The Nationals have signed right-hander Luis Garcia to a Major League contract, the Washington Post’s Andrew Golden reports. The deal will become official when the 38-year-old Garcia passes a physical.
It didn’t take long for Garcia to find a new landing spot, as the Dodgers only just released the veteran reliever on Friday. Garcia signed a minor league deal with Los Angeles last winter and broke camp with the team, but his struggled during his time on the big league roster. Garcia posted a 5.27 ERA and 12.7% walk rate over 27 1/3 innings, and spent about a month on the injured list recovering from an adductor strain.
There have been plenty of ups and downs for Garcia over his 13 MLB seasons, which isn’t surprising for a grounder specialist who relies a lot of batted-ball luck. His most sustained stretch of success came fairly recently, as Garcia posted a 3.62 ERA, 23.4% strikeout rate, and 7.4% walk rate across 154 relief innings for the Cardinals and Padres from 2021-23. Those results led to a one-year, $4.25MM free agent deal with the Angels during the 2023-24 offseason, and Garcia continued to pitch decently well before his production dipped after a deadline trade to the Red Sox.
Washington has one of the league’s worst bullpens, so there’s not much risk for the Nats in taking a flier to see if Garcia can bounce back from his rough showing in L.A. If he really pitches well between now and the July 31 trade deadline, the Nationals could even look to quickly flip Garcia elsewhere for a low-level minor leaguer.
Once Garcia gets into a game with his new club, he will have pitched with eight different teams at the big league level over the course of his long career. This is actually the second Dodgers-to-Nationals trip Garcia has taken — after beginning his career as an international prospect in Los Angeles’ farm system, the Dodgers dealt Garcia to the Nats way back in August 2009. Garcia didn’t see any big league action during his year-plus in the Washington organization, and didn’t end up making his MLB debut until he was a 26-year-old pitching with the Phillies in 2013. (By coincidence, Garcia pitched against the Nats in his first Major League game.)
Not confusing at all.
Garcia will be GM-Manager-relief pitcher?
It was a contest to see how many times the name Garcia could be fit into one article. The winner, at 17.
Hire Luis Garcia today
Okay thank you Mike
Now unfortunately your fired
Acting GM Team Doctor will also perform the physical!
Nats bullpen is pitiful so Garcia will be a slight improvement
If he pitches more than 30 innings he gets $200 million right? Thats how the nationals do it.
Will they do the same thing that the two Luis Castillos did when in Seattle where the new one went by Luis F. Castillo? This Luis Garcia’s middle name starts with an A so Luis A. Garcia sounds nice. But the second baseman Luis Garcia does go by Luis Garcia Jr. so maybe this whole comment will be totally trivial by tomorrow and the world will not change.
They really need the player’s union to be set up like the actor’s union. If another player has your name when you make it to the majors, you need to pick a stage name.
I assume the janitor signed him
Is like in “Major League: Back to the Minors”? With “Juan 1” and “Juan 2″…