The rocky, injury-riddled road that was Yoán Moncada’s 2024 season with the Chicago White Sox led the 29-year-old to free agency.
Chicago declined Moncada’s $25 million option Friday for the 2025 season and elected to go with a $5 million buyout instead. Moncada played just 12 games last season after suffering a left adductor strain, giving the nine-year veteran 208 appearances logged — or 69 on average — for the past three seasons with the White Sox.
Moncada, the former No. 1 prospect in baseball, was traded from the Boston Red Sox — alongside pitcher Michael Kopech and minor leaguers Luis Alexander Basabe and Victor Diaz — to Chicago in 2016 in exchange for eight-time All-Star pitcher Chris Sale. Moncada was touted as the next big name thing for the Red Sox, projected to establish himself in Boston’s infield but ultimately didn’t stick around.
The franchise had other ideas with then-prospect Rafael Devers on the rise in Boston’s farm system, plus with Sale — an established ace-caliber arm — the Red Sox put together a star-studded rotation. Sale, Rick Porcello, the reigning American League Cy Young Award winner at the time, and David Price, the 2012 AL Cy Young Award recipient, joined forces and won the 2018 World Series together.
Meanwhile, Chicago gave Moncada room and patience to develop but he failed to live up to the hype that stuck by his name when signed by the Red Sox in 2015 out of Cuba for $31.5 million — the largest ever given to an international free agent at the time.
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Moncada’s highlight campaign came in 2019 when he slashed .315/.367/.548 with a career-best 25 home runs, 34 doubles and 79 RBIs in 132 games. Chicago was impressed enough to lock Moncada to a five-year, $70 million extension the following offseason, just before Moncada’s regression and injury struggles began to catch up to him. Still, Moncada’s stock value — as is — should earn himself a big league spot elsewhere.
A veteran infielder with defensive versatility and reliability, Moncada might not have to wait too long in free agency until another organization takes him off the open market.
