The St. Louis Cardinals will get Jaime Garcia back on Sunday, after a long and ill-defined shoulder injury. He's 3-4 with a 4.48 ERA, and at 25 he no longer feels like the Next Big Thing, which is to say that fans are probably not as excited about this as they might have been a year ago. But they should be, and here's why:
- He's having a pretty good year anyway. Worse than last year, about even with his rookie year, but in 11 starts I'm hesitant to get that granular; when he got hurt, his peripherals were basically what we expected them to be. No breakout, but certainly not a 4.48 ERA. His xFIP is third on the team—really tied for second, with Lance Lynn—behind only Adam Wainwright.
- The Cardinals need arms and innings. They've given almost 20 to Barret Browning and that's seemed, by and large, like a good idea. Jaime Garcia pushes your boy Joe Kelly into the bullpen, where he can soak up some of those innings while throwing almost 100 miles an hour.
Jaime Garcia is weirdly boring now—all the troubles with W-L record and the weird non-control-problem-control-problems have continued past the point where the novelty subsided. But that doesn't make him good, or potentially better-than-good in the future—it just makes him kind of boring.
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