Little known at first, Luis Garcia is indispensable part of St. Louis Cardinals’ surge

When most people get a new job, they have the opportunity to interview with their potential boss, review some of the expectations of their potential position, and perhaps even take a tour around their work space to get a feel for their daily environment.

When Cardinals reliever Luis García got a new job, he hopped a flight to Chicago and showed up the next day at Wrigley Field nearly anonymously. Less than three months later, he’s one of the team’s most indispensable pieces.

“When I got here, I was thinking about (helping) the team the most I can,” García said Monday at American Family Field. “I still feel the same.”

García started the year as the closer for the Yankees’ Triple-A affiliate at Scranton/Wilkes-Barre. He had an opt-out clause built into his contract that would grant him the freedom to seek a Major League opportunity if he hadn’t been promoted by July 1st, but he was sure he would be.

With more than 300 big league innings under his belt and a sharp slider that plays off a heavy fastball, he kept his face clean-shaven as per New York’s long standing policy and was content to wait his turn.

Meanwhile, the Cardinals were in desperation mode.

Jack Flaherty was injured, Miles Mikolas was injured again, and a bullpen composed of system arms seeking to take the next step was springing a seemingly endless supply of leaks. All stones were turned over and all options considered, and that brought the club to García.

Cardinals General Manager Michael Girsch said that he couldn’t remember whether García was among the list of candidates who were presented to manager Mike Shildt and pitching coach Mike Maddux for their assessment.

With so many balls in the air and no guarantee that a player with an opt out would choose the Cardinals, Girsch and the front office felt like it wasn’t a good use of the coaching staff’s energy to take a peek under the hood at innings drivers they may not ever control.

So when García pulled into the garage, there was no test drive to be done. Shildt was handed the keys as the staff worked to pull together García’s manual.

Contact between the Cardinals and García’s agent, Larry Reynolds, led the reliever to exercise his opt out and be granted his release from the Yankees on July 6. By July 8, a deal nearly done, García was on a late flight to Chicago to meet the Cardinals. On July 9, he signed his contract and joined his new teammates for a pregame workout.

It happened so quickly that the assembled media in Chicago that day were left guessing as to his identity, watching a burly right-hander that none of them recognized play catch and great players warmly in the outfield.

As he was getting loose, pitching strategist Dusty Blake was at work translating one organizational language into another. The club’s internal scouting reports are necessarily more detailed and structured differently than their advanced scouting reports on opposing players.

For someone like fellow midseason revelation TJ McFarland, an established body of work for triple-A Memphis — even a small one — simplifies the translation and helps the big league coaches get a handle on the player they have.

For García, with only years-old advance reports and more recent minor league write ups available, it fell in part to Blake to turn García’s raw material into a digestible product for in-game usage.

“We do our due diligence, through baseball development and through our own pitching guys, including Dusty,” Shildt explained. “We welcome him and we go from there, start the process to get to know him.”

Part of that process was trial by fire.

García pitched that Friday, hitting one batter, striking out another, and allowing an earned run in ⅔ of an inning pitched. One week later, following the All-Star break, he allowed two runs in ⅓ of an inning. Four days after that, three runs without recording an out.

He then went seven weeks without allowing another run to score.

His 23 appearance, 25 ⅓ inning long scoreless streak is the second-longest in MLB this season, short only of all-world Mets starter Jacob deGrom, who went 31 innings without allowing a run in May and June.

In that time, he made himself indispensable.

He’s pitched primarily as a setup option, taking over the role previously held by Giovanny Gallegos as Gallegos has become the team’s closer and Alex Reyes has moved into more flexibility in his outings. After his scoreless streak was snapped on Sunday against San Diego, he fired back for his first save with the Cardinals on Monday, taking the ninth inning of a game for which Gallegos was unavailable.

It took him only eight pitches to dispatch the Brewers.

“Even when we are where we are right now, we’re close to making the playoffs,” Garcia said before Monday’s game, “basically the same mindset.”

“I don’t have a role. I’m just ready to pitch.”

He was ready from the moment he showed up, and with 16 of his 28 appearances coming with either one or zero days rest, he’s been ready on nearly every day since. That goes a long way toward driving a player from anonymous to indispensable.