Sunday Notes: Jeff Montgomery Tackles a Challenging Career Quiz

Two weeks ago, Sunday Notes led with David Cone following in Mark Gubicza’s footsteps. Just as his fellow pitcher-turned-broadcaster had done, Cone tackled a challenging career quiz, augmenting his answers — some of them correct, others amiss — with entertaining anecdotes about batters he faced along the way. Today we’ll hear from another 1980s-1990s hurler who is now a broadcast analyst: Jeff Montgomery, who played with Gubicza in Kansas City, is the Royals’ franchise leader in both appearances (686) and saves 304).

I began by asking the 64-year-old Wellston, Ohio native which batter he faced the most times.

“I’m going to say either Chili Davis or Kirby Puckett,” guessed Montgomery, naming a pair of players who narrowly missed being the correct answer. Upon being informed that it was neither of the two, the erstwhile closer pondered for several seconds, only to throw up his hands. “You got me,” he admitted. “Who was it?”

I told Montgomery that it was Paul Molitor, whom he faced 30 times, allowing just seven hits, all of them singles.

“Oh, Molly. There you go,” responded Montgomery, “Molly was the type of hitter who was never going to be easy. He had the ability to really wait on pitches. He was basically bat-to-ball, and his bat-to-ball skills were incredible. There were honestly times when I thought the pitch was in the catcher’s mitt, and the next thing I knew I was watching our right fielder chasing the ball down the line. Molly’s bat was that fast.

“I think I did pretty well against him,“ Montgomery added. “But I do remember one game in the Metrodome. We were in extra innings, it was a bases-loaded situation, and I had him 0-2. I’d thrown Molly a couple of sliders away, and decided to come in with a fastball. He leaned into it for a walk-off hit-by-pitch.”

Asked who he surrendered the most hits to, Montgomery once again narrowly missed, guessing Cal Ripken Jr. The answer is Puckett, who went 10-for-26.

“Probably a lot of those were balls that he hit 110 mph, right up the middle on the turf in Minneapolis,” said Montgomery. “The Twins had this style of baseball that was like playing in a bowling alley. They used that turf to their advantage. Puckett hit some balls that, while they didn’t literally go through me, felt like they went through me. The other thing about Puckett is that he could hit a pitch that was neck high.”

The batter who took him deep the most times?

“I remember some of the home runs against me, but mostly the ones that were of the walk-off variety,” said Montgomery, who surrendered 81 gophers in all. “You got me there, too. Who was it?”

The answer is Juan Gonzalez, Dean Palmer, and Harold Baines, the last of which is Montgomery’s usual answer to “Who was the most difficult hitter you faced?” Each of the trio had three.

The batter he punched out the most times also stumped him.

“I had a lot of success against Joe Carter [2-for-20, six strikeouts], but it’s probably not him,” replied Montgomery. “There were the big, strong home run hitters like Rob Deer [2-for-14, eights strikeouts] and Pete Incaviglia [1-for-12, five strikeouts]; I think I had more success against those types of guys than anybody. But I wouldn’t be able to tell you which one I had the most strikeouts against.”

Gonzalez — “Ah yes, Johnny Gonzo” — was the righty’s victim nine times.

The last ever batter he Kd proved to be an easy question.

“It would be Dean Palmer,” Montgomery said without hesitation. “The reason I remember him being the last is that I’d announced my retirement. It was a Saturday at the end of the 1999 season, and we were playing the Tigers. The next day, I saw him in the [concourse] outside of the clubhouse. He said, ‘Dude, why are you going to retire?’ I told him that I’d had a bad year and didn’t think I could keep going. He goes, ‘Last night you threw me the best slider I’ve seen all season.’ I’ll never forget that comment. That’s why I know that Dean Palmer my was last strikeout.”

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RANDOM HITTER-PITCHER MATCHUPS

Bake McBride went 5 for 10 against Clay Kirby.
Gabby Hartnett went 6 for 11 against Kirby Higbe.
Kerby Farrell went 7 for 11 against Marino Pieretti.
Wayne Kirby went 6 for 10 against Rick Sutcliffe.
Kirby Puckett went 9 for 12 against Mike Birkbeck.

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I commonly bankroll non-timely interviews to run during the offseason, and while the start of spring training is my target cutoff point, a few occasionally stretch into early weeks of camp. That was the case with Isaac Mattson. What I learned from my late-summer conversation with the 30-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates reliever is that two of his pitches have a bit of Vulcan to them. To my surprise, one of them is his slider.

“One of the biggest jumps I took this season came from working with a buddy of mine that pitches for the Mets, Reed Garrett,” said Mattson, who came out of the Bucs bullpen 44 times and put up a 2.45 ERA and a 3.66 FIP over 47-and-two-thirds innings. “He was working on slider [during the 2024-2025 offseason] and I kind of adjusted my grip to the one he has.

“I’d always kind of held my slider looser,” added the righty, who’d made just seven big-league appearances prior to last season. “Talking with Reed, the biggest thing was finding that pressure point between my middle and ring fingers, the knuckle there. I’m basically making the Spock sign — that space in between — to create pressure. Before, most of the pressure was between my thumb, my pointer, and middle finger. Shifting that pressure point a little bit toward the center of my hand and kind of getting my thumb out of the way helped reduce carry.”

His other “Vulcan-esque” — that is how Mattson described it — offering is predictably his changeup. He began throwing it in 2019 when he was in the Baltimore Orioles organization, the goal being to kill spin and get more depth. His previous changeup “had more carry to it, almost like John Means’s changeup a couple years back.” Mattson told me that he now presets to his Vulcan with every pitch, explaining that it is easier to adjust away from that grip than vice versa.

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Germán Márquez is a Padre now, San Diego having signed the 30-year-old, longtime Colorado Rockies right-hander as a free agent earlier this week. To say that he is a reclamation project would be an understatement. As my colleague Michael Baumann pointed out after the deal was announced, Márquez missed most of the 2023 and 2024 seasons due to a UCL injury, and last year he struggled to the tune of a 3-16 record and a 6.70 ERA.

Craig Stammen was asked about Márquez yesterday morning.

“He threw a lot in the offseason, but he’s just trying to get his feet underneath him in camp,” San Diego’s first-year manager told a small group of reporters. “I know that [pitching coach] Ruben [Niebla] has been working with him on some specific things. It’s an opportunity for them to work on those things, and then eventually take him to a live batting practice and into a game.”

Following up, I asked Stammen if the work is mechanical, or if it is more about pitch types.

“All of the above,” replied the 42-year-old pitcher-turned-skipper. “Any time you get on the mound with Reuben, or any of the pitching coaches, they’re checking everything out. It could be stuff in the weight room. It could be stuff in the training room. It could be mechanics. Could be pitch grips. Could be pitch mix. All that stuff is on the table, and him being open to doing those types of things is probably the number one attribute that he could have.”

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A quiz:

Two quarterbacks who are in the Pro Football Hall of Fame were drafted by the same MLB team out of high school in the same year. Who are they, and which team took them? (A hint: one of the players was later drafted by a different MLB team out of college and played briefly in the minors, while the other never played baseball professionally.)

The answer can be found below.

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NEWS NOTES

Bill Mazeroski, a Hall of Fame second baseman who played for the Pittsburgh Pirates 1956-1972, died on Friday at age 89. Considered one of the best-ever defenders at his position, “Maz” won eight Gold Gloves, was an All-Star in seven of his 17 seasons, and — last but not least — hit arguably the most famous home run in World Series history. The Pittsburgh legends’s ninth-inning blast walked off the New York Yankees in 1960’s epic Game 7.

Joe Nossek, an outfielder who played for three teams across the 1964-1970 seasons, died on February 12 at age 85. A Cleveland native, Nossek notched 122 hits, including three home runs, the last of them off of Indians southpaw “Sudden Sam” McDowell. A coach for multiple teams following his playing days, Nossek appeared in six games and went 4-for-20 with the Minnesota Twins in the 1965 World Series.

Bobby Henrich, an infielder who played in 48 games for the Cincinnati Reds from 1957-1959, died earlier this month at age 87. Utilized primarily as a defensive replacement and pinch-runner, the Lawrence, Kansas native went 2-for-16 at the plate and scored 13 runs.

A reminder that this year’s SABR Analytics Conference is being held at Arizona State University’s downtown Phoenix campus from February 27-March 1. The schedule, including the impressive array of featured speakers, can be found here.

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The answer to the quiz is John Elway and Dan Marino, both of whom were drafted by the Kansas City Royals in 1979. Marino, a fourth-round pick, opted to attend the University of Pittsburgh and stuck with football. Elway, an 18th-round pick, went to Stanford, then went to play short-season ball in the New York Yankees system in 1982 after being drafted out of college.

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Bryce Miller makes his living throwing a baseball, which is something he does very well when healthy. Elbow woes limited his effectiveness last season — they also landed him on the shelf on two occasions — but a year prior, the Seattle Mariners right-hander put up a 2.94 ERA and a 3.58 FIP over 180-and-a-third frames.

What if the native Texan were a Winter Olympics athlete rather than a baseball player? Which event would he be excelling in?

“Winter Olympics? I saw something last night,” Miller told me on Friday. “I think it was called mountaineering. It’s the first time they’ve done it, and all you do is run up a hill with skis on, then you ski down. It looked extremely easy.”

Wait, it looks easy to go uphill on skis?

“They have like grips on them,” Miller replied with a smile. “They just ran up the hill, then they went down. That’ s an easy Gold Medal for me. Give me a week.”

Fair enough. Any events you wouldn’t even want to attmept?

“I can’t ice skate,” said Miller. “So, figure skating wouldn’t be any good. I also don’t like to dance. Dancing and skating are two of the things I don’t like, so figure skating would be out.”

What about ski jumping?

“I’d do that,” he replied. “I don’t know about the one where I’d need to do a flip. But the flying squirrel one, I could do that.”

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I asked 20-year-old Mariners pitching prospect Ryan Sloan the same set of questions.

“Probably hockey,” said the Elmhurst, Illinois native, who is ranked 20th on our recently-released 2026 Top 100 Prospects list. “I didn’t play hockey — I can barely skate — but that would be pretty cool. I’ll go to a game every once in a while.”

The 6-foot-5, 200-pound hurler went on to name figure skating as the event he’d be least likely to even try. “Not a chance,” he told me. “I don’t think I have the build for it.” As for ski jumping, Sloan matched Miller in the bravery department: “I wouldn’t be opposed to it.”

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A random obscure former player snapshot:

Scott Livingstone had a career-best season with the San Diego Padres in 1995. Playing for first-year manager Bruce Bochy, the left-handed-hitting corner infielder slashed .337/.380/.490 with a 133 wRC+ over 213 plate appearances. Four years earlier, he had what arguably stands as his most memorable game. Making his MLB debut with the Detroit Tigers on July 19, 1991, Livingston went 3-for-5 with a walk and four runs scored in a 17-0 shellacking of the Kansas City Royals.

In 1987, the Dallas native had played for a star-studded Team USA squad that included Jim Abbott, Chris Carpenter, Tino Martinez, Gregg Olson, and Scott Servais. The following year, Livingston was drafted in the second round by the Tigers, with whom he went on to play for three-plus seasons before being traded to the Padres, and then by San Diego to St. Louis in a 1997 deal that included Danny Jackson, Phil Plantier, Mark Sweeney, and Fernando Valenzuela.

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LINKS YOU’LL LIKE

Nick Castellanos has no regrets about how his time in Philadelphia ended, although he did take away lessons from the rocky finish. Julian McWilliams has the story at CBS Sports.

Brewer Fanatic’s Michael Trzinski looked back at how the Seattle Pilots became the Milwaukee Brewers.

The Athletic’s Zack Meisel wrote about Cleveland Guardians pitching prospect Daniel Espino, a doctor’s son whose promising career has been stalled multiple times due to surgeries.

MLB.com’s Elizabeth Muratore wrote about the mantra that has brought British coaches to MLB.

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RANDOM FACTS AND STATS

Roberto Clemente and Honus Wagner co-hold the Pittsburgh Pirates franchise record for games played. The Hall of Famers each suited up 2,433 times.

Three position players in modern-era (since 1901) Cincinnati Reds franchise history have recorded a hit in their lone plate appearance for the team: Joseph Burns (in 1910), Red Lutz (1922), and Paul Noce (1990).

Buster Posey had a .302 BA, 1,500 hits, and 460 extra-base hits, and 729 RBIs.
Sean Casey had a .302 BA, 1,531 hits, and 464 extra-base hits, and 735 RBIs.

Robin Yount had 3,182 hits, including 251 home runs.
Tony Clark had 1,188 hits, including 251 home runs.

The Detroit Tigers signed Johnny Damon on today’s date in 2010. Damon went on to play one season in Motown, recording 146 of his 2,769 career hits, as well as eight of his 235 home runs and 11 of his 408 stolen bases. He had a 107 wRC+ and 2.3 WAR for a Tigers team that finished with a record of 81-81.

Players born on today’s date include Ferdinand De Paige Moore, a first baseman who went 2-for-4 while playing in a pair of games for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1914. Per his B-Ref bio page, Moore later became a detective for the Atlantic City police department and at one time was head of the vice squad. He fatally shot a cigar store proprietor, and then himself, in 1947.

Also born on today’s date was Steve Colyer, a left-hander who made 61 relief appearances while playing for the Los Angeles Dodgers, Detroit Tigers, and Atlanta Braves across the 2003-2007 seasons. His pitching ledger — a record of 1-1 with a 5.04 ERA over 55-and-a-third innings — isn’t all that notable, but his batting ledger puts him in fairly select company. Along with Eddie Gaedel and a small number of others, Colyer walked in his lone career plate appearance.

Muggsy Bogues played in one game and went hitless in two at-bats for the South Atlantic League’s Gastonia Rangers — a team managed by Bump Wills — in 1991. A 5-foot-3 point guard, Bogues played 14 NBA seasons, nine of them with the Charlotte Hornets.