Kansas City Royals: Don’t count Adalberto Mondesi out yet

Besides the fact that Mondesi is doing something the vast majority of players didn’t do, his numbers are the easiest reason to say “maybe not”.

But when you look beyond the numbers, that’s not a fair assessment. In fact, when you look beyond the numbers you actually start to see the reason why he might have struggled the first two times.

Mondesi has currently accrued 0.121 years of service time. For some clarification, one year of

service time equals 172 days, even though a regular season is 183 days. Therefore, 0.172 years of service time is the same as one-year (1.000) of service time. Also, the only way you can gain a day of service time is to be on the 25-man roster. So, another 51 days and Mondesi will have one full year.

Back to the point. Over those 121 days that Mondesi has been on the big league roster, he has only played in 72 games. That alone is him playing just 60% of the time he’s been called up. That might have something to do with his bad numbers.

But let’s look closer.

Those 72 games and 121 days span a two year period. In 2016 he played in 47 games and was on the big league roster for 69 days. Which meant that 68% of the time he was up he was playing. In 2017 he played in 25 games and was on the big league roster for 52 days, which meant 48% of the time he was playing.

However, of those 72 games, Mondesi was a pinch-runner in six games and had only one at-bat in seven games. Meaning, in 13 games he played in he either never had an at-bat or just swung the bat once.

So instead of looking at it as “72 games played” where we think he was starting and finishing, we will call it 59 games in which he played and had more of a chance to find consistency at the plate. That bumps him down to playing just 49% of the time.

Then we look at the games where he had at least two plate appearances. Over those 72 games, he didn’t start and finish another nine games.