Monty finally gets off schneid in ’22
LOOK. We get it. The norms and numbers of baseball have blown past us in a rush. We have three true outcomes now. We have OPS. We have OPS-plus. We have ERAplus. If you aren’t careful, no matter how much baseball you watch, you might find yourself wondering what, precisely, you’re watching. So yes: we understand. Wins don’t provide the optimum measurement for how effective starting pitchers are. There is much logic behind that, the idea that no one player should be recognized for “winning” such a team sport. We have other ways to measure pitchers now, and those numbers do tend to give a fuller, richer picture. Cy Young would’ve had to find something other than 511 wins to get an award named after him. Jack Chesbro would’ve had to figure out something other than winning 41 games in 1904 to be recognized as a marvel of the “modern” baseball era. And there’s no telling what might happen to you if you’d told Charles
“Old Hoss” Radbourn that 60 wins for the 1884 Providence Grays weren’t as impressive as his 0.922 WHIP that year.
That said?
Jordan Montgomery won a baseball game at Yankee Stadium Tuesday night, on the final day of May, going seven strong innings in a 9-1 Yankees rout of the Angels. Montgomery lowered his ERA on the season from 3.30 to 3.04, lowered his WHIP from 1.058 to 1.011.
And improved his won-loss record to 1-1 in 10 starts.
“These guys love playing behind Monty,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said. “For them to put a crooked number up early, it’s good to see him get some run support like that.”
In truth, Montgomery is actually a case study for why the “win” stat is becoming more and more obsolete for starting pitchers. He’d been bitten by deplorable run support — of his first nine starts, the Yankees scored three or fewer runs eight times — and had also seen some leads vanish after turning in a solid night’s work.
As 0-1 pitchers go, Montgomery was a hell of an 0-1 pitcher.
The Yankees had grown weary answering questions about why the bats seem to go silent when Montgomery’s on the hill.
They left little mystery to this one, ransacking Noah Syndergaard for four firstinning runs and building a 7-0 lead before Montgomery’s lone blemish of the night, a Luis Rengifo solo homer one out into the seventh.
The Yankees also safe-guarded him with two extraordinary defensive plays — Aaron Judge taking a home run away from Shohei Ohtani in the top of the first, Isiah Kiner-Falafa taking an RBI single away from Mike Trout a few innings later.
And Montgomery did the rest: seven innings, four hits, one walk, four strikeouts.
“We gave him some run support,” said Jose Trevino, who did his part by picking Matt Duffy off first base, slugging a tworun homer and somehow finagling his way home from third on a ground ball. “We went with his strengths, more cutters than we wanted but he did a good job keeping them off-balance.”
Said Montgomery, with his usual brevity: “I tried to execute my pitches and let the defense work behind me. And it worked.”
It worked beautifully, in truth, much the way so many of his starts this year have worked. He’s mostly stayed in and around the strike zone all year, which is always the key to maximizing his effectiveness.
Of course, Montgomery is just one member of the band, of the starting quintet and the pitching staff at large, which entered the game with a team ERA of 2.95 — that’s an astonishing number no matter how dead the baseball may or may not have been in April and May — and helped lower it.
“We all want to do our part,” he said. He did his. And he got an old-fashioned win for his effort, first of the season, 20th of his career, and two things are certain, even if Montgomery himself would never think to say so: he won’t have to talk about being on the schneid anymore. And even if wins are as old-fashioned as a game of pepper, he isn’t likely to give it back.