The Friday Funday experience is back to look at one of the more curious players in twenty-first century professional baseball: Jairo Garcia/Santiago Casilla. This is a guy who used someone else’s identity to get into the United States and then suffered seemingly no consequences for it as a mediocre MLB pitcher before being plucked off the scrap heap to somehow find himself winning three World Series championships.

Welcome to America; have a nice day.

He started his MLB career as “Jairo Garcia” in 2004 with the Oakland Athletics and ended it as “Santiago Casilla” with the A’s in 2018. In the middle, he somehow pitched seven great seasons with the San Francisco Giants, posting a 2.42 ERA across 414 games, while he could only manage a 4.67 ERA with Oakland in 241 games. He “peaked” under the tutelage of known PED enabler Bruce Bochy and his dugout tenure in S.F.

We don’t think it’s a coincidence, as it fits a pattern of the Giants picking up shitty players and somehow working miracles with them under Bochy’s managerial staff. Remember Ryan Vogelsong? We do. Garcia/Casilla isn’t much different. We saw plenty of players the S.F. organization picked up for no demonstrable reason other than desperation in our House that Steroids Built miniseries of analysis.

So, through 2009, this relief pitcher from the Dominican Republic had pitched 160 1/3 innings with Oakland to the tune of a 5.11 ERA. His 2009 year was his age-28 campaign, and the A’s were rebuilding between their 2006 ALCS appearance and their run of three straight postseason appearances from 2012-2014. If Garcia/Casilla has been any good, the Oakland organization would have kept him on their roster.

He was cheap, and the A’s front office liked that, especially if someone had talent. Alas, they chose to let him go after six seasons of MLB action. His 2009 ERA was a whopping 5.96 in 46 appearances. Why would any team give a guy a look after that kind of season? They wouldn’t. The myth goes that the Giants staff “saw something” in him they could fix, and that’s generally a huge line of BS. We’ve explored it here before now.

With the Giants in 2010, he dropped his ERA suddenly by over four runs per nine innings, putting up a 1.95 ERA in 52 games. His WHIP dropped from 1.779 to 1.193 in one year, and his K/9 rate jumped from 6.5 to 9.1 overnight. We’d be hard pressed to find another age-29 reliever in MLB history to replicate that leap. The “Giants Play-Doh Extruder of Pitching Excellence” that ESPN mocked many years ago rings true here, really.

Suddenly, Castillo was making $1.3M in 2011. Coincidence? We think not. It’s clear why the San Francisco front office gave a crappy pitcher an eventual 300-percent raise coming of a negative-1.6 WAR season in 2009: they knew he was desperate to stay in the majors, and they knew he’d do “whatever it took” to stay in the majors. If this guy was desperate enough to falsify his identity to make it in the States, well … yeah.

They were very right, as Casilla put up stellar relief numbers over seven season with the Giants while pocketing over $24M to probably cheat and win as a member of the crooked organization. When San Francisco was dumped in the 2016 playoffs by the eventual-champion Chicago Cubs, the Giants cut ties with him, and it’s not-so-ironic the A’s picked him up for 2017—and Casilla immediately sucked again.

He saw his ERA balloon to 4.27 right away in 2017. Curious, eh? His WHIP went up, as well, and his K/9 rate came down, too. We guess he forgot everything the Bochy-led coaching staff in San Francisco taught him overnight. Maybe age had something to do with it, as he was in his age-36 season by then, but that’s a little too convenient of an explanation for why the S.F. organization cut ties suddenly with such a valued player.

We called out a lot of this in our analysis of the Giants’ 2016 roster, his final year with that organization. We’re revisiting it today in fuller measure because … well, why not? But there’s another reason, too—his final MLB appearance was for the A’s in 2018 against San Francisco: he let three inherited runners score a bit too easily (including on a wild pitch), and Oakland was about to make three straight Octobers. No sale.

The A’s just released him outright, and he never appeared in the majors again. Draw your own conclusions.

[Editor’s Note: This player also compiled 8.2 WAR in seven seasons with the Giants, while managing to earn just 0.8 WAR in eight seasons with the Athletics. Sabermetrics don’t lie.]