The Mexican League’s Leones De Yucatán announced that they have signed right-hander Huascar Ynoa. He had signed a minor league deal with the Minnesota Twins in the offseason but he was released last month, per his transactions tracker at MLB.com.
Ynoa, turning 27 this month, didn’t have a good tenure with the Twins. He made five Triple-A appearance but allowed five earned runs in 4 1/3 innings. He issued seven walks and hit a batter while only recording one strikeout. That poor performance seemingly led to his release. Now that he’s signing in Mexico, it seems he didn’t get much interest from the other affiliated clubs.
However, he is still relatively young and put up some good numbers a few years ago. With Atlanta in 2021, he tossed 91 innings with a 4.05 earned run average. His 26.9% strikeout rate, 6.7% walk rate and 47.3% ground ball rate were all better than average.
Unfortunately, he hasn’t been able to build off that solid season in subsequent years. In 2022, he had two bad starts to begin the year and spent most of the season in Triple-A, putting up a 5.68 ERA at Gwinnett. He required Tommy John surgery in September of that year, which wiped out his entire 2023. Last year, he missed more time due to a stress reaction in his elbow. He logged only 29 2/3 innings in the minors with a 6.37 ERA. He was non-tendered by Atlanta, which led to his minor league deal with the Twins.
After missing most of the 2023-24 seasons, it’s perhaps not shocking that Ynoa showed some rust to start this year. Ideally, the Leones can give him some time to get back into a groove and rediscover his previous form. If that comes to pass, he would likely have MLB clubs calling him up again.
Photo courtesy of Kim Klement Neitzel, Imagn Images
That broken hand from losing his cool was the death knell for his career.
He was showing promise with Atlanta. Hopefully he can turn things around and get another shot
Huascar did the FAFO. Lost his cool and probably cost him millions in future earnings. I hope he learned from it.
I swore he had shoulder issues along with his elbow stuff. And true shoulder issues are like a death sentence in baseball (in my opinion) … and shoulder issues with the Braves (as minor as it may seem) are amplified 1000x because they always under play how bad a shoulder situation is
Michael Ynoa had the bluest eyes
Nothing has gone right for him since he broke his hand hitting the dugout wall. And he was in the middle of having a great season.
They also signed Leury Garcia
I thought he had really turned a corner in atlanta. He was pitching well and looked like one of the better pitchers the braves had at that time.. I was sad to see he could not pick up where he had left off after breaking his hand.