Yoan Moncada Had Himself a Super Star First Half

What a first half.  I couldn’t be more excited with the growth of this team.

If you’ve listened to Red Line Radio, you’ll hear Carl and Chief start tooting the playoff horn every week.  We’ll get to that in a minute, but one of my “goals”, for lack of a better word, was for the White Sox to be on the “still in the hunt” graphic on ESPN or whatever come August.

Now I would absolutely love if the White Sox snuck into the 2nd Wild Card.  Do I think it’s going to happen?  No.  The chances are slim to none. I get that people who don’t follow the team under a microscope might think otherwise…. but it’s more then likely not happening, which is fine.  This is still a development year and all of my focus and energy is on just that; development.  All that matters is Moncada, Giolito, Cease, Eloy, Robert, Madrigal, and others continue to dominate while Kopech, Dunning, Burger, Burr and others get healthy.  That is legit all that matters.

This is a long term process; if the White Sox sneak into the 2nd Wild Card, sweet.  But they will do so with almost the exact group of players they currently have.  They are not going to trade from prospect capital to make a run at the 2nd WC, nor should they.  They are thinking a few years down the road, not a few months, and that’s exactly how it should be.

But I wanna talk about one person right now: Yoan Moncada.  This dude is turning into a fucking superstar.  Before we talk about how, let’s first rewind it back to a year ago when people were losing their minds about him:

And let’s not forget about that little pip squeak Hubbs talking out of his ass

what a fucking idiot!

I said it the entire duration of the 2018 season; Yoan Moncada was going to be justtttt fineeeee.  The vast majority of the time a young player struggles at the plate because they are too aggressive and swing at everything.  Moncada was the exact opposite; he took WAY too many pitches.  It was really frustrating, but to me it was a better type of frustrating than someone who swings at everything.

See the chart below:This is how and why I knew he’d be fine; it’s way easier to teach someone to simply “swing” than to teach them to “not swing”.  In 2018 he walked at a little more than a 10% clip, but he was also taking cock shots right down the middle.   But it’s clear he made the conscious decision to be more aggressive, and it’s turned him into the goddamn stud everyone who watched him under a microscope knew he’d be.

Here are his sexy, face value stats:

and here are his advanced stats:

Say with me again: Super Star.  But the thing is this…. he’s going to keep on getting better.  He legit evaporates baseballs:

But back to his plate discipline… he’s swinging outside the zone 10% more this year than last year.  So what that tells me is this: that he’s made a conscious decision to be more aggressive, but that he still hasn’t found that happy medium where he’s only being aggressive at pitches over the plate.

It still might take a year or two for that to happen.  But when it does?  We’re legitimately looking at a MVP caliber player.  He’ll be pushing .400 OBPs because he’ll walk a shit ton more and he’ll complement that high OBP with a better power output because he’ll only be swinging at drivable pitches instead of pitcher’s pitches.

The White Sox would have been so, so fucked if Moncada wasn’t any good.  They traded a potential HoF’er for him and he needed to be, at the very worst, a good player, but every day that passes it’s looking more and more like they got a goddamn stud in return.

Oh, and he’s learned how to hit righty too.  Pray for the goddamn league!