How Jordan Montgomery finally beat Yordan Alvarez،
HOUSTON — Over the winter, Jordan Montgomery spent his days at Tread Athletics, a performance lab about 10 miles outside Charlotte, honing his throwing skills. While Tread coaches liked almost everything about Montgomery, from his size to his competitiveness to his willingness to learn, what they liked most was his curveball. They loved him so much that he earned a nickname:
The death ball.
To the naked eye, it looks like a perfectly OK curveball, and based on spin rate and break alone, it’s nothing special. And it confuses hitters anyway.
Yordan Álvarez learned his power Sunday night in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series. The Houston Astros slugger, one of the best hitters in the world, coming off a split series in which he hit four homers in four games, faced Montgomery three times. All three ended with Álvarez running through the Death Ball. Never had a pitcher struck out Álvarez three times in a single game.
Montgomery isn’t just any pitcher. Acquired by the Texas Rangers at the trade deadline for exactly one night like tonight, the 30-year-old turned in one of the best starts – and certainly the most important – of his career in Game 1. He pitched 6⅓ scoreless innings and neutralized Álvarez in the Rangers’ 2-0 victory that stole home-field advantage from Houston and silenced the once-raucous crowd of 42,872 at Minute Maid Park.
In the three at-bats Montgomery faced with Álvarez, he threw 17 pitches – eight sinkers, six Death Balls, two four-seam fastballs and even a changeup, a rarity for a left-handed pitcher against a left-handed hitter. He worked inside and outside, up and down, completely avoiding the middle of the strike zone. If a pitcher wants to beat Álvarez, he has to empty his bag of tricks.
It’s a good thing Montgomery’s curveball is magic.
“When it comes out of his hand, it looks like a fastball,” Álvarez said. “It makes it a little more difficult. The way he releases the ball, the angle he releases it at, makes the recovery a little more difficult and makes it look like a fastball.”
This is why, even with the analytics that inform so much about baseball today, context matters. At Tread, Montgomery worked not only on the form of his pitches, but also on how his speech presents them. Álvarez suggesting that Montgomery’s curveball resembles a fastball may seem odd — the average velocity on Montgomery’s fastball Sunday night was 93.3 mph; on the curveball, 79.8 – but he’s not wrong. That’s how Montgomery and his coaches designed it.
They recognized that Montgomery had two things that worked in his favor on the field: his size and his release point. It didn’t spin particularly hard and didn’t have the looping action that a more aesthetically pleasing curve might provide. He came out flat and broke late — and when paired with that sinker and a four-seam fastball, he turned into a haymaker.
Montgomery’s release point on the Death Ball is 80.2 inches off the ground, the second-highest vertical release on a curve in baseball (behind his Game 1 opponent, Justin Verlander). Montgomery releases his 80.4-inch four-seamer vertically and his 80.9-inch sinker – and the horizontal release points of all three are less than half an inch apart. The tunnel effect tricks hitters into thinking they’re seeing one thing when it’s something else, and that’s what left Álvarez struggling, with five whiffs among the 17 pitches he saw.
When he was about 12 years old and growing up in South Carolina, Montgomery learned to draw a curve when his father, Jim, helped him wrap duct tape around Coke cans to give them more weight . Montgomery was trying to throw them into a nearby trash can. Eventually he took notice of the pitch, rode it to the University of South Carolina and used it to get to the major leagues with the New York Yankees. They traded him to the St. Louis Cardinals last season, and the Cardinals received a bonus from the Rangers in the late July deal that brought him to Texas.
Upon his arrival, Montgomery did not think he would be the team’s ace in the playoffs, not with the subsequent acquisition of Max Scherzer, and Nathan Eovaldi pitching as a front-line starter. But Eovaldi was injured. And Scherzer did it too. And Montgomery found himself not only starting Game 1 of Texas’ wild-card series against Tampa Bay, but doing the same against the Astros, whose seventh straight ALCS appearance extended the league record.
Álvarez helped carry the Astros here. The 26-year-old is a dream hitter: powerful but precise. He destroys right-handed pitchers – and crushes lefties, too. Her holes are more pinpricks than Swiss cheese. Cutting it out requires the precision of a surgeon.
Dr. Montgomery started first with a clear plan: to work Álvarez inside. He started with a low, inside sinker that Álvarez fouled, moved up and inside with a sinker that Álvarez mistook for a ball, then hammered three more pitches to the inside: a curveball that Álvarez took for a strike, a sinker that he fouled and a curveball that he crossed.
“We know he likes to extend, and we were going to make him fight inside, make him a little uncomfortable,” said Rangers catcher Jonah Heim, an All-Star widely praised for his decision-making and framing skills. “And when he squirms a little bit, we try to catch him, and the curveball plays. [Montgomery] did an incredible job of execution.”
The second at-bat could have been even more impressive. In all the years Montgomery spent in the AL East, he learned that the best hitters, like Rafael Devers, will eventually sell out on an infield if you keep hitting there. So, after missing the pitch with a sinker, Montgomery hit a four-seam shot up the middle that Álvarez tipped through. He came back high and with a sinker that Álvarez fouled, tried to change his eye level with an even higher four-seamer and went inside twice – a change for a ball, a sinker committed a foul – before another Death Ball.
“I wanted to swing it,” Montgomery said. “I was going to make him fight with my best throw there. And usually when you don’t miss the middle, it’s a good day.”
That’s the problem with Montgomery. He’s not a snacker. He’s not someone who picks in corners. He attacks the hitters directly. And he is not afraid to deepen his repertoire. Earlier this week, Rangers outfielder Robbie Grossman told Montgomery he needed to use a sliding pitch toward home plate rather than his full throw when no one was on base. Well, in his third at-bat against Álvarez, trailing 2-0, Montgomery conjured one more round and froze Álvarez on perhaps the hardest pitch he would see all day, a low sinker and in the middle of the marble. .
“It’s not just about the curve,” Astros third baseman Alex Bregman said. “He’s got a bunch of other weapons as well, and he executes really well. So I think it’s really just execution. It’s a good pitch.”
Montgomery knows this, and so after getting that first shot against Álvarez, he didn’t throw anything else. On 2-1, Montgomery threw a curve down the strike zone; Álvarez rolled over. The next pitch was a bouncer, away from home plate, and it left Álvarez struggling, looking less like one of the best hitters in the world and more like a guy completely perplexed by what he was seeing.
Three at-bats. Three strikeouts to end the inning. And a gift of a performance, both to Rangers and to his family.
On Saturday, Montgomery’s wife, McKenzie, celebrated her birthday. And Sunday was his dad’s, and Jim was asking for a playoff win as the perfect gift. An ALCS victory over a future Hall of Famer was enough.
Montgomery is not finished. He will likely start another match in this series, when he faces Verlander again. He’ll follow the meticulous routine of pregame plyoball drills that his coach, Tyler Zombro, taught him at Tread — the ones that help him find consistency in his delivery and conviction in his movements. He will get together with Heim and his pitching coach, Mike Maddux, with whom he vibed almost immediately after his arrival, and plan his game.
And then he’ll try to continue doing exactly what he’s done all postseason and what he hopes to do throughout the World Series: run them dead.
