TORONTO – The last time Charlie Montoyo saw the Toronto Blue Jays in person, they were playing a lot more like his current team, the Chicago White Sox, than the way they are right now. Those were dire times last summer, the team coming off a dismal 1-9 stretch featuring a series of demoralizing losses along with sweeps by the Tampa Bay Rays and Seattle Mariners, prompting GM Ross Atkins to change managers and promote John Schneider. Eventually, the Blue Jays stabilized, got right, clinched the first wild card and, well, you know the rest.
Things aren’t quite as grim for the White Sox at the moment, even if the AL Central’s perennial underachievers arrived in Toronto having lost four straight and nine of 11. In that way, Montoyo, hired this winter as new manager Pedro Grifol’s bench coach, is once again trying to help his team escape a troubling funk, one the Blue Jays pushed them deeper into with a 5-2 victory.
Chris Bassitt threw 6.1 strong innings before leaving the game with right lower back tightness, Cavan Biggio capped a pivotal four-run fourth with a three-run homer and Matt Chapman added a run-scoring double as Toronto’s depth simply wore down the weaker White Sox.
Not even Luis Robert Jr. leaping over the eight-foot wall in centre field to rob Chapman of a homer earlier in the fourth could prevent the eventual outcome.
Montoyo’s thoughts on what happened last summer, where his old team is at now or the state of his current club remain unknown, as he traded pleasantries with a number of familiar faces but declined interview requests, as is his prerogative.
On the field pre-game, his exchanges were limited to hugs with a small handful of Blue Jays staffers and signing some autographs for fans who called out to him, making for a muted reunion. Otherwise, he focused on the White Sox’s work, hitting grounders to the infielders, chatting with baserunners by third base, working his way to the outfield and putting his arm around players who may very well need a little love at the moment.
“He’s got a calming presence,” Grifol said of Montoyo. “He doesn’t let situations like this affect him or anybody around him. He just brings a sense of comfort and calmness to all of us that we’ve needed. He’s a big piece of this thing. I’m lucky to have him here next to me.”
Montoyo provided the Blue Jays with similar guidance through the tumult of 2020’s pandemic summer in Buffalo and the three-home-city, one-game-short-of-playoffs heartbreak in 2021 before his firing last summer. He managed many of the growing pains the club endured in pursuit of the more mature whole it’s trying to become this season, personnel changes helping on that front.
Bassitt, signed to a $63-million, three-year deal this off-season, delivered a fourth straight solid outing, allowing a two-run double to Andrew Vaughn in the third and nothing else before a crowd of 26,293.
He cruised from there until the seventh, when with one out he spiked his first pitch to Robert, signalled to the dugout and came out of the game. The severity of his back tightness wasn’t immediately known.
After Chapman was robbed of a homer in the fourth, Whit Merrifield ate into a 2-0 White Sox lead with an RBI double and Biggio followed by ripping a 1-2 Lance Lynn curveball into the party deck in right field for a three-run homer.
The utilityman, in an 0-for-15 rut before the homer, watched the pitch break right onto his barrel.
Chapman added an RBI double in the seventh that made it a 5-2 game.
It was, in a sense, a vision of what Montoyo expected the Blue Jays to be, and a blueprint for the White Sox, as well, who made him a priority for their coaching staff.
“He was the only guy I thought about. The only guy. He checked every box that I wanted as a bench coach. It was an easy decision,” said Grifol. “I knew him a little bit, but when you’re in the game a long time, over the years, in the positions that I’ve held, you always write down good names of people that you’d want to work with in the future. He was on every list I ever had, whether I was farm director, field co-ordinator, whatever. When his name came up and I knew he was available, it was an easy decision.”
