Can Jaime Garcia rebound with the Braves?
The Braves continued their assault on the “past their prime” pitching market this week, following up their acquisitions of R.A. Dickey and Bartolo Colon by trading for Jaime Garcia from the St. Louis Cardinals. In return, the Cardinals received three mediocre prospects, none of whom should make a fantasy impact in 2017 or the near future (but we’ll talk about them briefly anyway in a bit).
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After an extremely solid first two months of 2016 (roughly a 3.50 ERA, 1.19 WHIP, and 55 strikeouts in 59 2/3 innings), Garcia fell apart over the latter two-thirds of the season. Although he finished with his second-highest innings total and strikeouts of his career (the good), he also finished with the highest ERA, WHIP, FIP, walk rate, and home runs allowed of his career (the really bad).
Truthfully, Garcia’s season was a surprise. Although he has always had trouble staying healthy, he has almost always been effective when he pitches, at least from a real-life perspective. He’s certainly never a huge fantasy asset, but he can generally give you some reliable innings without hurting you, which has some value in NL-only and deep mixed leagues.
The trade doesn’t change Garcia’s fantasy value much. He stays in the National League and goes to an up-and-coming team. But there’s just not much fantasy value in a guy who doesn’t have a big strikeout rate and has topped 130 innings just once in the last five seasons. Look elsewhere for fantasy value, at least until the last round or two of your draft.
In return for Garcia, the Cardinals acquired three players who fantasy owners can ignore in redraft leagues. John Gant is a deception guy who can start or relieve, but other than having the world’s funkiest delivery, he simply is not worth paying attention to. Chris Ellis, a minor league pitcher, walked 52 batters in 67 innings in Triple-A in 2016. Finally, Luke Dykstra is a second baseman who is still in Single-A and hasn’t hit a home run in two years. In other words, it’s unlikely that any of these guys can help owners in fantasy for this year or beyond.
Dan Harris is a correspondent with FantasyPros. For more from Dan, check out his archive or follow him on Twitter at @danharris80.
