Colson Montgomery, who knew he was meant to play in majors, is showing what he can do

There is one word to describe how Colson Montgomery feels now that he’s in the major leagues.

Relief.

For Montgomery, a former first-round draft pick, a small-town high school legend, a prospect-list darling despite limited production, making it to the bigs was supposed to be a given.

Now that he’s “finally” here at 23, the pressure is off and his swing is on.

“A lot of people asked me when I got to the big leagues, why is everything clicking?” he said. “I always believed in myself. I always had belief that I could play here. I knew I was supposed to be a big leaguer.”

Montgomery was talking at his locker before Tuesday’s game against the Kansas City Royals. One pitch into his first at-bat, he deposited Michael Lorenzen’s 94 mph sinker 361 feet off the left field foul pole. It was his fourth game in a row with a home run. It was also his 14th home run of the season, tying him with Luis Robert for third on the team, despite Robert having played in 68 more games.

“To think where we were a couple months ago, we honestly didn’t think he was going to be in the big leagues, and now he comes up and you’re watching what he was able to do and it’s pretty incredible,” White Sox general manager Chris Getz said.

Montgomery’s power surge since making his debut on July 4 in Colorado has been one of the pleasant surprises of the season. The Sox youth movement has shown promising returns lately, but it was missing an impact hitter. And now, after four-plus years in the minors, Montgomery looks like he could fill that role.

So far, 20 of Montgomery’s 35 hits have been for extra bases. At 6 feet 5 inches, with long arms and easy power, the former All-State basketball player is suddenly money from deep.

Armed with one of those torpedo bats, he’s annihilating sliders, sinkers, cutters and curveballs. Eight of his homers have been no-doubters, including a 452-foot shot on Aug. 10, the longest home run at the Sox’s home ballpark this year.

“He hits them well over the fence, it seems like, which is great,” manager Will Venable said the other day. “I know they all count the same, but yeah, it’s exciting to see him really lay into one.”

“He’s been using the new bat that perhaps has given him a little bit of boost or at least a boost in confidence,” Getz said. “He has found a swing that has allowed him to be a threat, and he’s been able to execute on different pitch types. And these aren’t fence scrapers. These are concourse-type home runs.”

So beyond the bat, what’s been the difference?

Despite the hype and the strong start in A ball, Montgomery slugged just .414 over 376 minor-league games spanning five seasons. He hit 29 of his 48 homers in Triple-A Charlotte over the last two seasons. While he still made the Futures Game in 2024, his standing in the scouting world started to dip.

Montgomery, the team’s first-round pick in 2021 out of Huntingburg, Ind., was the team’s top prospect for two years running, but a back injury in 2023 and a middling performance in Charlotte in 2024 didn’t exactly augur future stardom.

The Athletic’s Keith Law wrote that Montgomery looked like an emergency call-up when he saw him play last season. He was being passed up in the prospect rankings by the new additions to the Sox system.

In his prospect rankings from early February 2025, Law wrote of Montgomery, whom he still ranked No. 7 in the Sox system: “On 2024 scouting looks, performance, and data, he’s barely a prospect. It’s his history — and maybe some blind optimism — that’s keeping him alive here.”

Coming off a 121-loss season, absolute rock bottom for a below-average franchise, White Sox fans were clamoring for Montgomery to make the majors out of spring training, and he hit the Sox’s first spring homer on Feb. 24 when he took Cubs lefty Caleb Thielbar deep to center.

But because of back spasms, that was his only hit of the spring. He hit in four games with the big-league club and was optioned to minor-league camp in mid-March. And that’s when his real struggles began.

In his first month with Triple A, he slashed .149/.223/.255 with 43 strikeouts in just 94 at-bats.

And as he scuffled, the Sox started promoting prospects. Infielder Chase Meidroth was called up on April 11. Catcher Edgar Quero came up on April 17.

He was happy for them, but it only deepened his slump. He was in Triple A, thinking about why he wasn’t in the majors. You can tell yourself everyone has a different journey, but when you’re striking out 46% of the time, it’s not going to stick.

“You’re struggling, you’re not doing the best, you just got optioned, you’re supposed to be in the big leagues and all this stuff,” Montgomery said. “And everyone’s like, you’re supposed to be the future, you’re supposed to do all this, and then you don’t play good. You don’t really feel good about yourself.”

In late March, the Sox did something drastic. They told Montgomery they were pulling him out of Charlotte and sending him back to Glendale for an undetermined amount of time to hit with Fuller, the organization’s director of hitting.

“It was very clear that something needed to happen,” Getz said, “and he was striking out in a clip that he had never before and, you know, he was clearly searching, and when Paul (Janish), Ryan Fuller, kind of the whole PD group, came up with the idea to do this type of intervention of (sending) him to Arizona. We obviously felt like it was worth trying.”

According to both sides, it went over OK because Montgomery had enough people, including his agents, telling him it was for the best.

“All right, they do have confidence in me,” Montgomery said. “They do believe in me. I get to come here, I get to hit every day for six hours and I get to go home and do it again.”

He worked with Fuller, played in a week’s worth of Arizona Complex League games and returned to Charlotte in mid-May. It took about a month but he finally started hitting.

Meanwhile, Sox prospects kept getting called up. Tim Elko made his debut on May 10. Kyle Teel debuted on June 6. Pitcher Grant Taylor arrived June 10.

But Montgomery was making his own case for a call-up. He hit six homers and slugged .672 in June. His defense stayed sharp.

“It got to the point where, OK, we felt like this was a time to bring him to the big leagues,” Getz said. “It was a testament to him and his belief in himself, the determination.”

And now look at him go. His start hasn’t been flawless. He’s hitting .230 with a .288 on-base percentage and striking out 27.3% of the time. Four-seam fastballs and change-ups are eating him up. You could look at him and see a guy who could hit 40 homers and not much else.

But maybe he’s more than that. For one thing, his defensive success in the minors has carried over.

“Defensively, he has been outstanding, Venable said. “Looking at his swing, big, physical guy, him hitting homers isn’t a surprise. I just didn’t see the defense play like it has played. I saw him in limited action in spring training. I had no history with him before that. So that’s been a really pleasant surprise.”

Getz said sometimes guys just don’t take off until they get to the majors, when the pressure to be a prospect is off and the quality of everything is greater.

Montgomery thinks there’s something else to it. Baseball now has a meaning beyond his own success.

“Once I got up here, I’m like, it’s completely different, I’m playing this game to win,” he said. “In the minor leagues, winning is whatever. It’s more about development and things like that. And you get up here and all that matters is winning tonight. All we’re worried about is tonight. We’re not worried about tomorrow. We’re worried about today. I feel like that’s just when I’m at my best, is when I just go out there and try to win.”

With a bunch of other young, hungry position players in the clubhouse, the Sox have actually started winning at a respectable clip since the All-Star break and brought a little hope after a moribund few years. For the first time since 2021, you can imagine what a young, promising Sox team could look like.

And maybe Montgomery, with the minors behind him, could be a big part of the team’s future.

“I didn’t get off to the start that I wanted to,” he said. “I had to go through some stuff. But I think if I didn’t go through any of that, I wouldn’t be where I am today.”

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