The Dodgers have released Luis Garcia, according to the right-hander’s MLB.com profile page. Garcia was designated for assignment last week and (upon clearing waivers) had the right to reject an outright assignment in favor of free agency, though L.A. streamlined that process by parting ways with the 38-year-old.
Signed to a minor league contract this past winter, Garcia made the Dodgers’ Opening Day roster, and posted a 5.27 ERA over 27 1/3 innings with the club. The righty’s 4.25 SIERA was more respectable, as Garcia’s sky-high .388 BABIP greatly hampered his grounder-heavy approach. Bad batted-ball luck notwithstanding, Garcia also hurt himself by allowing a lot of hard contact, and walking batters at a 12.7% rate. That elevated walk rate was an unwelcome return to the control problems Garcia faced earlier in his career, though he had seemingly harnessed his control by posting a more palatable 7% walk rate from 2021-24.
Garcia missed about a month of the season due to an adductor strain, and made two final appearances for Los Angeles before he was DFA’ed. The 13-year veteran will now be changing addresses yet again after already pitching for seven different teams at the big league level over his lengthy career. This long track record figures to get Garcia another look from some team on a minors deal, and the reliever was still posting quality results as recently as the first half of 2024, before the deadline trade that sent Garcia from the Angels to the Red Sox.
If Garcia indeed signs elsewhere, new team would only owe him the MLB minimum salary for any time spent in the majors. That money would be subtracted from the remainder of Garcia’s $1.5MM salary for the 2025 season, which will be otherwise covered by the Dodgers.
Noah Davis soon to follow.
AMEN! What a trainwreck.
In a telling sign, the Dodgers had Michael Conforto drive Luis Garcia to the airport.
Lol
At first, you see a guy with 89th percentile ground ball rates and an inflated BABIP and you think that team needs to shop for infield defense, but upon further review, that doesn’t actually appear to be the case.
This website likes to cite fielding independent stats like FIP and SIERA that assume BABIP is an across the board luck skill, but Garcia hasn’t really had bad luck on his batted balls. His BABIP on grounders is more than 20 points below league average. His BABIP on fly balls is around 4 times the league average (.400 compared to the average .109) but he’s only had 10 fly balls in play so it only accounts for 3 hits more than you’d expect which is made up for in the overperformance on all his grounders. It’s the line drives. His BABIP on line drives is around league average but league average is around .700 so if you give up a ton of line drives like he does, a high BABIP isn’t unlucky. The writers here seem to have a template that points to FIP and SIERA but have been slow to embrace a stat like xERA that would suggest he’s not unlucky as those assumptive “luck” regressing stats would say.
I didn’t even mean to open this article. It was an accident while scrolling and I started reading without realizing it wasn’t what I meant to open. Then that BABIP luck paragraph and grounder heavy approach made me think that maybe the Dodgers are a good fit for a trade for an infielder and started looking into the underlying stats to find that based on Garcia’s batted ball outcomes, quite the opposite. His infielders have been there for him.
I was hoping to see Noah Davis DFA headlined, but that isn’t the case. Hopefully we see that tomorrow, with Sheehan’s return.
Oddly for a guy with his stats, he was a fairly important pitcher for the Dodgers early in the season. He ate a ton of mop up innings, allowing Roberts to keep the pen in some kind of order, and he came through a couple of times late in games. Injuries kept him on the roster far longer than warranted, but while it’s great that enough players have gotten healthy that he can finally be released, he served the Dodgers well.
Too bad he can’t play third and hit home runs
It would be fun if Nats can sign him, so that they could have two Luis Garcias on the team