The good news: Jaime Garcia is all better again. The bad news: It's impossible, now, to know whether Kyle Lohse is all better after all.
This is the trade-off that comes when you accept that Spring Training stats would be no more deceptive than they already are if you flipped everybody's batting average around horizontally. On one side, a sort of enlightened calm—Jaime Garcia, who threw a complete-game shutout Sunday afternoon, hadn't really become a terrible pitcher in the course of putting together several savagely awful games in a row in the Grapefruit League.
Those who hued to that mantra through March were rewarded yesterday, when he looked exactly like last year's Jaime Garcia, only better. His slider locked up right-handers so consistently that baseball's official scorers will have to look into drawing up a new symbol for checked-swing strikeouts, to go with the called strikeout's backward-K. His heavy fastball generated 11 groundball outs to one fly-out. Unlike the 2010 version, this one was as efficient as he was effective. It's impossible to say how good Garcia will be in 2011, but it's possible, now, to confirm that his Spring Training stats have failed, once again, to give us any insight into that question.
On the other side, a sort of enlightened, stagnant neurosis: No matter how good Kyle Lohse was in March, and he was very good, it can't tell us anything about his performance the rest of the year.
Don't get me wrong; there's a little good news to be taken from all this. He was able to pitch in the first place, after getting two injury-plagued seasons into his big contract extension with health always a matter of degrees, and it's certainly better that he looked great.
But until we see him pitch against real competition—starting tonight—and for real periods of time, we're still in the dark. The dark's a good place to be when Jaime Garcia spends all of March screaming in pain, but after Daylight Saving Time and all it's beginning to get a little tiresome with Mr. Lohse. Such is post-Spring-Training life.
