My piece last month on players I was wrong about was missing a name I’d intended to include: Rangers starter Jordan Montgomery. I absolutely whiffed on him, writing very little about him as a prospect and woefully underrating him the three times I did mention him in writing, as he’s both a key part of the Rangers’ rotation right now and heading toward what should be a very lucrative free agency. So I wanted to talk about where I was wrong and what has made him so effective.
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The Yankees took Montgomery in the fourth round of the 2014 draft out of the University of South Carolina, where he was a strike-thrower with solid numbers but strikeout rates that didn’t inspire a lot of confidence that he’d miss bats in pro ball. In three years with the Gamecocks, he never struck out a man an inning in any season, but his walk rates never hit 7 percent, and he kept the ball in the park. It’s a statistical profile that often points to a back-end starter future, with plenty of variance in either direction around that median.
I didn’t write much about Montgomery while he was a prospect or a rookie, but what I wrote was never very complimentary. When the Yanks took him, I referred to him as “a soft-tossing lefty who relies on deception and changing speeds,” which was accurate enough at the time but gave him no room to gain velocity or other stuff, even though he was 6-foot-6 and had some room left on his frame. He did pick up some velo in the minors, averaging 91.9 mph on his four-seamer in his rookie season of 2017, with below-average movement on pretty much everything. But when I wrote in September of that year that Montgomery lacked a plus pitch, I really undersold what he was doing with what he had.
He posted positive run values for all three of his offspeed pitches — curveball, slider, and changeup — in that first season, even though none of the pitches looked like they would be that effective or had movement data to point that way. He underwent Tommy John surgery in June of the following year and only threw 7 2/3 total innings in 2019, so by the time the pandemic hit, he hadn’t really returned to the mound in any meaningful way, and he suffered through what remains his worst season in 2020 with a 5.11 ERA.
There were signs in 2020 that he was not only back to the pitcher he was before the injury, but on track to be even better. His velocity crept up on both the four-seamer and sinker to 92.5 mph (all data here is from Baseball Savant), a trend that continued into 2021 and beyond, to the point where he had the highest average velocity of his career on both pitches in 2023, 93.4 on the four-seamer and 93.3 on the sinker. He also started sinking the ball a lot more effectively after the surgery, going from slightly below-average vertical movement to slightly above, with comparable or greater improvement on the pitch’s horizontal movement.
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So he was sinking the sinker better, at higher velocity, with more side-to-side movement for good measure — and by 2023 it had become his primary fastball after years of a roughly equal split between the two. Hitters hit his sinker hard fairly often, 42 percent of the time in 2023, but they can’t elevate the pitch when they do so; more than half of the balls hitters hit at 95 mph off Montgomery’s sinker had a launch angle of 8 degrees or less, all the way down to one ball hit by Brian Anderson at 102.5 mph and -37 degrees. Baseball Savant’s run values have Montgomery’s sinker as one of the 20 most valuable pitches of any type in MLB in 2023, and fifth among sinkers, although two of the guys ahead of him, Dane Dunning and Yennier Cano, are also in this Division Series.
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On top of the improvement in his sinker and his overall fastball velocity, Montgomery remains extremely deceptive, including keeping hitters from distinguishing between those two types of fastballs. Montgomery benefits from the phenomenon known as seam-shifted wake, which results in his sinker running more toward his arm side while the four-seamer has some slight run towards his glove side — and both look pretty much the same out of his hand. We don’t have this data prior to 2020, but I’m going to guess it was always there or at least mostly there, and that’s why he was effective even when he wasn’t sitting 93-94 and didn’t have great pure movement data on any of his pitches. Now that he has more pure velocity, he doesn’t have to rely as much on fooling hitters into thinking the sinker is the four-seamer or vice versa as long as he throws the latter pitch enough to keep hitters from automatically recognizing the sinker.
I’m less bothered by failing to account for the potential of the velocity increase than I am by the failure to recognize how much Montgomery’s deception really helped him. I’d never seen Montgomery live from behind the plate — I still haven’t, actually, although I suppose that ship has long sailed — which might have helped, because just seeing him on TV made me think some regression was inevitable. There was no way a guy with stuff that mediocre could keep pitching well! He didn’t even have high spin rates that might have explained away some of the results. He still doesn’t, actually. But he sinks the ball effectively and has a ton of deception, boosted by being left-handed and thus gaining a natural advantage against left-handed hitters.
The challenge for the Orioles is going to be getting some of their hard contact into the air, since you know Montgomery doesn’t walk many hitters and has shown he can limit the damage from hard contact by making hitters drive the ball right into the ground. And those same skills are going to make him a coveted target for teams needing pitching — which, by my count, is somewhere between 28 and 30 of them — this winter.
(Photo: Ron Jenkins / Getty Images)