At 100 losses in August and rocketing toward the worst offensive season in decades, and possibly the worst overall MLB season ever, the White Sox could really use a savior.
As still their top-ranked positional prospect, Colson Montgomery could really use more time. Five hits over the weekend lent him some breathing room in fighting to stay above the Mendoza line (.210/.328/.375) and under a 30 percent strikeout rate at Triple-A (29.2), but the main work product of the 22-year-old's statistically disappointing campaign is something nearly everyone in the organization says we'll see down the road.
"This is going to be really good for him," said director of player development Paul Janish. "The game's hard, man. Especially at the major league level, it's not an environment where people just move out of your way."
"It's the first time of going through a little bit of an extended period of failure," said Justin Jirschele, who managed Montgomery for most of the year. "He continues to stay positive every single day, continues to work, is not shying away from where he's at. It's been a really mature approach."
That the organization's best offensive prospect since the White Sox carved up the major league roster for a bushel of them in 2017, and certainly their most celebrated high school position player draft pick in recent memory, is going through a protracted stretch of struggling to hit for average is widely being couched as a necessary thing. It's to the point that even Montgomery himself, offered a softball question to discuss what part of his season he's most proud of, opted for celebrating the purpose behind his offensive woes over lauding his defensive gains.
"A lot of people probably don't want to hear this, but I'm happy that I'm kind of struggling," Montgomery said. "That's what everyone has been talking about. It's honestly good to go through these things right now, because I'd rather deal with it now than when I get to the big leagues. Because it it does happen in the big leagues, then I'll know what to do and I'll know what to go back to if this ever happens again."
The contraction of minor league baseball has changed the standards of young for the level, and 21-year-old Edgar Quero has been thriving in the middle of the Charlotte Knights order, just as Montgomery is frequently being slid down to hitting sixth these days. Yet Montgomery is still more than four years younger than the average player in the International League, aggressively assigned after a scant 51 games in Double-A (only 37 of them coming last season).
A meaningful adjustment period isn't damning for Montgomery's future as a major league regular, whether he sticks at shortstop or tumbles down the defensive spectrum. It's just the expectations for him are such that every week his struggles persist raises more questions about whether he's still on track to become a major league superstar. Also the nature of Montgomery's power and patience approach -- and the shape of his current production -- are such that rather than looking like an unrefined athlete, he more resembles a limited player. His hard contact is overly tilted to the pull side, his damage has mostly come on pitches below the belt, and Triple-A pitching is sophisticated enough to model attack plans away from those strengths.
"That's really how I've been pitched," Montgomery said. "They're going to try to change my eye level with a lot of things and also trying to get me off the plate. I've just got to stick with plans and my approach at the plate and don't let the pitcher dictate all that."
It's perhaps that Montgomery's batting eye and plate approach is so respected that his nearing 500 plate appearances of relative mediocrity -- an accomplishment of its own given his injury history -- invites so much suspicion that a more intractable issue is at work.
He lends no credence to the idea that he's a different player since last year's back injury, saying that he felt as mobile and fluid as ever immediately upon returning to action in 2023. Already with a traditional left-handed stroke that cuts through the bottom of the zone most effortlessly, some in the organization wonder if he's developed a habit of dipping his shoulder in a way that cuts him off from pitches above the belt. Others simply feel he's chasing for power production that should come organically from his approach.
But another prevailing theory is that the tall and projectable two-sport athlete the White Sox drafted three years ago has simply grown bigger and stronger -- 6'5", 230 pounds was the spring training estimate -- and his swing is going to have to grow along with it.
Or when it comes to his lower half, it might need to retract.
"He's getting stronger and tighter," said Knights hitting coach Cam Seitzer, son of the longtime Braves hitting coach. "We're trying to nip something in the bud. All really lower-half stuff, because the swing is working from the ground up and if your lower half is out of sync and you're not moving properly, the bat's not going to get into the zone efficiently. Just really trying to make his move more repeatable and working down through contact."
Seitzer wants to simplify Montgomery's "negative move," which is his terminology for the period where the hitter's body is moving away from the ball as it loads up for power, before the "positive move" that is driving forward through the ball. Edgar Quero is slugging .120 points higher than last season largely because his narrower stance allows him to hinge into his back leg quicker than rocking his hips out of a wide base. Bryan Ramos, a few weeks older than Montgomery, is hitting .291/.398/.557 through 20 games in August after he, Seitzer and hitting coordinator Alan Zinter worked to turn his negative move from a loose sway to a tighter coil.
Montgomery looks pretty trim in person, and would be the first to tell you that it's hard not to lose weight over the course of playing baseball for months. But it's still easy to look at his hulking frame and imagine he needs little build up to drive the ball with authority, and needs to be pretty efficient to get his long levers on time for 95 mph.
"It's really how quick he can be from Point A to Point B; for a big boy like that the more efficient he is, the more simple his negative move is, the more repeatable he's going to be," Seitzer said. "He's always been a pretty loose mover when it comes to swinging, which is great. It allows him to do a lot of things with the bat. But he's getting stronger and he's getting tighter. We're talking about making him more stable in his lower half, making him more efficient to the ball and just keep grinding away every day."
In late August, it's easy to envision more substantial progress being made toward this work in Montgomery's offseason, removed from the everyday grind of competing with what he has. It's certainly easier than seeing a September call-up to the majors going smoothly, with Chris Getz recently acknowledging "we’re still looking for a little bit more consistency in the bat" when broached on the topic.
Five months of seeing underwhelming Montgomery box scores slowly chips away at confidence at how much impact he can be expected to have on a major league team that is repeatedly emphasizing how much help it needs. But Montgomery touting a more efficient load, driving elevated upper-half fastballs to the left-center gap and looking big league ready while 23 years old next spring would hardly resemble the product of a sidetracked developmental path.
It's a pretty big "if" to assert that such a leap forward can be pulled off. This is a crossroads for Montgomery's prospect ceiling, and cautious route most prospect outlets are taking of dropping him in the rankings but not hopping off the bus entirely reflecta that. But Montgomery is comforted by the notion that it's a crossroads he always had to reach eventually.
"I'm still the same guy, nothing different," Montgomery said. "If nobody struggled, then you wouldn't be able to see someone's true potential, you know? If you're just having success, success all the time, you wouldn't really know what you need to do to get better."
