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Jordan Montgomery’s 2024 season didn’t exactly go as planned, either for Montgomery or the team that signed him, the Diamondbacks. Montgomery was real good for the Cardinals in 2023 before a midseason trade shipped him to the Rangers, where he was a revelation, and a significant part of their first-ever World Series championship — a title they won for besting the Diamondbacks. This year, though, Montgomery made just 21 starts (and 25 appearances), totaling 117 innings, and produced an ERA+ of 67 in the process.
Given an ERA+ of 100 is supposed to represent an average performance, Montgomery was awful. Throw in that he managed a 136 mark in the stat in 2023, and entered 2024 at 116 for his career, and that 67, somehow, looks even worse. It’s not an entirely unexpected outcome, however. Montgomery, despite his strong 2023 and years of above-average work, sat on the sidelines as a free agent for the entire offseason, and then some. He didn’t agree to a deal with the Diamondbacks until March 29 — not only was this after the start of spring training, it was after the start of the actual regular season, which had begun the day before.
Montgomery made his first start of the season on April 19, despite not having a normal offseason or the traditional spring training ramp up. Things started out well enough, but his season quickly turned, and then, on top of the performance issues, came a knee injury in June. Montgomery didn’t pitch much better after the injury than before it, and finished 2024 with an ERA of 6.23; his adjusted rates like FIP looked much better than that, but still much worse than he was supposed to be.
It’s pretty easy to blame the highly disrupted routine (and the injury) for Montgomery’s performance, which came during a one-year deal with a player option for a second — it was supposed to be a season in which he’d prove he could be as good as his 2023 suggested, giving him the fuller body of work he needed for the kind of contract he had been asking for. Diamondbacks’ owner Ken Kendrick has decided to take a different approach, though, during an interview with Arizona Sports 98.7 (transcription from The Athletic):
If anyone wants to blame anyone for Jordan Montgomery being a Diamondback, you’re talking to the guy that should be blamed. I brought it to their attention, I pushed for it. They agreed to it. It wasn’t in our game plan.
…
Looking back, in hindsight, a horrible decision to have invested that money in a guy who performed as poorly as he did. It’s our biggest mistake this season from a talent standpoint.
Where to start. Montgomery wasn’t in the game plan, sure, but the problem wasn’t in adding him so much as in the way they went about it. Having Montgomery go from signed on March 29 to starting a regular season game just a couple weeks later — and with just two minor-league starts before then, neither of which he was sharp in — was an issue. He didn’t have the time to settle in, and it showed, with a hole dug that neither he nor the team could dig him out of before they ran out of season.
Blake Snell, who also signed late, though in mid-March, struggled early with the Giants. He managed to eventually bounce back after some trips to the Injured List and minors, and looked like the same guy who won a Cy Young in 2023 for the Padres before the year ended. These guys go to spring training for a reason, you know, and having to jump right in (or basically right in) without much in the way of prep against players who have spent six weeks or more getting their timing down and the rust off… well, it can look a lot like the early parts of Montgomery and Snell’s campaigns.
Kendrick said that “in hindsight” this was a terrible use of their resources, but that’s also the wrong way to look at it. Adding Montgomery was a good call: the timing wasn’t the best, and pushing him to the roster so soon made it worse, but the basic idea of “let’s add a good pitcher to a team that nearly won the World Series last year” wasn’t a mistake.
Which leads us to two possible conclusions here, as to what Kendrick was up to with this interview. Supposedly absorbing the blame by throwing the player with the highest 2024 salary on the team under the bus is either Kendrick absolutely fumbling an attempt at saying the team needs to be better, including himself, or, it’s Kendrick trying to make the environment Montgomery has the choice to opt into or out of for 2025 seem unwelcoming, in the hopes of getting him to choose the latter. Given this is an MLB owner we’re talking about, and not one with much of a history for spending, it could be either. These guys put their feet in their mouths all the time; they are also often strategic about ways to avoid spending money. The 2024 Diamondbacks had the highest payroll in franchise history, and while it wasn’t that high at $163 million, it was still a significant increase over 2023 ($116 million), which itself was a jump from consecutive sub-$100 million payrolls.
Trying to free up some cash for 2025 — whether to spend it on another player or to hold onto it for “flexibility” — by making Montgomery feel as if he should seek employment elsewhere is… probably not a great plan. But it is a plan. Montgomery might think it silly to opt out after his horrible 2024, though, so there’s probably little you can do to convince him that that would be the right call. We’re talking about a player who publicly criticized his agent, Scott Boras, for causing him to have to sign a make-good deal in the first place: after his dreadful ‘24, making good while getting paid $22.5 million for it is probably going to be much more appealing than hitting the market again if he’s that concerned about what he’s going to be pulling in for a paycheck.
Then again… an incentive-heavy one-year deal to give it another go with an organization that didn’t just have its owner go on the radio to criticize him could be worth the extra hassle for Montgomery. Say, one that could maybe help him find his old form again. I don’t have one in mind, I’m just going through the options and thought process here — maybe that will feel like a better launch point for the bigger deal Montgomery is seeking in 2026 and beyond than what he feels Arizona has to offer him. And if not, well. His next meeting with Kendrick might be a little awkward, is all.
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