First start a solid one for Jordan

Hours before he took the hill at Yankee Stadium Wednesday before what turned out to be a solid major league debut, Jordan Montgomery was nervous.

He’d gotten to the park early, around 9 a.m., drank a few cups of coffee and ate breakfast. It may have been too early, in fact, because that meant he was just waiting and thinking.

“Had so much downtime this morning, kinda killed me,” Montgomery said.

He’d been to the stadium the day before, tossing the ball with bullpen catcher Radley Haddad, but it didn’t quell the tension he felt. He hadn’t been that nervous pitching, he said, since throwing in the College World Series as a freshman at the University of South Carolina in 2012.

When the game rolled around, he was nervous still. After striking out the first two batters, Montgomery got ahead 0-2 on Evan Longoria and ended up walking him. The next batter was Rickie Weeks Jr., who made him pay with a two-run shot to the left field seats.

“Two-out walks always come back to get ya,” Montgomery said.

His nerves then settled. Longoria’s homer accounted for the only two earned runs in Montgomery’s 4.2-inning outing in the Yankees’ 8-4 win. A third unearned run scored after Montgomery left the game.

“You want to see how they respond, and I thought he responded well,” Joe Girardi said. “He went back to pitching, put it behind him and got some important outs for us today. We kind of had him on a pitch count today, that’s why I took him out.”

Montgomery gave up several more hard-hit balls, but he got through each of those jams. The most critical of those came in the third inning after Montgomery put two aboard with one out and Longoria at the plate. He struck out the Rays star and then did the same to Weeks to get out of the tough spot unscathed.

“I feel like usually in more pressure situations, that’s when I execute my best pitches,” Montgomery said. “I really buckled down — I mean, I had a lot of pressure situations. Next time I want to go out there and have a couple more quick innings.”

Though Montgomery doesn’t throw super hard — he sat around 92-93 Wednesday — he managed to strike out seven. Most of those came via swings at his slider.

“I thought he used all his pitches effectively,” Girardi said. “Could he have spotted his fastball better today? Yes. Could his two-seamer have had more run? We’d seen more run on it, yes. But for the first start, I’m pretty pleased.” Girardi said Montgomery should get another start. And for as nervous as Montgomery may have been, his parents may have been worse.

“We made it through it,” his father, Jim Montgomery, said. “It’s nerve-wracking, always.”