Mexican League's Leons de Yucatán announces they have signed right-handed Huascar YNOA. He signed a minor league contract with the Minnesota twins during the offseason, but his trading tracker on MLB.com was released last month.
YNOA is 27 this month, and the twins have bad tenure. He showed up with five triple A but allowed five runs in 4 1/3 innings. He issued seven walks and the batsman recorded only one strikeout. This bad performance seemed to lead to his release. Now that he is signing in Mexico, it seems that he is not very interested in other affiliated clubs.
However, he is still very young and proposed a lot of numbers a few years ago. He threw 91 innings in Atlanta in 2021 with an average run of 4.05. His 26.9% strikeout rate, 6.7% walk rate and 47.3% ground ball rate are all better than average.
Unfortunately, he was unable to build that steady season in the following years. In 2022, he started two bad starts this year and spent much of the season in Triple-A, holding a 5.68 ERA at Gwinnett. He asked Tommy John for surgery in September of that year, which eliminated his entire 2023. Last year, he missed more time due to pressure responses in his elbow. He recorded only 29 2/3 innings in minors with 6.37 ERA. He was not interested in Atlanta, which led to his minor league deal with the twins.
After missing much of the 2023-24 season, it may not be shocking that YNOA will start to rust this year. Ideally, Leons could give him some time to go back into the groove and rediscover his former form. If that passes by, he might have the MLB club summoned him again.
Image courtesy of Kim Klement Neitzel, Imagn Image
