Colson Montgomery Is A Cornerstone For Rebuilding White Sox

Colson Montgomery has been compared to Corey Seager since his high school years in Indiana. The link no longer seems like shallow prospect hype, however, as the oversized shortstop is putting his skills as a power hitter on display for the White Sox, who still can use all the good news they can get.

While skeptics will wisely point to the small sample size, Sox general manager Chris Getz and manager Will Venable must be getting awfully excited. Montgomery has barely been in the big leagues for two months but has already put his name alongside a couple of franchise icons (and another hard-core punisher of baseballs).

When the left-handed-hitting Montgomery lined a 1-2 slider from Keider Montero into the right-field seats at Comerica Park last Friday, it gave him 18 home runs in a 37-game stretch that began on July 22.

In the White Sox’s 125 seasons, they’ve only had three hitters amass home runs that quickly over the same stretch of games: Hall of Famers Frank Thomas and Jim Thome, and Albert Belle in 1998, when he set the franchise record of 49. This is serious business, as Twins All-Star Byron Buxton noted last week.

“Just a baller,” Buxton told the Chicago Sun-Times’ Kyle Williams last week. “He goes up there and he takes great at-bats, quality at-bats. Honestly, it looks like he’s been in the league for a couple of years … just seems like a big leaguer.”

Montgomery was picked 22nd overall in the first round of the 2021 draft, which featured an unusually thin crop of college hitters. He was a 19-year-old senior at Southridge High School in Huntingburg, Ind, and the White Sox got him a taste of Double-A pitching in his first full pro season. But Montgomery’s progress had stalled until Getz sent him to the Arizona complex league for one-on-one work with Ryan Fuller, the organization’s new director of hitting, in late April.

It’s fair to call that time well spent.

“You see him up here, there’s true belief that he is a big-league game-changing player,” Fuller told the Chicago Tribune’s LaMond Pope last week. “The maturity swing-wise, I think you can go back and look at what he was doing in April, how much better he’s moving now, the pitches he’s able to cover, the velocity, breaking balls. The personality … you’re seeing him really enjoy this stage. It’s been really fun to watch.”

Montgomery is hitting .230 with an .849 OPS and 46 RBIs in 53 games entering the upcoming a series against Tampa Bay at Rate Field. He does have a lot of swing-and-miss in his swing, however, leaving him with a 27.8 strikeout rate and a .299 on-base percentage. He’s hardly a finished product.

Statcast’s Hawk-Eye cameras love both his bat speed (77.0 mph) and his ability to hit the ball on the barrel of the bat (14.3 percent). He hasn’t batted enough to qualify for leaderboards but is matching Aaron Judge in bat speed — behind only six other qualifiers — and would be leading the majors in barrel rate if he qualified. The top three are currently Judge, Shohei Ohtani and Pete Alonso.

Like Thomas and Thome, that’s nice company to keep.

Montgomery is listed at 6-3, 230 pounds. His build has led to questions about his ability to stay at shortstop in the major leagues. The White Sox have looked at him at third base but he’s delivered encouraging metrics in the 42 games he’s played at shortstop.

Statcast rates Montgomery’s fielding in the 82nd percentile, with a +5 Fielding Run Value that is largely the result of 91st-percentile range. Fangraphs says he has generated +6 Defensive Runs Saved over his 355 innings in the field. Seager (+16 DRS in 828 innings) is the only big-league regular that has produced more than +1 DRS every 60 innings.

Add it all up, and this is what a cornerstone player looks like. The best news for the Sox is they have Montgomery under contract 2031, with the only question being whether they look to look him up to a contract that runs even longer.

Getz and the White Sox ownership may have some reservations about a long-term deal. The organization was burned by the back end of their commitments to Tim Anderson, Luis Robert Jr., Eloy Jimenez and Yoan Moncada.

The Dodgers went year-to-year with their franchise shortstop, Seager. He delivered 21.8 WAR at a cost of $27,124,583 (per Cot’s Contracts) over 636 games before signing his $325-million contract with the Rangers in 2022.

Would it be the worst thing if the White Sox lost Montgomery to greener pastures 10 years after Seager jumped ship in Los Angeles?

That’s a question for another day. The key for now is that amongst a group of promising young players — led by catchers Kyle Teel and Edgar Quero, second baseman Lenyn Sosa, infielder Chase Meidroth and outfield prospect Braden Montgomery — they have found a cornerstone to build their long-term lineup around.