Frankie Montas
"By the time Frankie Montas takes the mound in Queens, he will have worn the uniform of six different major-league organizations — a résumé that reads less like a career arc and more like a map of baseball's front-office chess game."
Montas has been traded or signed as a free agent by six different MLB organizations since he first put on a professional uniform as a teenager — a level of organizational turnover unusual even for a journeyman starter.
After a lost 2023 season recovering from shoulder surgery, Montas rebuilt his value with a full, durable season for Cincinnati in 2024 — the kind of bounce-back that convinced the Mets to bet on him again as they retool a rotation for contention.
The shorthand version of his career leans on the 2019 PED suspension, but that flattens a longer story: a 16-year-old international signee who worked his way through six organizations' player-development systems and, after major surgery in his 30s, proved he could still start 25-plus games in a season.
Montasの体格は身長188センチ、体重約116キロ。これは日本のプロ野球で見慣れた投手の体格よりもかなり大きく、アメリカの野球文化が投手に求めるのが精密なコントロールよりもまず球威とサイズであることを物語っている。
Montas signed with the Red Sox at 16 as an international free agent out of the Dominican Republic — a completely different entry point than the amateur draft American fans are used to. There's no draft day, no college option, no high-school showcase circuit; instead, Latin American teenagers sign with MLB academies years before they'd be draft-eligible in the U.S., which is why a player can already be a professional by the age American prospects are still finishing high school.
Frankie Montas is a right-handed pitcher from Sainagua, in the Dominican Republic, who has spent more than a decade bouncing between contenders and rebuilders — the Red Sox, White Sox, Athletics, Yankees, Reds, and now the Mets. His path includes an All-Star-caliber stretch in Oakland, an 80-game suspension, shoulder surgery, and a 2024 comeback that earned him another chance in New York.
| Year | Team | G | W–L | ERA | IP | SO | WHIP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | NYM | 9 | 3–2 | 6.28 | 38.2 | 32 | 1.60 |
| 2024 | — | 30 | 7–11 | 4.84 | 150.2 | 148 | 1.37 |
| 2024 | MIL | 11 | 3–3 | 4.55 | 57.1 | 70 | 1.26 |
| Career | — | 169 | 47–48 | 4.20 | 783.0 | 792 | 1.32 |
Source: MLB Stats API · regular season
A Frame Built for the Mound
At six-foot-two and a listed 255 pounds, Frankie Montas has the kind of build that scouts describe in shorthand as 'a workhorse frame' — the physical mass to absorb the workload of 30 starts a year without the mechanics breaking down under it. He throws and bats right-handed, born March 21, 1993, in Sainagua, a small locality in the Dominican Republic's Peravia province, a region better known in baseball circles for the players it has sent north than for anything else. He made his major-league debut on September 2, 2015, a date that, on paper, undersells how much organizational movement was still ahead of him.
The Road Through Six Uniforms
Montas signed with the Boston Red Sox as an international free agent, was later dealt to the Chicago White Sox — the organization with which he debuted — and was traded again in 2016, this time to the Oakland Athletics, where he became a full-time member of the rotation and, by 2021, one of its more reliable arms. From there the path kept moving: a trade to the New York Yankees at the 2022 deadline, a lost 2023 season spent recovering from shoulder surgery, free agency, a one-year prove-it contract with the Cincinnati Reds in 2024, and finally a move to the New York Mets. Few starting pitchers in the current era have changed addresses this often while still holding a rotation job; it is a career shaped as much by roster math and team timelines as by performance on the mound.
American fans generally track prospects through the amateur draft — high school and college players selected in a single, televised event. Dominican players like Montas enter professional baseball through a parallel system: international free agency, in which teams sign players as young as 16 out of academies run either by MLB clubs or independent trainers. There's no draft slot, no leverage from a college commitment — a family's entire negotiating position rests on a single signing period, which is one reason player-development pipelines in the Dominican Republic look so different from their U.S. counterparts.
The Suspension and the Rebuild
In 2019, Major League Baseball suspended Montas 80 games after he tested positive for Ostarine, a violation of the league's joint drug policy. It is the single event most often attached to his name in shorthand recaps of his career, and it cost him a season of momentum just as he was establishing himself in Oakland's rotation. What gets less attention is what came after: a return to full-time starting duty, a trade to a contender, major shoulder surgery that wiped out nearly all of 2023, and then — at an age when many pitchers with that injury history quietly fade into bullpen roles or retirement — a full, healthy season back in a big-league rotation in 2024.
New York, Again
Montas's move to the Mets puts him back in a New York uniform, this time in Queens rather than the Bronx. For a pitcher who has now been evaluated, developed, or reclaimed by half a dozen front offices, joining a team actively trying to build a contending rotation represents something closer to stability than anything he's had in years. Whether that stability produces a career-best stretch or another transitional chapter is, as with any pitcher a few years removed from shoulder surgery, an open question — but it is the first time in a while that Montas arrives somewhere as a chosen piece of a plan rather than a return in a trade.
An 80-game PED suspension carries a particular financial and reputational cost for a player who is not yet an established star — it interrupts arbitration timelines, trade value, and the trust of front offices at the exact moment a player is trying to build a track record. For American readers unfamiliar with how thin that margin is for a mid-rotation starter (as opposed to a franchise player who can absorb the hit), the suspension explains why Montas's subsequent moves through five more organizations reads as a slower, harder climb back than the transaction log alone suggests.
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Frankie Montas Gear — Official MLB ShopThis profile was written by AI (Claude Sonnet) using publicly available sources. Interpretations and cultural notes are AI-generated and may not reflect the views of the player, their team, or MLB. This page contains affiliate links.