Jesus Montero's Turbulent Journey to Restore Hope for MLB Stardom

Jesus Montero isn't going to be the best player Brian Cashman ever traded. The New York Yankees general manager is going to be wrong on that prediction, not that he should stay up nights worrying about it.

But stop for a moment and think of Montero as what he is, and not what he was supposed to be.

He's a 25-year-old with his life seemingly in order, on and off of the baseball field. He's still a kid (if only barely), and he was having a fine season in Triple-A when the Seattle Mariners called him up to the big leagues. He's a perfect fit on the Mariners roster right now, though he found himself back in Triple-A when the Mariners sent him down on Sunday. But when people inside and outside the Seattle organization look at him, they see a guy who has a chance to really hit.

It's not a bad picture, if you don't cloud it with the expectations from his past. Then again, if you color it through the depths of Montero's more recent past, it has a chance to be one of the nicer pictures in baseball.

Who doesn't love a story of redemption, a story of a guy who digs himself into a big hole and then finds his way out of it?

Jesus Montero isn't yet that guy, but he lived through the depths and has already made considerable progress on the climb back up. He's impressing people again, instead of disgusting them.

"Tremendous transformation," Mariners manager Lloyd McClendon said. "He's back on the radar."

Montero's first five major league games this year were unremarkable, with three singles and three walks in 13 plate appearances. He was called up because the Mariners were about to face a string of left-handed starters, and the hope was that he could give a struggling team an offensive boost.

He's hardly the first guy who failed to do that.

The Mariners have been looking for offense seemingly forever, which is why they gave $240 million to Robinson Cano, why they gave $57 million to Nelson Cruz—and why they once gave Michael Pineda to the Yankees to get Montero.

"He may well be the best player I've ever traded," Cashman said in January 2012, when the deal was made.

Montero was a catcher then and for three straight years he'd been ranked by Baseball America as one of the top 10 prospects in the entire minor leagues.

He hadn't yet been caught up in the Biogenesis scandal and suspended for 50 games (that would come in 2013). He hadn't yet shown up for spring training badly overweight (that would come in 2014), and he hadn't yet been suspended for an altercation with a scout (later in 2014).

He debuted in the big leagues at 21 and was 22 when he spent all of 2012 with the Mariners.

"It's not easy to be here that young," he said last week.

Montero seems to understand now what he wasn't able to understand then, which is that it takes work and commitment and not just talent to make it. Mariners people universally praise the work he did over the winter, the work that helped him lose 45 pounds and move better on the field.

Stephen Brashear/Associated Press/Associated Press/Associated Press

They praise the attitude he has taken into this season, how he handled being back in Triple-A (where he hit .332 with an .899 OPS and was headed to the All-Star Game before he got called up). They like the way he handled his call-up to the big leagues and even how he handled getting sent back down.

"They gave me an opportunity to be here," he told reporters, including Bob Dutton of the News Tribune. "It was fun. I want to keep working hard to get back here."

Montero says his marriage has settled him down and that having a child (with another child on the way) has changed him.

"I just think about my daughter," he said. "And I do good things."

He may never make the trade look good from the Mariners' perspective. Pineda has had problems of his own, but he has a 16-strikeout game this year and has become one of the keys in the Yankees rotation. Montero can't even win a regular job on one of the worst hitting teams in baseball.

"I don't know what's going to happen in the future," he said.

Not many of us can accurately predict the future. Jesus Montero is already proof of that.

We can't change the past, either, but we can change how the past is viewed. What's clear this year is that Jesus Montero now has a chance to do that.

Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.

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