With the All-Star break less than two weeks away, Major League Baseball released the Futures Game rosters on Monday, and White Sox will be sending two players to Atlanta for the midsummer prospect showcase at Truist Field on July 12. Noah Schultz holds a spot on the American League roster for the second consecutive year, and he's joined by Braden Montgomery, who gets the nod halfway through his first professional season.
The announcement catches neither at what they perceive to be the height of their powers. Montgomery was effusive about his excitement over the opportunity to participate in the Futures Game, but he told reporters that his 2025 performance has "been just all right," and his .263/.336/.459 line at Winston-Salem includes a 20-game slump from mid-May to early June that humbled his numbers.
Still, it's been more good than bad over his first 70 games as a pro. He's recovered from that malaise to hit .314/.351/.543 over his last 18 games, and he's shed the existential concerns about his right-handed swing with an impressive showing against left-handed pitching thus far (.273/.333/.636 with five homers over 63 plate appearances).
"I give our hitting group a lot of credit. We didn’t have any apprehension about his right-handed swing and I don’t think Braden does either," said Paul Janish, the White Sox's director of player development, during a Zoom call on Monday.
"There was a talk about being a little further down the road left-handed, which isn’t that uncommon. Guys get more left-handed at-bats and do more in early work, practice from the left-handed side for that reason. But we’ve tried to help balance him out with regards to some of his preparation and yeah, to this point, from a game-planning standpoint, from a pure ability standpoint, I personally have seen him a couple of times hit impressive home runs right-handed and shoot the ball the other way down the right field line as a right-handed hitter."
The 6-foot-10-inch Schultz is the tougher guy to size up. He spent the first half of the season negotiating unusual control issues at Birmingham, then getting roughed up in his first two starts at Charlotte. Struggles against right-handed hitters have nagged him at both levels.
While Schultz is pitching under a regular starter's workload for the first time in his career, he said he's happy with the way he's felt, and how he's maintained his velocity over the course of six innings. Instead, he echoed Brian Bannister in saying that emphasizing the development of his cutter altered the way he was letting go of his established sinker-slider combo.
"In order to throw the cutter, I had to change my hand positioning and in turn I was changing my hand positioning on my other pitches, which was changing a lot of things," Schultz said. "It was leading to different movement on my fastball, different movement on my slider and becoming more curveball-y. So when I would throw it different spots, it would end up in different spots. If I throw it down the middle to go to the back foot, but it would end up middle-bottom and it would get hit more."
(That helps explain why Schultz's first starts in Statcast stadiums aren't identifying his slider as such.)
The hope is that Schultz's second Futures Game appearance will go better than his first, when he retired just one of the six batters he faced. He'll be paired with a different Montgomery this time around, as Colson was his teammate at Globe Life Field in 2024.
The elder Montgomery instead had to settle for International League Player of the Week honors and a spot on Baseball America's Hot Sheet for his torching of Toledo, which is just as well. From what Janish said on Monday, a Colson Montgomery who sustains that performance into July might have to revise any All-Star break plans regardless.
"One of the things you start to look to is the consistency and being able to pull himself out of a funk, which he really didn't show us last year," Janish said. "He's done that a couple times this year now, which is super encouraging. You do want to strike while the iron's hot with a guy like that. Whether it's a pitcher or a hitter, giving them the opportunity to go up when they're playing well is definitely preferred. He's in a really good place and doing what he needs to do and putting himself in a conversation, for sure."
White Sox Minor Keys
ACL White Sox 5, ACL Reds 3 (7 innings)
- Adrian Gíl was 0-for-3 with two strikeouts.
- Jurdrick Profar, 0-for-2 with a K.
DSL White Sox 5, DSL Blue Jays Blue 1 (7 innings)
- Christian Gonzalez doubled, singled, walked twice and was caught stealing.
- Yordani Soto was 0-for-3 with a walk and two strikeouts.
- Eduardo Herrera, 0-for-3 with a strikeout.
- Alejandro Cruz doubled, singled and walked.
- Diego Perez: 3 IP, 0 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 4 K
Notes:
*Perez, Orlando Suarez and Alexander Martinez combined for a no-hitter (7 IP, 0 H, 1 R, 0 ER, 8 BB, 11 K), although the shutout was spoiled due to an error on the final batter of the game.