Passan: How Jordan Montgomery finally solved Yordan Alvarez
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Jeff Passan, ESPN
HOUSTON — Over the winter, Jordan Montgomery spent his days at Tread Athletics, a performance lab about 10 miles outside of Charlotte, fine-tuning his pitching craft. While the coaches at Tread appreciated almost everything about Montgomery, from his size to his competitiveness to his willingness to learn, what they loved most of all was his curveball. They loved it so much that it earned a nickname:
The Death Ball.
To the naked eye, it looks like a perfectly OK curveball, and based on spin rate and break alone, it’s nothing special. And it confounds hitters anyway.
Yordan Álvarez learned its power first-hand Sunday night in Game 1 of the American League Championship Series. The Houston Astros slugger, one of the best hitters in the world, coming off a division series in which he hit four home runs in four games, faced Montgomery three times. All three ended with Álvarez swinging through the Death Ball. Never had one pitcher struck out Álvarez three times in a single game.
Montgomery isn’t just any pitcher. Acquired by the Texas Rangers at the trade deadline for exactly a night like tonight, the 30-year-old authored one of the best — and certainly the most important — starts of his career in Game 1. He threw 6⅓ scoreless innings and neutralized Álvarez in the Rangers’ 2-0 victory that pilfered home-field advantage from Houston and silenced the once-raucous crowd of 42,872 at Minute Maid Park.
In the three at-bats Montgomery squared off with Álvarez, he threw 17 pitches — eight sinkers, six Death Balls, two four-seam fastballs and even a changeup, a rarity for a left-handed pitcher against a left-handed hitter. He worked inside and outside, up and down, completely avoiding the middle of the strike zone. If a pitcher is going to beat Álvarez, he needs to empty his bag of tricks.
It’s a good thing Montgomery’s curveball is magic.
“When it comes out of his hand, it looks like a fastball,” Álvarez said. “That makes it a little more difficult. The way he releases the ball, the angle he releases it, makes it a little bit more difficult to pick it up and makes it look like a fastball.”
This is why, even with the analytics that inform so much of baseball today, context matters. At Tread, Montgomery worked not only on the shape of his pitches but how his delivery presents them. Álvarez suggesting Montgomery’s curveball looks like a fastball might sound outlandish — the average velo on Montgomery’s fastball Sunday night was 93.3 mph; on the curveball, 79.8 — but he’s not wrong. It’s how Montgomery and his coaches designed it.
They recognized that Montgomery had two things working in his favor on the pitch: his height and his release point. It didn’t spin particularly hard, and it didn’t have the looping action a more aesthetically pleasing curve might. It came out flat and broke late — and when paired with this sinker and four-seam fastball, it turned into the reaper.
Montgomery’s release point on the Death Ball is 80.2 inches from the ground, the second-highest vertical release on a curve in baseball (behind his opponent in Game 1, Justin Verlander). Montgomery releases his four-seamer 80.4 inches vertically and his sinker 80.9 inches — and the horizontal release point on all three are within a half-inch of one another. The tunneling effect charms hitters into believing they’re seeing one thing when it’s something else, and it’s what left Álvarez flailing, with five whiffs among the 17 pitches he saw.
When he was around 12 and growing up in South Carolina, Montgomery learned to throw a curve when his father, Jim, helped him wrap duct tape around Coke cans to give them extra weight. Montgomery would try to spin them into a nearby garbage can. Eventually he got the feel for the pitch, rode it to the University of South Carolina and used it to get to the major leagues with the New York Yankees. They traded him to the St. Louis Cardinals last season, and the Cardinals received a bounty from the Rangers in the late-July deal that landed him in Texas.
Upon his arrival, Montgomery didn’t think he’d be the team’s postseason ace, not with the subsequent acquisition of Max Scherzer, plus Nathan Eovaldi pitching like a frontline starter. But Eovaldi got hurt. And Scherzer did, too. And Montgomery found himself not only starting Game 1 of Texas’ wild-card series against Tampa Bay but doing the same against the Astros, whose seventh consecutive ALCS appearance extended the league record.
Álvarez helped carry the Astros here. The 26-year-old is a dream hitter: powerful but precise. He destroys right-handed pitchers — and crushes lefties, too. His holes are more pin pricks than swiss cheese. Carving him up takes the exactitude of a surgeon.
Dr. Montgomery started in the first with a clear plan: Work Álvarez inside. He started with a low-and-inside sinker that Álvarez fouled off, moved up and in with a sinker Álvarez took for a ball and then pounded three more pitches inside: a curveball Álvarez took for a strike, a sinker he fouled off and a curveball he swung through.
“We know he likes to get extended, and we were going to make him beat us inside, make him a little uncomfortable,” said Rangers catcher Jonah Heim, an All-Star who is widely lauded for his game-calling and framing abilities. “And when he’s kind of squirmy, we try to get him, and the curveball plays. [Montgomery] did an amazing job of execution.”
The second at-bat might’ve been even more impressive. In all the years Montgomery spent in the AL East, he learned that the best hitters, like Rafael Devers, will eventually sell out on an inside pitch if you keep pounding there. So after missing low and in with a sinker, Montgomery feathered a middle-away four-seamer through which Álvarez swung. He came back high and in with a sinker Álvarez fouled off, tried to change his eye level with an even higher four-seamer and went inside again twice — a changeup for a ball, a sinker fouled — before another Death Ball.
“I wanted to make him swing,” Montgomery said. “I was going to make him beat me with my best pitch there. And usually when you don’t miss middle, it’s a good day.”
That’s the thing about Montgomery. He’s not a nibbler. He’s not someone who picks at the corners. He goes right at hitters. And he isn’t afraid to go deep into his repertoire. Earlier this week, Rangers outfielder Robbie Grossman was telling Montgomery that he needed to use a slide step to the plate rather than his full delivery when nobody was on base. Well, in his third at-bat against Álvarez, down in the count 2-0, Montgomery conjured one more trick and froze Álvarez on perhaps the most hittable pitch he’d see all day, a sinker low and across the middle of the plate.
“It’s not only the curveball,” Astros third baseman Alex Bregman said. “He’s got a bunch of other weapons as well, and he executes really well. So I think it’s just execution really. It’s a good pitch.”
Montgomery knows that, and so after getting that first strike against Álvarez, he wasn’t throwing anything else. On 2-1, Montgomery threw a curve toward the bottom of the strike zone; Álvarez swung over it. The next pitch was a bouncer, nowhere close to the plate, and it left Álvarez flailing, looking less like one of the best hitters in the world than a guy who was utterly perplexed by what he was seeing.
Three at-bats. Three strikeouts swinging to end the inning. And one gift of a performance, to both the Rangers and his family.
On Saturday, Montgomery’s wife, McKenzie, celebrated her birthday. And on Sunday, it was his father’s, and Jim had been asking for a playoff win as the perfect present. An ALCS win against a future Hall of Famer sufficed.
Montgomery isn’t done. He’ll likely start another game this series, when he’ll line up against Verlander again. He’ll go through the meticulous pregame routine of plyoball drills that his coach, Tyler Zombro, taught him at Tread — the ones that help him find consistency in his delivery and conviction in his movement. He’ll get together with Heim and his pitching coach, Mike Maddux, with whom he vibed almost immediately after arriving, and he’ll game plan.
And then he’ll try to keep doing exactly what he has done all postseason and what he hopes to do all the way through the World Series: spin ’em to death.
LOS ANGELES — Dodgers right-hander Brusdar Graterol will miss the first half of next season after having surgery to repair the labrum in his right shoulder.
The surgery was performed Thursday by Dr. Neal ElAttrache, the Dodgers announced Friday.
Graterol is expected to return in the second half of the 2025 season.
Graterol pitched in seven games during the regular season and three games in the World Series against the New York Yankees, which the Dodgers won in five games. He allowed three hits over 2⅓ scoreless innings in those World Series appearances.
The 26-year-old was slowed this season by shoulder inflammation and a hamstring injury.
Graterol, a hard-throwing Venezuelan, spent his first season in the majors with Minnesota in 2019, and the Twins traded him to the Dodgers before the 2020 season. For his career, he has a 2.78 ERA and 11 saves in 188 games.
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Bill Connelly, ESPN Staff Writer
At SEC media days in July, Steve Sarkisian inadvertently described a good portion of college football in a single line. “I feel like when you go to Arkansas,” the Texas Longhorns coach said, “I almost at times feel like they hate Texas more than they like themselves. That’s a real rivalry.”
Later that week, Arkansas Razorbacks coach Sam Pittman confirmed Sarkisian’s take. “We hadn’t played Texas for years,” he said, “and when we played them a couple of years back, it was the most excited our fan base has been in a while. So I would say he’s probably right.”
Houston Nutt can testify. Nutt grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas. He idolized legendary Arkansas coach Frank Broyles and watched him battle Darrell Royal and the Longhorns before playing for the Razorbacks himself.
“When Texas came to play Arkansas, it was this huge, huge thing,” he told ESPN in 2019. “I remember being taught at the age of 6 outside War Memorial Stadium [in Little Rock] how to do the Hook ‘Em Horns Down sign.”
Nutt beat the Horns as the Hogs’ coach, a 27-6 win in the 2000 Cotton Bowl, Arkansas’ first bowl win since 1985. He turned around, and threw the Horns Down to the Arkansas fans.
“It was a sea of red, and they were mostly doing the Hook ‘Em Horns Down,” Nutt said. “What did I do? I can’t help it. I’m right there with ’em.”
Conference realignment has broken countless rivalries through the years. There are no Oklahoma-Oklahoma State games on the schedule; Missouri and Kansas haven’t played since 2011; Cal has traded playing UCLA for playing NC State; Oregon-Oregon State and Washington-Washington State have been moved from the traditional bottom of the schedule to the top; Pitt and West Virginia play only sporadically, as do Oklahoma and Nebraska. But in the “thank God for small favors” department, this latest round of realignment at least reignited a few rivalries to replace the further ones we lost. Longtime Big 8 and Big 12 rivals Oklahoma and Missouri played this past Saturday for the first time in 13 years (and celebrated the occasion with a particularly wacky finish), and on Nov. 30 not only will we get our first Texas vs. Texas A&M game since 2011 but it also might have enormous College Football Playoff stakes.
While we wait for Aggies-Horns, however, we get a rivalry game that, for quite a while, outshined Texas-A&M and defined Southwest Conference football. On Saturday, Texas and Arkansas will play for just the fourth time in 20 years and will play as conference rivals for the first time in 33. Most rivalries fit into certain parameters — the dueling heavyweights that split the wins over time, the heavyweight against the aspirant that measures itself by how well it’s faring against the big dog, etc. — but over the course of a few decades, Arkansas-Texas fit into multiple categories. Arkansas was the aggrieved and aspirant underdog for much of the series, but for much of the 1960s, when Royal and Broyles were at the top of their respective games, this was the biggest game in college football. Whichever flavor it takes on at a given time, this game remains spicy.
Texas is 8-1 and listed as a favorite by more than two touchdowns Saturday, while Arkansas is 5-4, having handed Tennessee its only loss of the season but suffered two blowout losses in its past four games. The Razorbacks are volatile underdogs; the Longhorns are SEC title favorites; and, for at least a little while Saturday, Razorback Stadium will be an absolute cauldron. To prepare ourselves, let’s look back at 10 of the most noteworthy games in this revived rivalry’s history.
No. 3 Texas 20, No. 14 Arkansas 0 (1946)
“Steers Trounce Tough Porkers For 5th Victory” was the headline in the Austin American. At 3-0-1, Arkansas was off to its best start in 13 years, and for the first time these teams met as mutually ranked foes. But Texas, also unbeaten and the winner of three of the past four Southwest Conference (SWC) crowns, handled both the moment and the muggy conditions better. Future pro and college football Hall of Famer Bobby Layne threw a pair of touchdown passes — one to Hub Bechtol for 50 yards, one to Jim Canady for 47 — and the Longhorns had scored all their points by halftime. This was a pretty common result: Aside from a mid-1930s run in which Texas lost its way as a program and Arkansas won five of six games between them, UT dominated the early stages of this rivalry, winning 29 of the first 35 battles. It’s been a lot closer since then.
This was the high-water mark for the “Steers,” by the way, as they would fall via road upset to both Rice and TCU, handing Arkansas only its second SWC title. The Razorbacks would head to Dallas, where they endured a 0-0 tie with LSU in the Cotton Bowl.
No. 3 Texas 13, No. 12 Arkansas 12 (1959)
After falling apart under Edwin Price in the mid-1950s, Texas righted the ship by hiring Royal, a former Oklahoma Sooner, to lead the program in 1957. In 1959 the Longhorns embarked on a run of nine top-10 finishes and two national titles in 14 years. Royal won his first two games against Arkansas by a combined 41-6, but second-year head coach Broyles also had things up and running by 1959. The Razorbacks would enjoy eight top-10 finishes in 11 years from 1959 to 1969; in this tight loss, they served notice as to what was coming.
As with much of 1950s college football, this game was decided by disasters. Both teams lost four fumbles; Arkansas recovered a loose ball to set up its first touchdown, but with Texas trailing 12-7 in the third quarter, another future Hall of Famer, Lance Alworth, muffed a punt, which set up a winning touchdown pass from Bart Shirley to Jack Collins. Between 1959 and 1969, eight of 11 Steers-Porkers games would be decided by five or fewer points.
No. 8 Arkansas 14, No. 1 Texas 13 (1964)
Texas won its first national title under Royal in 1963; the Longhorns shined in big games that season, beating No. 1 Oklahoma and No. 2 Navy by a combined 56-13, but they managed only a 17-13 win over Arkansas in Fayetteville. They advanced their winning streak to 15 games early in 1964, but Broyles was building a title-worthy squad of his own by then.
For the third time in four years, this was a matchup of top-10 teams. The most famous members of the 1964 Razorbacks were future Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and future college and NFL title winner Jimmy Johnson, but future Arkansas coach Ken Hatfield made the difference in this one. His 81-yard punt return gave Arkansas a 7-0 halftime lead, and after Texas tied the score in the fourth quarter, Fred Marshall found Bobby Crockett for a 34-yard touchdown to put Arkansas ahead once more. With about a minute left, Ernie Koy scored on a 1-yard plunge; Royal, entirely uninterested in a tie, elected to go for two points and the win, but a pass attempt came up short. Texas’ winning streak was over, and Arkansas would go on to finish 11-0 and score a share of its first national title.
No. 3 Arkansas 27, No. 1 Texas 24 (1965)
By October 1965, Arkansas had extended its winning streak to 16 games, winning its first four games of 1965 by a combined 114-33. But Texas had leapfrogged the Razorbacks to get back to No. 1, thanks in part to a 19-0 win over Oklahoma. That put the chip firmly back on Arkansas’ shoulder.
With the extra dose of motivation — plus, perhaps, some divine intervention: Fayetteville’s First Baptist Church famously posted, “Football is only a game, eternal things are spiritual. Nevertheless, beat Texas” that week — Arkansas raced to an early lead thanks to a pair of Phil Harris fumbles. Martine Bercher recovered the first one in the end zone, then Tommy Trantham took another one 77 yards for a score.
Arkansas went up 20-0 after a Jon Brittenum-to-Bobby Crockett touchdown, but Texas charged back. It was 20-11 by halftime, and David Conway’s 34-yard field goal made it 24-20 Longhorns with just five minutes left. Brittenum scored from a yard out with 1:32 remaining, though, and Arkansas had its second of three straight wins in the series.
The Hogs would run their overall winning streak to 22 before falling to LSU 14-7 in the Cotton Bowl.
No. 1 Texas 15, No. 2 Arkansas 14 (1969)
Don’t you love it when a plan comes together? Texas usually played Oklahoma and Arkansas back-to-back in early October, but Roone Arledge, the innovative head of ABC Sports, had an idea in the offseason. Texas had finished 1968 as the hottest team in the country, winning its last nine games and averaging 37 points per game with offensive coordinator Emory Bellard’s innovative wishbone scheme. Arkansas, meanwhile, finished 10-1 with only a 39-29 loss at Texas. The Longhorns and Razorbacks finished third and sixth, respectively, in the AP poll and headed into 1969, college football’s centennial season, as obvious national title contenders.
According to Terry Frei’s “Horns, Hogs, and Nixon’s Coming,” ABC publicist (and future ESPN analyst) Beano Cook pored over the schedules and determined that Arkansas, Texas and Penn State all had good chances of going unbeaten. “My recommendation involved Penn State and Arkansas finishing the regular season with perfect records and then playing for the national title,” Cook told Frei. “I said we should move Texas-Arkansas to December 6, because I thought Texas might be undefeated then, too.” Arledge told the coaches that former Oklahoma coach and politician Bud Wilkinson could make sure that new President Richard Nixon was likely to attend the game as well. It was going to be a spectacle unlike anything college football had seen.
Sure enough, the Longhorns and Razorbacks both reached December unbeaten (as did Penn State), and Nixon was there in the stands for a game that somehow lived up to all expectations.
With Texas’ offense discombobulated early — the Horns turned the ball over on their first two drives — Arkansas scored on a short Bill Burnett run and, early in the third quarter, a 29-yard catch by star receiver Chuck Dicus. Texas quarterback James Street scored on the first play of the fourth quarter, then scored on a 2-point conversion as well. (Royal decided before the game that he once again wanted to avoid a tie at all costs.)
With the score 14-8, Arkansas drove the length of the field and was on the verge of putting the game away until Danny Lester picked off a Bill Montgomery pass in the end zone. Then came “Right 53 Veer Pass”: On a fourth-and-3 near midfield, Street threw a bomb to Randy Peschel for 44 yards.
#TBT – 1969: Texas defeats Arkansas 15-14.#ThisIsTexas #HookEm pic.twitter.com/xoqn5cbhFm
— Texas Football (@TexasFootball) October 17, 2019
Two plays later, Texas went ahead with a short Jim Bertelsen touchdown. Arkansas drove near field goal range in the final seconds, but Tom Campbell picked off Montgomery to ice the game, and Nixon declared Texas the national champion in the locker room after the game. (This rather annoyed Penn State’s Joe Paterno, whose team was also unbeaten.)
College football’s explosion as a television product can be ascribed to countless things, but ABC’s innovative approach to broadcasting, followed by a couple of all-time classics — this and 1971 Oklahoma-Nebraska, to name two — in short succession certainly didn’t hurt.
No. 1 Texas 42, No. 4 Arkansas 7 (1970)
The sequel often fails to live up to the billing. Almost exactly a year after the 1969 classic, Texas was riding a 29-game winning streak, while 9-1 Arkansas was ranked fourth in the AP poll and looking for revenge on national television. It didn’t quite work out.
Texas rushed for 464 yards — Bertelsen and Steve Worster combined for 315 on their own, with five of the Longhorns’ six touchdowns — and picked off Montgomery three times. After a goal-line stand by the Longhorns’ defense prevented Arkansas from tying the score early on, the floodgates opened.
The tide had again turned in the rivalry. Arkansas would finally get some measure of revenge the next year with a win in Little Rock, but after winning four of seven over the Horns between 1960-66, the Hogs won only once between 1966-79.
No. 8 Texas 28, No. 3 Arkansas 21 (1978)
A generation ended when both Royal and Broyles retired after matching 5-5-1 seasons in 1976. They both ended up hiring their younger replacements — 38-year old Fred Akers at UT, 40-year old Lou Holtz at Arkansas — as their schools’ respective athletic directors.
Both led immediate rebounds. Holtz won 30 games, Akers won 29, and both schools finished in the AP top 12 each year from 1977 to 1979. In 1978, Akers’ Longhorns played a unique role, too: spoiler. They welcomed unbeaten Arkansas to Austin and ended the Hogs’ 11-game winning streak. Two Randy McEachern touchdown passes in the final minute of the first half turned a tie into a 20-7 Texas lead, and when Arkansas charged back to take the lead, Johnny “Lam” Jones caught McEachern’s third TD pass, and Johnnie Johnson picked off one pass and broke up another on a fourth down to seal the win. This was the first of four straight upsets in the series, with the lower-ranked team winning every year from 1978 to 1981. My favorite rivalries are the ones that make no sense.
Arkansas 42, No. 1 Texas 11 (1981)
And now for maybe the most shocking result in the history of the rivalry. Akers’ Longhorns entered the 1981 game No. 1 in the country, having just blown out Barry Switzer’s Oklahoma 34-14 to move to 4-0. Arkansas, meanwhile, had fallen out of the AP rankings two weeks earlier after a road loss to an awful TCU team that would finish 2-7-2. Surely a blowout was in store, right?
This was indeed a blowout, but not the one anyone expected. Two fumbles and a safety from an airmailed punt snap gave Arkansas a quick 15-0 lead, and the Longhorns never got closer. The Hogs led 25-3 at halftime and 39-3 after three quarters; Texas actually outgained the home team 421-323, but seven turnovers sabotaged all efforts. A turnaround in the series? Not so much. The last two Akers-Holtz battles ended up a combined 64-10 in favor of the team in burnt orange. But this one was an awfully big thumb in the eye, and it would prevent the Horns from winning a national title — they ended up second in the polls behind Clemson.
Arkansas 14, Texas 13 (1991)
“Ain’t no rematch. Best thing of all, ain’t gonna be no rematch.” That’s Arkansas head coach Jack Crowe, celebrating a Hogs win in the final SWC matchup between the two rivals. He had just weathered one of the silliest games in the series to secure permanent (well, permanent-ish) bragging rights. Arkansas led 14-0 at halftime after touchdowns from Ron Dickerson Jr. and Kerwin Price, but a 14-yard Phil Brown touchdown made it 14-7 heading into the fourth quarter, and a 55-yard burst from Brown tied the score. Or at least, it should have: The Longhorns missed the PAT, then missed a 39-yard field goal attempt with 3:45 left.
The teams weren’t particularly memorable, even if the game was. Crowe’s Razorbacks went 6-6 in their last season in the SWC, while David McWilliams’ fifth and final Texas team went 5-6. The teams had weathered ups and downs, splitting the previous six meetings and producing zero top-10 finishes from 1984 to 1991 as the SWC wobbled through controversies and discontent. In 1990, the SEC announced it was adding Arkansas as part of an expansion to 10 teams; the plan had originally included adding not only the Hogs but also Texas and Texas A&M, but the state legislature intervened, and only Arkansas was on its way out the door. So was Crowe: Broyles fired him (and then tried to get away with announcing he’d resigned) after Arkansas began its SEC tenure with a 10-3 loss to The Citadel.
No. 7 Texas 22, Arkansas 20 (2004)
Since 1991, this has basically been a series of pent-up aggression: Whichever rival takes an early lead when they meet just keeps wailing away for a while. Arkansas won two bowl meetings (the 2000 Cotton Bowl and the 2014 Texas Bowl) by a combined 58-13, Texas won a home game in Austin 52-10 in 2008, and Arkansas won a home game in Fayetteville, Steve Sarkisian’s second game in charge at Texas, by a score of 40-21 in 2021.
A 2003-04 home-and-home series produced some drama, though. Arkansas upset No. 6 Texas by a 38-28 margin in 2003, using an early 21-0 run to build some space, getting 217 combined rushing yards from Cedric Cobbs and quarterback Matt Jones and scoring every time it needed to down the stretch.
But with a young quarterback by the name of Vince Young taking over for UT in 2004, the Longhorns got some revenge. Texas built a quick 9-0 advantage with a safety from a bombed punt snap and a 49-yard TD from Young to David Thomas. And from there, it was the Cedric Benson show: The star running back produced 201 yards from scrimmage and scored via both ground and air. Texas held a 22-17 lead into the fourth quarter, and after forcing an Arkansas field goal with 9:58 left, the Longhorns’ defense forced three consecutive turnovers to ice the win. Arkansas would stumble to a disappointing 5-6 record, while Mack Brown’s Longhorns would finish 11-1 before winning the national title a year later.
The most recent Hogs-Horns game might turn out to have been pretty useful. “I don’t know what Darrell Royal did to Arkansas back in the day,” Sarkisian joked with reporters this week, “but they absolutely hate our guts. And I think we learned that the first time around when we went there.”
Texas knows what it’s walking into, at least. They know to expect a Horns Down or two, though we’ll have to wait and see if Sam Pittman gets in on the act.
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