Jon Meoli: How Rico Garcia assembled the pitch mix that’s saving the Orioles’ bullpen

It’s a pitch mix that you’d design in a lab if you could. Rico Garcia didn’t have to.

And because of it the Orioles’ breakout reliever is one of the most unhittable pitchers in the game. The advice he constantly gets from this father, Eddie — throw everything hard — is at the heart of it all.

“I think that plays a big role in all my pitches because all of my pitches, I like to just grip it and throw it hard,” Garcia said. “And whatever movement profile it does, it’s what it is.”

That throwback approach is yielding dominant results in many ways. After earning a save Tuesday in Boston, Garcia has an ERA of 0.68 ERA and a WHIP of 0.61, striking out 32.3% of batters he’s faced and holding opponents to a .113 batting average.

If it looks as if hitters are just guessing against Garcia, it’s because they are — and there’s little even the most advantaged eye in the batter’s box can do to change that. Garcia’s pitches all live in a consistent band of spin rates — between 2,525 rpms on his four-seamer and 2,422 on his slider — and also spin on roughly the same axis. The only way for a hitter to know which pitch he is seeing is when it starts to move. You’ve probably seen enough bad swings on Garcia to understand that, by then, it’s too late.

The most such swings have come on Garcia’s changeup, which has a 55.8% whiff rate. It’s a pitch that Garcia brought with him to pro ball after the Rockies selected him in the 30th round of the 2016 draft. They developed him as a starter with a heavy emphasis on his fastball-changeup combo.

“They really harped on those pitches, so those two have kind of always been the same,” he said.

That means what makes them effective long precedes this era of pitch design and analytics.

“I think I just knew it was different,” he said. “A lot of changeups drop off the table, almost the depth-y changeup. The swings I would get and stuff on the changeup to lefties, I didn’t have a problem with it. They weren’t seeing it well or whatever — I got away with a lot more. And I think it was because of the spin, and like the rotation, all that kind of stuff.”

Technically speaking, the fact that they are both thrown hard with similar spins means his changeup is indistinguishable from the four-seamer out of his hand. Garcia said his has a “parachute effect.” It appears identical to the fastball but fades toward his arm side as it slows down.

He seldom throws the pitch against righties, though. Instead, he favors his slider and curveball in those situations — equally effective pitches, though not as natural to him.

He wasn’t a fan of the movement or swings he was getting on his curveball in 2023 with Oakland and asked teammate Austin Pruitt how he threw his. It stuck and almost immediately became a bat-missing weapon against righties and lefties.

At the time, he threw a sweeper too, seeking a pitch that moved toward his glove side, given his curveball was more vertical and his fastball and changeup had arm-side movement.

As the sweeper became prevalent in 2022 he got on board, but the pitch didn’t match the rest of his arsenal. His pitching coach at Triple-A Rochester with the Nationals, Rafael Chaves, recommended he throw a gyro slider, which has a tighter movement profile and — most important for Garcia — is a bit harder.

“When they told me [to throw it], I said, ‘OK, as long as it’s something that goes left,’” Garcia said. “It felt good out of the hand. I didn’t feel like I was trying to manipulate it, and whatever the shape is, is what it is. Just being able to grip a pitch and just throw it, for me, is the biggest thing. For me, a lot of things are based on feel. So just being able to throw that slider felt good out of the hand.”

It just so happens that the four pitches feel good out of Garcia’s hand and are hard to distinguish from one another. The numbers will tell you as much. His swinging strike rate of 18.3% is seventh best among all pitchers with at least 20 innings this year, and batters have made contact on just 67% of his pitches in the strike zone, the second-lowest rate in the league behind Padres closer Mason Miller.

That’s how Garcia went the first 11 innings of his season without allowing a hit and has yielded just seven with 93 hitters faced. That and what he’s done since, particularly over the last month as closer Ryan Helsley has been on the injured list, earned Garcia the trust of manager Craig Albernaz — and is quite possibly going to make the well-traveled reliever an All-Star in a month’s time.

He’s only now established himself as a big leaguer, a decade into his pro career. He might operate by feel, but Garcia isn’t just going out there and hoping this run continues.

“The biggest thing is identifying what didn’t go well in the past outing and trying to perfect that,” Garcia said. “I just try not to think, ‘Oh, I’m doing well, so nothing is wrong.’ Obviously, every outing, there’s something wrong, so it’s just being able to try to figure that out. That’s something I can keep working towards every single day.”