Jaime Garcia Is the New Adam Wainwright
When the news hit that Adam Wainwright would be lost for the season, it was tough to imagine the St. Louis Cardinals overcoming that loss to win the NL Central. The Cards had already fallen short to Cincinnati last year. They’d also made few major off-season changes, while the hitting-loaded Brewers picked up two top-shelf pitchers in Zack Greinke and Shaun Marcum. A third-place finish was a perfectly reasonable projection.
Perfectly reasonable until we realize that Jaime Garcia is the new Adam Wainwright.
As Garcia climbed the minor league ranks, he seemed to have some potential. Writing for Baseball America in 2007, Derrick Goold tabbed Garcia as the Cardinals’ second-best prospect:
Garcia fools hitters with a wicked downward-breaking curveball he lands for strikes. His fastball features natural sinking life, consistently reaches the low 90s and tops out at 94. He operates with a clean, easy arm action and repeats his delivery, allowing him to fill the zone with strikes. He shows an advanced touch with his changeup.
Goold surmised that Garcia could crack the big league rotation by 2008. That prediction proved correct when Garcia made his first start that season. But after missing the second half of the 2007 season due to elbow soreness, the joint gave out in early ’08. Garcia would make just that one MLB start in 2008, as Tommy John Surgery knocked him out for most of ’08 and ’09.
Garcia’s stock predictably dropped, as he failed to crack the organization’s 2009 top 10 list. In 2010, he reclaimed the #2 spot, his 38 minor league innings the previous year apparently enough to reassert the team’s confidence in him. Goold had a different take this time:
Garcia commands a biting 12-to-6 curveball that’s a genuine swing-and-miss pitch. He sets it up with an 88-92 mph fastball that has late, downward movement. He used his rehab to add a pitch that’s a cross between a cutter and slider. His minor league playoff performance validated his reputation for being unflappable.
Emphasis mine. Messing around during his long rehab, Garcia found that little hybrid pitch. After that, everything started to change.
The velocity projections put forth early in Garcia’s career haven’t materialized, with the lefty averaging a tick under 90 mph on his four-seam fastball. But with the help of Cardinals pitching guru Dave Duncan, that slider/cutter has evolved into a full-on cutter, one of the most devastating cutters thrown by any pitcher in the game (only Roy Halladay and Jon Lester generated more value with their cutters than Garcia did last year). With hitters perhaps more aware of the cutter this year, Garcia is finding a lot more success with his four-seamer and change-up.
Steve Slowinski recently addressed the concerns that swirled around Garcia coming into this year. Chief among them was the huge bump in workload from 2009 to 2010. In a March Rotographs post, Jason Catania labeled Garcia one of “Five NL Starters You Shouldn’t Draft.”
Another innings increaser. Except in Garcia’s case, the hike alone—125 and 2/3 innings!—should scare the bejesus out of you. Paired with the fact that the Cardinals can’t afford to limit the 24-year-old’s innings like they did at times last season—losing Adam Wainwright‘s 230 will do that—and things get even more frightening.
The Verducci Rule, The Shandler Thesis, or whatever the hell you want to call concerns over a pitcher seeing a big workload jump from one year to the next, does have some merit. But these are broad strokes. Not all pitchers who see a big workload increase will automatically fail. Far from it. In Garcia’s case (and in fairness to Jason!), Catania noted the lefty’s healthy groundball rate (52.4% this year, 18th in MLB; 55.9% last year, 6th in MLB), and came up with a pretty strong hedge, naming Anibal Sanchez and Jorge de la Rosa as strong alternatives (ideally you own all three). Garcia also benefits from a pitcher-friendly home park and pitching in front of the 9th-best defense in baseball.
Most encouragingly, whatever concerns we may have had about Garcia’s good-but-not-great strikeout potential in the minors should be cast aside at this point. The effectiveness of Garcia’s cutter, combined with his newfound durability, have made him a much better pitcher.
In fact, Garcia is putting up the kind of K/BB numbers this year that rival Wainwright’s best. Garcia’s 4.1 strikeout-to-walk rate so far this season tops Wainwright 3.8 K/BB in his top season, 2010. Though we’re only seven weeks into the season, we probably shouldn’t call Garcia better-than-average strikeout rate a fluke anymore, iffy velocity or not. His Swinging Strike rate of 11.8% is tied for 4th-best in MLB; last year’s 10% mark ranked a strong 14th out of 92 qualified starting pitchers.
The Cardinals figure to face stiff competition from the Reds (and very possibly the Brewers) all year long. They’re holding their breath after Lance Berkman (wrist) and Matt Holliday (quad) both exited Wednesday’s game (and missed Thursday’s game) with injuries, potentially threatening baseball’s high-scoring offense. But Garcia, along with Duncan reclamation project Kyle Lohse, have helped the Cardinals stay right in the thick of the race.
If St. Louis does part company with Chris Carpenter ($15 million club option for 2012), or Wainwright struggles to make it back, they can still remain contenders. Having a new ace helps make that possible.
Jonah Keri is the author of The Extra 2%: How Wall Street Strategies Took a Major League Baseball Team from Worst to First -- now a National Bestseller! Follow Jonah on Twitter @JonahKeri, and check out his awesome podcast.
“9th-best defense in baseball.” That’s a shocker!
I was going to comment about this too. If you ever needed an argument that UZR data is worthless in small samples, this is it.
If the Cardinals are the 9th best defense in baseball, then the Padres have the best offense. No way.
They have been playing Lance Berkman in the OF
Let’s see.
C – Yadier Molina. Having a down year (to my eyes) but still regarded as one of the best defensive catchers around.
1B – Pujols. Very good defender.
2B – It’s been a mix-and-match, but mainly Nick Punto (who is EXCELLENT at 2B), with some innings from Tyler Greene (average-to-good), Skip Schumaker (bad) and Daniel Descalso (good).
SS – Theriot, mostly. And he’s been AWFUL this year.
3B – David Freese started the year. He’s good. Daniel Descalso has taken most of the starts recently, and he looks truly excellent at the position (so far, like, Rolen/Beltre good, in a SSS, both to my eyes and to UZR).
LF – Matt Holliday. Plus defender in LF, by UZR and to my eye.
CF – Colby Rasmus. To my eye he’s average, UZR has him as a slight plus.
RF – Berkman. OK, he’s going to be very bad going forward.
The 4th OF is Jon Jay, who is an excellent fielder (and who has played quite a lot so far this year due mainly to injuries).
So, we’re looking at one awful position (RF), one bad one (SS), two average-to-slightly above (CF & LF), two good (1B & 2B), two very good (C & 3B). It doesn’t seem beyond the realms of possibility that that defense is somewhere in the top half, even the top third, in baseball.
And, if I interpret it correctly, I’d say the likelihood is that UZR should be a pretty good descriptor of what’s happened (i.e. the Cardinals defense has been good) over the first month+20days of the season, as that equates (over 8 positions) to a little over two full seasons’ worth of data for an individual player (and I’ve heard 3 seasons mooted as the possible point at which UZR is getting close to normalising, in terms of its sampling error). That doesn’t mean they’ll be any good going forwards, especially if Theriot and Berkman continue at SS and RF every day, but I’d say that, overall, that defense is at least average on paper.
good analysis Felonius
“9th best defense” is misleading. The Cards have played Freese, who is at least average, or Punto (above average) much of the year. Skip Schumaker (awful) hasn’t played all that much due to injury. 2 of the plus defenders are in the outfield and, as the article noted, Garcia’s a ground ball pitcher.
Pujols has been adequate this year. Theriot’s awful but 3rd base and, to some degree, 2nd base have been a pleasant surprise. Garcia’s not hurt too badly by Berkman’s horrid defensive play.