Last summer’s Frankie Montas trade ended up mostly being the Lou Trivino trade.
When the Yankees swung the transaction with Oakland to acquire both pitchers (Montas the starter they long craved, Trivino the right-handed reliever meant to shore up the bullpen), the former was considered the prize and the latter was more of a supplemental addition.
But as Trivino wound up making 25 helpful appearances down the stretch, posting a 1.66 ERA while Montas only started eight times before a shoulder injury messed everything up, the immediate framing was that Montas failed to deliver on the promise that made him such a coveted deadline pickup.
The good news for both the Yankees and Montas — who will be looking to bring his 6.35 Yankee ERA down by a good three runs or so — is that the 29-year-old hurler now has a fresh season to get back to stasis. In 2021, he was rubbing elbows with the very best pitchers in the American League. In his first 19 starts of 2022, he was striking out 25.1% of his opposition while toiling away for the A’s, a number that immediately shriveled to 17.8% when he joined the Yankees and his shoulder began acting up.
The combination of injury and small sample make for some garish numbers, but Montas is primed to return to form now that he’s healthy. An even smaller postseason sample — Montas was not on the roster for the Division Series but threw one inning against Houston in the Championship Series — didn’t go great either, but it was at the very least an indication that his shoulder inflammation had subsided. Jeremy Pena took him deep in the seventh inning of Game 1, but Pena was taking everybody deep last October, and Montas is decidedly not a relief pitcher.
Primed to make a full season of starts again, complete with an entire offseason and spring training under the tutelage of the Yankees’ pitching coaches, Montas is one of the more obvious bounce-back candidates on the roster. His velocity dipped slightly when he got to New York — perhaps an indication that the Yankees should have done a little more medical homework when they traded four minor leaguers to get him and Trivino — but a compromised shoulder will do that. Assuming he’s all systems go by Opening Day, other underlying statistics point to a strong 2023 campaign.
The Yankees clearly already had some ideas for how to maximize Montas’ potential, starting with making pretty major alterations to his pitch usage. The data from his eight post-trade outings in August and September show a completely revamped pitching approach. The man who finished sixth on the 2021 Cy Young ballot seemingly trusted Matt Blake and the Yankees’ much-ballyhooed army of baseball scientists to make some suggestions in the name of improvement. The result was a fastball percentage that skyrocketed, way fewer sinkers and cutters and quantum leaps in slider and splitter utilization.
The sinker was Montas’ primary pitch in 2021, the year he began ascending into the upper echelon of American League starters. It was also getting clobbered. The slugging percentages against that pitch in 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 (all years when he was throwing it more often than any other pitch), read like a prodigious power hitter’s prime: .551, .469, .617, .471. In his three September starts for the Yankees, Montas was only throwing that sinker 16.2% of the time, a drastic departure from the 55.4% he had in 2018, and even from the 38.1% in 2020.
Montas’ best start for the Yankees came on Sept. 4 in Tampa Bay. In the only game where he allowed no earned runs, Montas also set a Yankee career-high with seven strikeouts and held the Rays to one measly hit, a Yandy Diaz single. That day at Tropicana Field can and should serve as a blueprint for Montas’ sophomore season in the Bronx. It was only five innings, but they were his five best innings, and an arsenal full of fastballs and splitters was to thank.
Four of his seven strikeouts ended with those two pitches, with the four-seamer maxing out at 97.3 mph and the splitter creating a whiff on 56% of the swings it elicited. Other teams will certainly be aware of these tweaks now, but if the changes do end up being permanent, Montas has a solid foundation to build on from this domination of the Rays.
From 2019 to 2021, only six AL starters rang up more Wins Above Replacement than Montas. He has a lengthy track record of being a top-of-the-rotation arm. With 2023 serving as his contract year — and, aside from the financial ramifications of that, the year where he wants to prove himself to the baseball world again — expect Montas to arrive motivated and ready to let the fastball rip. He already ranked in the 70th percentile or higher in velocity and fastball spin rate, likely part of the reason why the Yankees wanted to see it more often. His best trait, though, is his ability to make hitters chase pitches out of the strike zone. His 2022 chase rate fell in the 86th percentile, with the splitter trending upward in that category from the year before.
That splitter — which has produced an opposing slugging percentage of .168 and .280 in the last two seasons — will be the literal moneymaker for Montas. If it keeps teaming up with his fastball to generate whiffs and weak contact, he will be in line for a nice payday next winter. Whether that comes from the Yankees or another team is yet to be seen, but if the Montas of old shows up, the Bombers should be happily paying for his services over a multi-year deal.
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