The Atlanta Braves continue to do well with quiet, short-term moves this winter, this time by picking up veteran lefty Jaime Garcia from the St. Louis Cardinals. Garcia has one year remaining on his deal, and the Braves got him for three players who wouldn’t have made my rankings of their top 20 prospects this winter.
Garcia is set to make $12 million in 2017, well under the qualifying offer and less than he’d likely make on the open market. A year after a 2.43 ERA/3.00 FIP performance in an injury-shortened, 20-start 2015 season, Garcia threw 171 innings in 2016, the second-highest total of his career. Unfortunately, he gave up a career-high 26 home runs, leaving a lot of fastballs out over the plate for hitters to send out of the park and resulting in the worst ERA and FIP of his career.
Garcia has generally been effective when healthy, but infrequently healthy. The 2016 season was the first in which he qualified for the ERA title since 2011, and his delivery puts a lot of stress on his elbow and shoulder. But if you're looking to catch lightning in a bottle on a starter for a year, he has 3.0 WAR upside with stuff that misses bats and gets ground balls. The investment here for Atlanta, in both dollars and players traded, is relatively low.
Adding Garcia creates some real competition for the back end of Atlanta’s rotation now, with Julio Teheran still the No. 1 starter and Bartolo Colon presumably locked into another slot. I would assume Mike Foltynewicz has a spot after a season when he was just about league-average in 123 innings, although he might have to compete for one of the last two slots in the rotation against R.A. Dickey, Matt Wisler, Aaron Blair and perhaps one or two others. With Atlanta on the upswing but not at the Nationals’ or Mets’ level yet, I’d rather see those spots go to developing young pitchers, with Dickey and Josh Collmenter in relief roles. But with Blair losing velocity in 2016 and Wisler becoming insanely homer-prone (11 homers in 50 innings after the break), they will both have to re-earn their spots at some point.
St. Louis clears some space on its payroll, but I think the haul is probably less than the team expected when it picked up Garcia’s option a month ago. The Cardinals wind up with a quantity-over-quality package that is better than nothing but doesn’t have much upside. John Gant is a deception guy with average stuff who has missed some bats in the minors and might have value in the bullpen where hitters get just one look at him, although in 2016 he was awful in both roles in the majors. He has thrown 50 major league innings, so he has lost his rookie eligibility and technically isn’t eligible for my prospect lists any more. Chris Ellis had some potential coming out of Ole Miss with two average pitches and a workhorse build, but he was mediocre in Double-A last season and flat-out awful in 15 Triple-A starts, walking 52 guys in 67 innings. He doesn’t have monster stuff, so while he looks like a starter, he might be a pen guy or just a minor league arm unless he can stop walking guys the way he has since pitching in High-A. Luke Dykstra is an organizational player, a second baseman with no power (really -- he hasn’t homered since 2014) or speed and a career walk rate in the pros of 3 percent.
It’s just some stuff for Garcia, who might just not have had the asset value I thought he had. I saw a guy who has the potential to be league-average or above -- and who has done it more than once before -- under contract for a reasonable one-year deal. He would have slotted somewhere in the middle of my top 50 free agents had the Cardinals declined his option. St. Louis doesn’t need him -- with Lance Lynn coming back, Alex Reyes up, and Michael Wacha around, they have six guys who could make their Opening Day rotation -- but I’m surprised this is all the market thought he was worth.