Quickly moving forward
A third-round pick in 2020, Garcia coming into his own on the mound
Pirates assistant general manager Steve Sanders sat at a podium Thursday, telling the media how much the team believes in their thirdround draft pick Bubba Chandler’s ability to grow.
Chandler, a three-sport athlete in high school, had never committed fully to baseball before, and that, Sanders said, was a positive to the Pirates.
In a way, that was Nick Garcia 13 months ago. Garcia was the Pirates’ thirdround pick in 2020, and while he was a college pitcher, he hadn’t started throwing off the mound consistently until his sophomore year at Chapman University in California, the 2018-19 season. Before that, he was an infielder full time.
That led director of amateur scouting Joe DelliCarri to rave about the room for development left in Garcia’s arsenal, his mechanics … everything. The gist of it is that he was raw then and still successful, so just imagine what he could be pitching full time around an experienced minor league staff.
“Nick Garcia is the classic coming-into-his-own, position player getting a chance to pitch,” DelliCarri said. “Watching him grow and watching the small progress that he has made along each step that we have seen him, then getting the opportunity to see the foundation come to fruition a little bit, we feel like we can really help him moving forward, as well.” So how’s that going so far? Through 13 appearances and 44 innings at low Class A Bradenton, Garcia is sitting with a 3.27 ERA, 48 strikeouts and 22 walks. He has allowed more than two runs against him in an outing just once all season, and most recently he has worked his stamina up, pitching five innings or more in each of his past three starts.
He has started more games this year (six) than he had started in his career to this point (five), and he’s doing well.
That also comes after a season when all minor league games were canceled by a global pandemic. Garcia said it was somewhat difficult to get ramped back up into game action after so much time away from it. He didn’t call it rust, but even if he had, he hasn’t shown many signs of struggling.
There are, obviously, still things being fine-tuned. As with most pitchers who transition to the position late, his fastball is solid, sitting in the mid-90s mph consistently, but the breaking stuff is wherehe’s working hard.
“The breaking balls for me, the two of them that I throw, have been the biggest point of emphasis for me to work on,” Garcia said. “And I knew that coming in after that long period off, not being able to throw them competitively. It takes some time, especially for me to get feel back. As the year’s gone on, it’s gotten better and better, but it’s one of those things that you can ask any pitcher across the board with however many years, they’re always working on stuff, always adjusting stuff.”
To imply that Garcia came in with no idea how to pitch and is just now learning would be false. He already had good stuff in college; it’s just a matter of building on it and translating it to professional ball.
After he was drafted, Garcia and Chapman coach Scott Laverty both expressed to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette their excitement for Garcia to get around the technology at the disposal of minor league teams.
As it turns out, Garcia has stayed away from diving too much into the advanced numbers. Bradenton has people who study the analytics and tell him where his pitches play best to hitters, and Garcia has taken that information with him. At the same time, his mindset has always been a raw, competitive one on the mound, and to change that now would be losing what made him a good college pitcher in the first place.
“For me, it’s a lot of feel,” Garcia said.
“Being so new to everything, you’ve got to really trust what you’re doing, so it’s great to have numbers and have statistics to prove what you’re doing is good, but you’ve got to make sure when you go out there that you trust your gut and can throw everything with conviction.”
And when Garcia is feeling his best, he said it’s because everything in his mechanics is timed up well and in perfect sequence. The flow of his body, as he calls it, is the predominant sign of how he’s throwing.
It’s hard to argue with the results so far.
Garcia’s development and continued success is also a factor in grading the 2020 draft class.
High-A second baseman Nick Gonzales, the firstround pick, is the Pirates’ No. 1 prospect right now. High-A right-hander Carmen Mlodzinski is on the injured list, but he was impressive when he was healthy. Two of Garcia’s teammates, second-round right-hander Jared Jones and fifth-round right-hander Logan Hofmann, have both been good for Bradenton, too.
The only blip you could point to is fourth-rounder Jack Hartman, who had Tommy John surgery in December.
Garcia said there is a sense of camaraderie among the six players taken in last year’s five-round draft, in part because it’s such an abnormally small draft class.
The lofty goal would be for them to join together someday in Pittsburgh with the major league club. That’s a long way off, though. Garcia understands that the current goal is simply to keep pressing on and let the rest take care of itself.
“There’s not really [something] that I can say at the end of the year I have to achieve, because there’s really nothing that’s going to alter my career by the end of the year, other than just making the most out of every day that I can, make the most out of every time I get to throw a ball here, every time I get off the mound,” Garcia said.
“We’re really building up to a good pitch count, so now’s the opportunity to just fine-tune stuff, making the adjustments that need to be made mechanically and going out there and competing and really dominating the innings that I can get out there.”