White Sox shortstop Colson Montgomery is a hot shot, but not a hot hitter
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Colson Montgomery won the three-point shooting contest among his fellow White Sox teammates Wednesday morning outside the club’s training facility, which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Growing up in small-town Indiana — Holland, population 619 — he was as proficient in basketball as he now is in baseball. Hoosiers basketball, of course, runs in the blood.
Montgomery defeated Mike Vasil, Ryan Borucki and Zach Franklin, hitting 12 out of 20 shots. That’s 60%, much better than the average three-point range in the NBA right now of 36-37%.
In contrast, he’s batting .185 playing shortstop for the Sox this spring after .239 as a big-leaguer last season in 71 games when he was called up from the minors on July 4.
Despite all that, Sox manager Will Venable said Wednesday before the Sox played the Angels at Camelback Ranch that Montgomery will be on the Opening Day roster and at shortstop on March 26 at Milwaukee. He’ll bounce between short and third base.
“He’s been having a good spring,” Venable said about Montgomery. “The pregame work has been great. There have been some barrels there recently. He’s still coming along, trying to find his way at the plate. But the defensive stuff, the running stuff we’ve asked him to do — he’s been outstanding.”
It was a dream of Montgomery’s as a kid to be out there on opening day, and this would be his first one in the major leagues.
“I think it’s a dream of everyone,” he said.
Baseball can be a killer with its large doses of failure.
As Michael Jordan discovered in his aborted transition from basketball to baseball, hitting a ball is perhaps the hardest thing to do in sports. Jordan’s career NBA shooting percentage was 49.7%, mostly for the Bulls where he won six titles. His batting average in 1994 during one season playing for the Birmingham Barons was .202. And that was Double-A.
Montgomery, 24, is like many of the young White Sox players — a work in progress. He’s 5-for-27 with two homers, three RBI and eight strikeouts thus far this spring.
It’s the dog days of camp, for sure.
“It’s definitely when you get to this time of the spring, the days seem the same and start getting a little stagnant,” he said after smacking a hit in four at-bats Tuesday as the Sox lost to the A’s at Hohokam Stadium. “You just have to keep being process-oriented. Just come in and do the work you need to do to play 162.”
Montgomery had to make the choice between basketball and baseball early in his amateur career. He was recruited by Purdue and Louisville to play basketball, but chose baseball out of high school when the Sox selected him with the 22nd pick in the 2021 amateur draft. At 6-3, he’s the all-time leading scorer in Southridge High School basketball history with 1,966 career points.
But the Sox gave him a $3 million signing bonus, which made the decision easy.
He’s now playing for a second-year manager in Venable, who had to make a similar decision between baseball and basketball, albeit at Princeton, where he excelled at both sports.
“I always liked basketball better until I made baseball my profession,” Venable said.
And for good reasons. Venable averaged 10 points for Princeton in basketball and .344 in his first season playing baseball, earning All-Ivy honorable mention.
“I was always a basketball guy, but learned later in high school and early in college that playing it after college was really not my path,” Venable added.
Montgomery made a similar decision, and now he’s following his own path.
“My goal every day is just to get everything out of each day,” he said. “Just show up and try to be the best person, the best player I can every single day. If I do that results-wise everything is going to fall in place. It’s a building block every day. That’s the way I look at it. Baseball is such a tough game.”
On Wednesday, he fell back on his other sport. Swoosh.