Colson Montgomery is a big kid from a small town, so everyone knew who he was before he got to Southridge High School, enrollment 500, in Huntingburg, Ind.
Scott Buening, the school’s athletic director, knew Montgomery when he got to town. Montgomery was in the third grade.
But Buening was late to the game compared with Gene Mattingly, the Southridge baseball coach. He’s known Mongtomery since he was born. They both live in Holland, Ind., which has a population that could fit into the Craft Kave at Guaranteed Rate Field.
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“I mean, he was under a microscope, really, since he was young,” Buening said. “And everybody’s talking about him and how tremendous of an athlete he was.”
Mattingly always figured Montgomery, who grew to 6-foot-4, was destined to play basketball in Bloomington, Ind., not get drafted by the White Sox with the 22nd pick of the first round as he was Sunday night.
Montgomery, now a lefty-hitting shortstop with big-league dreams, said that by the time scouts started coming to his games, no one made a big deal about it.
“Growing up in a small town, everybody knows everyone,” he said. “You know everybody’s got your back. They are going to support you no matter what.”
Montgomery became the best basketball player in the school’s history, needing just 63 games to set the scoring record. He was the starting quarterback as a sophom*ore. And he started for the baseball team since he was a freshman.
They write fiction books about small-town teenagers like that. And now the real thing is a millionaire in waiting. Montgomery is committed to Indiana University for baseball, not basketball, but he’ll have a locker in Glendale, Ariz., before you can say signing bonus.
Colson Montgomery watches a home run during the WWBA World Championship in October in Fort Myers, Fla. (Mike Janes / Four Seam Images via Associated Press)
When did Mattingly know Mongtomery might be more than a small-town hero? Well, he had known him for a while by that point. Montgomery was a freshman in high school.
“We’re playing in the regional against a kid going to Louisville, who throws 90, 92 with a good slider,” Mattingly said. “Colson is batting in the three-hole and it’s the first inning and the kid throws 90, 92 underneath his hands and gets sawed off and it’s a humpback line drive to second base for the third out. I’m standing there waiting for him to give him his glove and he’s grinning from ear to ear like it’s Christmas morning. I’m like, ‘What are you smiling at?’ He goes, ‘I got him timed up. I own him for the rest of the day.’ He went double, double, double in his next three at-bats. All fastballs. He knew immediately.”
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College coaches were already sniffing around. And so were the White Sox.
“To be frank, I’ve known and heard about this player since he was 14, 15 years old,” amateur scouting director Mike Shirley said. “The first time I got a look at him was in the state championship game during his freshman year of high school. He’s famous. And he really piqued my attention early on. The runway in getting from your first look to here, there’s been many looks at this kid.”
Despite a late start getting into baseball after leading his basketball team deep into the playoffs, Montgomery hit .333 with nine doubles, seven homers and 23 RBIs during his senior year, which culminated in an IHSAA Class 3A state title. Montgomery was a second-team All-America selection by Baseball America and MaxPreps. Justin Wechsler is the recommending scout. The last time the Sox picked a high-school position player in the first round was 2012 when they selected outfielder Courtney Hawkins with the 13th pick.
Montgomery hadn’t really played travel baseball until the summer after his freshman year, and that’s when he began investing in his future. He gave up football after his sophom*ore year, but that didn’t mean Buening, who doubles as the school’s strength coach, wasn’t curious about his potential as a quarterback.
“I had a friend at a Division I school, who was an offensive coordinator, and I said, ‘OK, evaluate him. Tell me, you know, where he fits,’” he said. “This guy was at a mid-major school and he said, ‘Well, he’ll be on our board and he’s on our board now. But we won’t be able to touch him.’ He said for a kid that just picks up a football and basically played August through November, he’s got every making of a Power 5 quarterback.”
All this is to say, Montgomery is a great athlete. Fine, so are most first-round draft picks. But though Montgomery can draw comparisons to Tim Anderson because both were standout high school basketball players, he’s hardly a late bloomer.
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The signs were there, and Mattingly saw them even before that fateful freshman year.
“He always had an elite-level swing that he learned on his own, primarily playing Wiffle ball in the backyard with his older brother and friends and his cousin,” he said.
Colson Montgomery played at the Perfect Game National Showcase at Hoover (Ala.) Metropolitan Stadium in June 2020. (Mike Janes / Four Seam Images via Associated Press)
Southridge might be a small school, but it made the state finals every year of Montgomery’s career (minus his junior season, which was lost to COVID-19) and it has the technology you’ll find everywhere else.
“We use Rapsodo and Blast and all that good stuff,” Mattingly said. “We monitor their progress to see if our training methods are working.”
That’s how they know Montgomery was hitting baseballs with 115-118 mph exit velocity as a senior.
“He’s done some things in the weight room that really helps,” Mattingly said. “He’s generating a lot more ground force, which, in turn, helped him with his rotational speed and his hand speed. He’s got elite-level power.”
Shirley, who lives a few hours north in Anderson, Ind., said he was blown away by the progress Montgomery made his senior season.
“One of the last few times we got a chance to look at him, he was playing in the step before the state championship, he was facing one of the top arms in next year’s draft class, and it was an impact display of how he controlled the strike zone,” Shirley said. “When this kid was on the field, you know he was on the field.The presence he displays was substantial.”
Whether Montgomery stays at shortstop is immaterial. What matters is he can hit. That’s why he was drafted in the first round.
“When he delivers the barrel, he gets to his power,” Shirley said. “That was the thing offensively that jumped out at us. You think about a plus bat in terms of the hit tool plus power, that was the exceptional piece. You have an easy-moving athlete, graceful, does the part defensively, gets to the impact of the bat, that jumped out at us as well.”
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Montgomery won’t be flustered by the move from a small town to the minor leagues. He is fluent in the kind of analytics they feed ballplayers these days. But more importantly, “he’s a feel guy,” Mattingly said.
What does that mean? Everything, when you’re an athlete. If you want to know why it’s important that Montgomery is a well-rounded athlete when his job will be to be a professional baseball player, well, it’s all about feel. All good athletes have it. The special ones have a little something extra.
“He knows,” Mattingly said. “We always go back to what your body feels like when it was right. He can go back and re-create that. He can make his adjustments instantly. For his age, he has body control and body awareness that is ridiculous. I’ve never been around someone that had that kind of body awareness. So, he’s a feel guy, but he understands the rest of it, which makes him dangerous.”
Montgomery was at the draft in Denver, and when he got interviewed on TV, he got a little choked up. But by the time he talked to the Chicago reporters via video, he was confident and relaxed. As he reminded himself, this is just the beginning.
“Just from what I know about myself, the ceiling that I have, I can go as far as I pretty much want to go,” he said.
(Photo: Mary DeCicco / MLB Photos via Getty Images)
