Photograph by shgmom56 via Flickr
It was a great spring in 2010 that vaulted Jaime Garcia from an usually quick return from elbow surgery to a sub-3.00 ERA as a rookie, so it's fitting, if not necessarily advisable, that a rough spring in 2011 has Cardinals fans worried. Across four starts Garcia has done just about everything a pitcher can do to struggle—he's walked more batters than he's struck out, he's allowed two home runs, and he's been torched to the tune of 23 hits in 13 innings. His WHIP, for the fantasy baseball players out there, stands at 2.23. But four bad starts don't mean very much, and four bad starts in March mean even less. We're unlikely to see another 2.70 ERA from Garcia in 2011, but this particular rough patch doesn't shed much new light.
Spring Training, after all, offers a million large and small caveats for any player's performance. New pitches, offseason rust, the vastly different atmosphere—whatever it is that goes on in addition to the necessarily small sample sizes of spring, a player's March performance often does little more than mislead, anointing utility infielders as future starters and AAA pitchers as diamonds in the, uh, diamond.
The same effects that can turn a mediocre player into a Spring Training hero are at work on the Spring Training losers. Among the starters with a higher spring ERA than Garcia to date: Milwaukee's Randy Wolf, Chicago's new acquisition, Matt Garza, and Houston's Wandy Rodriguez. So if Garcia takes this spring opportunity to ripen prematurely into a fall pumpkin, the Cardinals will at least have fine NL Central company.
If you want to panic about Jaime Garcia I have a million reasons I could lend you—the huge increase in innings pitched from 2009 to 2010, the way his ERA exceeded his peripherals, the likelihood of less home run luck in 2011—but his Spring Training performance isn't very high on my long, anxiety inducing list.
