Yankees: Revisiting Deivi Garcia’s 15-Strikeout Masterpiece

New York Yankees top prospect Deivi Garcia was extremely nasty one year ago, and still is.

While Yankee fans would like baseball in any capacity sometime soon, we were especially ready this spring to watch the emergence of several of New York’s vaunted young arms, a cavalcade led by Clarke Schmidt, Luis Gil and Deivi Garcia.

And while all of that trio’s action is viewable on Instagram instead of YES Network these days, there’s no time like the present to relive one of Garcia’s most dominant outings from his breakout 2019 campaign: a 15-K gem in just SIX SCORELESS INNINGS from June 18 of last season as a member of the Double-A Trenton Thunder.

Kudos to the four batters who made outs and didn’t strike out (one of the K victims reached on a wild pitch, of course). Those guys are golden gods.

Garcia’s mastery of the Richmond Flying Squirrels deserves mention once again — his 15 whiffs matched both Trenton’s franchise record, as well as 2019’s minor-league high, at the time.

Not only did Garcia deliver repeatedly, but he did so on the biggest MiLB stage. Trenton was attempting to secure a playoff berth that night by marking themselves as the first-half leaders in the clubhouse.

“What he did in such a big game for this team — you win, you make the playoffs; you lose you don’t,” pitching coach Tim Norton told MiLB.com. “For a 20-year-old kid to do that is pretty impressive.”

Nowadays, if you want to catch Garcia grinding, he’s still doing do — but on his own terms, while rocking performance gear from last year’s Futures Game.

In this particular game we’re highlighting, Garcia allowed just a single hit (a double by Gio Brusa in the fifth) and walked one, lowering his ERA to 4.03.

When Garcia’s 2020 campaign begins, he’ll be just 21 years of age.