For KC Royals’ shortstop Adalberto Mondesi, the comparison is inevitable, an unavoidable consequence of being the baseball playing son of a former major league star. His is a pedigree impossible to ignore; not even a change in name for baseball purposes can deflect study of the son against the backdrop of the father, a former National League outfielder.
Adalberto Mondesi is by birth Raul Adalberto Mondesi, son of Raul Mondesi, an exceptional veteran of 13 major league seasons, the best of them spent with the Dodgers and Blue Jays. But the Royals’ Raul became, by his choice and insistence, Adalberto–he announced shortly after spring training began in 2018 that he wished to be called by that name because it made him comfortable and that’s how people in his home, the Dominican Republic, knew him.