MINNEAPOLIS — Ross Fenstermaker was a professional scout in the Texas Rangers organization when he swung by a UC Davis baseball game on a spring day nine years ago and watched a big, burly left-handed pitcher throw for his alma mater.
“Hey,” Fenstermaker, now the Rangers’ general manager, said that day in a text to an area scout who kept tabs on California amateurs, “I think this guy is pretty good.”
That guy now closes games for the Rangers. That guy had always envisioned himself in that role but, simultaneously, couldn’t have imagined a legitimate path toward it. That guy quite literally left baseball behind. That guy was at the “lowest of lows” and believed that he’d be better of cashing in on his business degree than his baseball acumen. That guy took such an unpredictable path to the big leagues that it even supersedes the probability of his eventual general manager’s impromptu collegiate evaluation.
Robert Garcia, a 28-year-old left-hander whom the Rangers acquired this winter from the Washington Nationals in exchange for first baseman Nathaniel Lowe, doesn’t want to indulge on the past, as intriguing as it may be. He waited patiently for this opportunity, one that came in the middle of May after incumbent closer Luke Jackson fell out of favor, and is intent on “being where my feet are.”
They’re now snug in a pair of critical bullpen cleats.
Imagine that?
“I think if that helps one person in this game to understand that there is hope and you’re not as far away as you think,” Garcia said Wednesday before the Rangers’ 6-2 loss to the Minnesota Twins at Target Field, “I really would love for someone to take that story and understand you’re not as far away as you think you are.”
Garcia, who owns a 3.12 ERA and four saves in a team-high 30 appearances this season, will be the first to it that he could’ve used his own advice four years ago when he retired from professional baseball.
Like, retired retired. Paperwork and all.
“I signed it,” Garcia said. “It was done.”
Garcia was a 25-year-old minor leaguer in his fifth season of professional baseball after the Kansas City Royals selected him in the 15th round of the 2017 MLB draft. He yielded a 5.63 ERA in 33 games with the Northwestern Arkansas Naturals during the 2021 season, missed the first six months of his daughter Adalynn’s life and struggled to “see the light at the end of the tunnel” in a league where he was nearly 2 years older than the average player.
“It could be very discouraging, and I think that really got to me,” Garcia said. “Maybe this isn’t for me. Maybe it’s time to move on.”
So he did. Garcia filed his retirement paperwork with the Royals that winter and started a job at his mother-in-law’s California-based mortgage loans firm. Because of a timing quirk, though, he remained eligible for that year’s Rule 5 draft.
The Rule 5 draft is held each year during the winter meetings and allows teams to draft minor leaguers who meet certain experience and service-time criteria from other organizations.
“If they’d have submitted my paperwork, I’d be done,” Garcia said. “If I’d never gotten selected, I never would have looked back.”
The Marlins selected Garcia with the fourth pick of the second round. He learned while at his desk job and was reluctant to return for a sixth minor league season. He was, at that time, simply in disbelief that a team would even select him. His wife, Paige, encouraged him to continue his career.
Garcia, who earned a master’s degree in business istration during the COVID-19 pandemic to give himself a career safety net, continued to work in mortgage loans until spring training before the 2022 season. He ed the Marlins in Jupiter, Fla., and “realized that I’m really not that far away.”
“That’s when I kind of fell in love with the game, when I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, I fell in love with it again,” Garcia said. “I just had to fine tune some things. I really pushed myself to get there.”
The biggest tweaks were mental. He described himself as “so physically and mentally raw at the time” and had a rudimentary-at-best understanding of baseball metrics and of his own abilities. The Marlins were the first team, in Garcia’s words, that explained to him why he was good and what works for him.
He made his major league debut with the Marlins during the 2023 season and was claimed off of waivers by the Nationals one month later. The Rangers’ research and development team yielded strong reports on Garcia during his first full big league season in Washington and the team’s front office believed his underlying metrics reflected something better than a career 4.03 ERA pitcher with underwhelming numbers in high-leverage situations.
Garcia, who finished last season with a 4.22 ERA in 72 games with the Nationals but maintained that he had “really, really good stuff,” understood that there was buzz surrounding his name at last year’s trade deadline and into the offseason.
The Rangers were so sold on Garcia, a bulky 6-4 hurler who has embraced his emotions on the mound, that they acquired him late December in a one-for-one swap with a Silver Slugger, Gold Glove-award winning first baseman. He did not need to compete for an opening day roster spot and was immediately thrust into a high-leverage role in a reconstructed bullpen that, according to FanGraph’s WAR calculations, has been the fifth best in the American League.
“That gives me a lot of confidence” Garcia said, “but that makes me know that what I’m doing is right. It only solidifies my process of what I’m trying to do day in and day out. There’s a lot of things in this game you can’t control and that’s why you have to be where your feet are.”
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