KC Royals: Tale of two seasons for Adalberto Mondesi in 2020

The KC Royals saw two very different versions of Adalberto Mondesi in 2020.

Kansas City Royals fans were really looking forward to seeing what a healthy Adalberto Mondesi could provide for the team in 2020. He’s always battled injuries throughout his young career, but fans and the front office had high hopes for the shortstop in his fifth season in the big leagues. The delayed start to the 2020 season actually helped Mondesi because otherwise he’d have likely been unable to play in the first few months of the season.

What ended up happening was a very up and down season for Mondesi. He struggled to start the year and had some poor mistakes on the base paths, which pushed KC Kingdom’s own Travis Neely to write about what was going on with Mondesi. In the game that inspired Travis’ article, Mondesi had a defensive error and also didn’t hustle to first base on a play where he’d have been safe if he had hustled.

Mondesi turned it around after that, which made fans think he just needed time to warm up in the bizarre season. On Aug. 4, Mondesi was batting .289, but things went downhill from there for a long period of time, as his batting average continued to dip. Not even a month after he had his highest average of the year, Mondesi then had his lowest average with an ugly .179 batting average on Sept. 3.

During that time, Mondesi went six straight games without recording a hit and fans were definitely concerned with the young shortstop at that time. The good news, however, is that Mondesi turned things around for the better once again and ended the season on quite the hot streak.

Matthew Pouliot’s tweet below is very interesting, as it highlights both how bad Mondesi was for the first 37 games he played in 2020 and also how dominant he was in the final 23 games. It truly was a tale of two seasons for Mondesi and while the poor performances were definitely concerning, the fact that he ended the season on such a high put fans’ minds at ease.

Adalberto Mondesi needs to continue being the player that KC Royals fans saw at the end of the season.

It’ll be interesting to see how the shortstop position looks in a few years from now. Mondesi is still young and has all of the talent in the world, but the Royals drafted Bobby Witt Jr. with the No. 2 pick in 2019 and he looked nearly ready to be in the majors at summer camp this year.

It’s entirely possible if Mondesi is sluggish to begin the 2021 season that the Kansas City Royals might opt to start the Witt era earlier than expected, especially if Dayton Moore thinks this team is close to being a postseason contender.

What thoughts do you have on Adalberto Mondesi’s 2020 season? Do you think he’ll be a part of this team when they make their next run at a World Series?