‘Nick can’t hit the curveball’
Position change was born of necessity
Thursday night, Nick Garcia, a righthanded pitcher from Division III Chapman University in California was the Pirates’ third-round pick in the MLB draft. Just two years ago, he wasn’t even a pitcher.
The 21-year-old right-hander from San Carlos, Calif., played in the field most of his career at Junipero Serra High School. Garcia pitched a little bit, but his recruitment to Chapman was as a fielder. In 2018, his freshman year with the Panthers, he played mostly third base, hitting .268 with 6 RBIs in 24 games.
Fine numbers in a small sample size, but nothing especially eye-popping. The problem?
“Nick can’t hit the curveball,” Chapman coach Scott Laverty said. “That was the thing. He started the first part of the season his freshman year playing third base for us and just was doing OK, but was just starting to get exposed with the breaking stuff.”
Pitching coach Dave Edwards had some success in the past moving position players to the mound and helping them morph into good pitchers. Garcia’s arm strength made him a strong candidate for that move, so they pulled the trigger.
“That sophomore year, I kind of was like, ‘All right, let me get the ball. Let me go do this. I’ve done it a little bit before, and I think I’ve got it in me.’ ” Garcia said.
“I think I threw in an intersquad, and that next day I think we had a meeting, and it was like, ‘Let’s do this. Let’s go all on board. Let’s put away the fact that you can’t hit a curveball, and let’s just go see how great I can be on the mound.’ From there on out, it was every day challenging that ability to see how much I can learn and see how good every day I can get at it.”
The development was slow and steady. Laverty says Garcia was around 88-90 mph with his fastball at the beginning of the summer of 2018. Playing in a New York summer league, that crept up to 90-91. In the fall, rested and reunited with Edwards, some physical strengthening and tinkering with his mechanics got that up to 92-95.
So Garcia started the 2018-19 season in the bullpen. Laverty remembers in a season-opening tournament in Arizona, Chapman led, 4-2, in the top of the ninth. Their opponent had the bases loaded with no outs. Garcia was still plenty raw, mainly throwing just fastballs while still working on his secondary pitches, but Laverty called on him anyway to get the Panthers out of the jam.
“He just blows fastballs by the next three guys, and we’re like, ‘Oh, OK. Now, if he continues to do this, we’ve got something special,’ ” Laverty said.
That was the preview of what would be a special season for Garcia. In 56 innings as a reliever, Garcia finished with a 0.64 ERA, striking out 82 and allowing just four runs. He went 9-0 with 12 saves. He went on to become an American Baseball Coaches Association first-team All-American, a member of the Division III National Championship All-Tournament team and the D-III College World Series’ most outstanding player.
That was just one year into his development as a pitcher.
In the summer, he went to the Cape Cod League, where he worked on his off-speed stuff and started to round that into form.
And while Chapman’s conference is very strong at the Division III level, a trip to the Cape also gave Garcia a chance to prove himself against more substantial competition.
“It was huge in proving to people that I could play against that competition from such a young age in pitching,” Garcia said. “And it was huge for me in a learning aspect.
“I knew going there I was going to fail, but I also knew that it was a chance for me to learn fast and succeed and show that I am who I am as a college pitcher and a professional pitcher now, and that I hope to keep moving and learning each outing that I can and just be great.
“And I took something out of every time I went out there on the mound. From the start to that summer to end of that summer, I learned so many things, I gained so much confidence, and, by the end, I was a much different pitcher.”
This quick development is what the Pirates are banking on. Even with a lot of improvement in a short time, Garcia still is very raw. Laverty mentioned that he is excited for Garcia to get his hands on the advanced analytics an MLB team can provide, given that Chapman couldn’t afford them at the time.
Garcia is excited for that, too. Most young pitchers grow up learning how to pitch with feel and eye tests. At Chapman, he did the same, just under the watchful eye of a more experienced coaching staff than he might have had if he had started exclusively pitching younger.
Now, he’s a fireballer with a mid-to-upper-90s mph fastball, and a slider, curveball and changeup that are coming around, too.
That arsenal and the potential are one thing, but Laverty said his pitch to the scouts who asked about Garcia was a more personal one.
“Nick never complained,” Laverty said. “Our three starters from our championship team graduated, and we have five freshman pitchers on our staff right now that are all really good, that we’re really excited about, but Nick was the first one to take them under his wing, start to show them, ‘Hey, this is how you do it here.’
And that’s a special attribute, especially when you see a lot of people that get in that mindset that, ‘Hey, I might be a top-five round draft pick,’ they just start worrying about themselves, and Nick was still about the team, about, ‘Hey, I can still accomplish my things, but this is special.’ ”
Garcia understands as well as anybody that his journey, which he hopes will culminate in the major leagues, only just began with his selection Thursday night.
There are a whole lot of steps he must take along the way.
Surely, there will be failures that come with that, but if there’s anyone who is used to dealing with abnormal bumps in the road, it’s Garcia.
“Right now, day-to-day, my concern is that obviously the end goal is what it is, but I’m going to focus on accomplishing my day-to-day goal,” Garcia said.
“That’s what I’ve done to get myself here, and, if I continue to do that, that’ll get me to where I need to be in the future.
“I’m just going to trust that process and stick to it.”