Jordan Montgomery has exactly 1 person to blame after getting booed off the field in Arizona

After years of proving that he's a reliable starter to plug into a rotation, Jordan Montgomery had a career year in 2023. The southpaw posted a 3.20 ERA in 32 starts and 188.2 innings of work splitting time for the St. Louis Cardinals and Texas Rangers. Once Texas acquired him at the trade deadline, he posted a 2.79 ERA in 11 starts, helping them get to the postseason. He again elevated his play in the postseason, leading the Rangers to a World Series title.

Montgomery was one of the best pitchers in all of baseball last season. No, he wasn't in the Cy Young conversation, but combining his regular season and postseason numbers, only a few were better.

Montgomery's reward for his stellar season was a one-year deal that he wound up agreeing to with the Arizona Diamondbacks just a couple of days before the regular season began. Montgomery (along with several other Scott Boras clients) dragged his free agency out until the very end only to settle for a one-year deal after Spring Training had ended.

To the surprise of very few individuals, he has gotten off to a very slow start to his season. His latest rough outing caused Diamondbacks fans to boo him off the field. Montgomery has one person to blame for this, and his name is Scott Boras.

Scott Boras is the only person Jordan Montgomery should blame for his rough start

Montgomery was coming off an abysmal start in New York in which he gave up eight runs (six earned) in four innings pitched against a struggling Mets offense. He was hoping to have righted the ship, but things only got worse with the southpaw allowing six runs in just two innings of work against the San Francisco Giants. All six of those runs came in the top of the third inning, punctuated by a Wilmer Flores grand slam.

What has stood out most about Montgomery's slow start is his lack of command. At his best, Montgomery is usually a strike-thrower, but this was his fourth time walking three batters in an outing already this season in just nine starts. He had four such starts in his 32 appearances in 2023, and his career-high is four.

Montgomery has looked out of sorts, and it's pretty clear that missing Spring Training has something to do with it. It's unfair for Montgomery to not shoulder any of the blame, but it's hard to imagine he'd be struggling this mightily had he gone through an ordinary Spring Training.

The 31-year-old is in this situation because of who represented him. Scott Boras is known to drag things out with his clients, and this past offseason, that strategy simply did not work. He waited for teams to budge, and that did not happen. There's a very realistic chance that Montgomery passed on a long-term deal that wasn't to Boras' liking, and he wound up having to settle for a one-year deal when the regular season was about to begin.

Clearly, Montgomery didn't feel like the fit with Boras was right as he switched agencies in April.

Boras' gamble of having his clients prove themselves on these short-term deals can work, but they carry tons of risk. So far, the risk is not paying off at all for Montgomery, and Boras deserves the blame for that.