Montero's early exit from gem precedes late blown lead to end rough May

CHICAGO -- Keider Montero walked into the visiting dugout after the sixth inning at Rate Field on Sunday afternoon and began to mentally prepare for the next frame.

The right-hander had thrown 65 pitches through six shutout innings, had permitted just two hits, the Tigers had a one-run lead and they looked primed to snap a three-game losing streak. Then, manager A.J. Hinch came up to him to let him know his day was finished.

“He gave me a handshake in the dugout and said I was done,” Montero said after the Tigers’ 2-1 loss to the White Sox, which gave Chicago a three-game sweep and ended a difficult, 6-22 May for Detroit.

Was Montero surprised he wasn’t going back out?

“Yes, yes, I was because I wasn’t looking at that [handshake],” Montero said. “I was so focused on adjusting my things in the dugout where I was seated, and that’s when [Hinch] told me, ‘Good job,’ and that I was done.”

The 25-year-old wasn’t fatigued, either.

“Yes, all good,” he said. “I felt really good, but it’s his decision.”

Hinch went to right-hander Drew Anderson to relieve Montero, who induced a groundout to Andrew Benintendi before allowing a solo home run to Colson Montgomery, the first of four straight hits in the inning that flipped the game for the Tigers.

"He was on his stuff, you know?” Montgomery said. “It's the big leagues. That stuff happens, and guys are really good. Sometimes it's like he leaves and it's just ‘All right, now this is our time to go, kind of thing.’ Not saying we were happy to see him leave, but it's one of those things where he was dealing, he was on his stuff.

“But we're a team, we're not going to stop. I have all the confidence in the world in ourselves and our guys, so I felt like we were ready to get to them sometime."

Hinch didn’t want the left-handed hitting pocket of the White Sox lineup to face Montero a third time because of the damage they had done the first two nights. Benintendi, Montgomery and Chase Meidroth -- the three hitters due up in the inning – were 7-for-22 in the first two games of the series with six extra-base hits.

“Well, the very part of their order that we had trouble with pretty much all series was coming up again,” Hinch said. “Drew’s been pretty dominant against lefties. But they put together an inning [of] four straight hits, so, clearly, it's tough because it’s a 1-0 game. You’re trying to win a 1-0 game, if we couldn’t put anything together [offensively].

“I thought that was the best way to get there with Drew’s dominance of lefties. We just couldn’t keep the ball in the ballpark.”

Pulling Montero put a damper on one of his best outings of the year.

He retired the first eight hitters of the game, before Rikuu Nishida hit an infield single that second baseman Zach McKinstry had a glove on but couldn’t field. Montero worked around that and retired 10 of the final 11 hitters he faced, with Tristan Peters’ two-out double in the fifth his only other blemish.

It’s the second time this season he’s thrown six scoreless innings in a start, having done so against Miami on April 10 in another two-hit effort.

“I was in the zone and was attacking them a lot because I know them,” Montero said. “I know they’re very aggressive, and I was just trying to get them to make outs as fast as possible to try to go farther in the game, and that’s what happened.”

The Tigers’ offense raced out to a hot start, as they scored three batters into the game. Spencer Torkelson doubled to score Kevin McGonigle, who reached on a one-out single.

But the offensive woes that plagued Detroit in May quickly returned. They mustered just two hits the rest of the game – a leadoff single by Kerry Carpenter in the fourth and a two-out single from Torkelson in the seventh. They scored five runs on 15 hits in the sweep and finished May scoring 81 runs with a .597 OPS, both the lowest marks in baseball.

“We’re just trying to win the game,” Hinch said. “I understand, the common thought is the other way [keeping Montero in the game] would have worked out perfectly.

“Just giving him another look was not the way we were going to go. We’re just trying to win today’s game.”