears when they leave. They shouldn’t be blocking anyone, in other words.
In the second half, however, Hill, Holt and Shaw have been much worse – they’ve hit .230/.298/.370 across 393 PAs. That’s unacceptable anywhere, but especially from two corner spots where players are expected to produce offensively. That’s Chris Donnells territory. Wes Chamberlain territory. Do you even remember Donnells and Chamberlain? Hill, Holt and Shaw combined are slugging worse in the second half than John Lackey did during his stint with the Red Sox – Lackey slugged .385 in a Red Sox uniform.
Of course, the familiar trope brandished like a weapon in the media and on Red Sox broadcasts since Moncada was benched was that Shaw had magically turned it around. After all, he homered in two straight starts! He’s back! The logical fallacy that you could represent the futures of either Shaw or Moncada by what they did in any two games has been very much lost in the past week, as the Sox have ascended to first place.
Those two games certainly weren’t indicative of Shaw’s future. Since that second game in which he homered against the Padres, Shaw has gone right back to hitting like a benchwarmer. He has managed just one hit and one walk in his last 12 plate appearances. He was also the only Red Sox player to not manage a hit on Sunday. While his teammates were busy racking up 11 hits, six walks and 11 runs, Shaw went 0-for-5 with a strikeout.
We don’t need to focus on one game of course. Shaw’s body of work in the second half is pretty ugly in general. Broken out from Hill and Holt, we see that in the second half Shaw has hit .206/.281/.412, and he’s struck out in 28.1 percent of his plate appearances. Moncada really can’t do much worse. And unlike Shaw, he is the future of the team. That’s why he was promoted.
Even if Moncada doesn’t hit, the situation with him would be more or less comparable to Christian Vazquez in the first three months of the season. During that time, when he was bleeding the team dry offensively, the consensus was it’s OK if one spot in the lineup doesn’t hit, as long as the defense is good.
Now, with Sandy Leon hitting well at the catcher position, and Andrew Benintendi set to return, if Moncada doesn’t hit he will be the one player who isn’t hitting well (or capable of hitting well), and that should still be acceptable. After all, the games from April to June count the same in the standings as do the games in September. Perhaps Moncada’s defense does need work, but he was deemed capable of playing a tougher position in second base. He should be fine. Either way, he can’t improve from the bench.
Yoan Moncada is the No. 1 prospect in baseball. He is in the major leagues. But he isn’t playing. That should change. A handful of games should not be enough to convict a player to a bench sentence, and the three men playing instead of Moncada have shown both this season and especially in the second half that they have not contributed enough to justify blocking a potential future star. We’ve seen before in Xander Bogaerts just how quickly promise can turn into production. The team needs to give Moncada the same chance.
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