With his baseball career on the fritz, the Colorado kid got reinvigorated by some Colorado kids.
Fossil Ridge and MSU Denver product Julian Garcia made his big-league debut for the Reds on June 23 in Cincinnati. It was the culmination of a winding, decade-long journey to the bigs that featured stops in the Puerto Rican Winter League and the independent American Association, plus two full years away from the game.
The first of those hiatuses came in 2020, after Garcia had made it to Double-A with the Phillies in 2019, only for the COVID pandemic to wipe out the next minor-league season. The second came in 2023, after Philadelphia released Garcia and it appeared the right-hander’s career might be over.
That’s where the kids came in. Garcia spent that summer teaching lessons at Slammers, reminding him of his fire to play the game.
“Those five-hour shifts every night working with kids made me enjoy the game again, and want to get back in it so badly, because it was so fun to see kids come in and be happy and love the game of baseball,” Garcia said. “At the time, and in the couple years before that, I didn’t love the game of baseball. I hated it. I found a way to complain about everything.
“… Just seeing the smiles on kids’ faces when they walked into the facility, it made me realize I took the game and having a jersey for granted. It was my childhood dream to play professional baseball, and I wasn’t going to give up on getting to the highest level.”
Emergence on the mound
Garcia’s unrelenting determination became a staple of his unlikely rise as the first MSU Denver player to make the majors.
His journey started on the fields of northern Colorado, where Garcia was a standout outfielder through his first few years at Fossil Ridge. He never had much interest in pitching while growing up, until he convinced then-Fossil Ridge coach Mark Findley to put him in a summer league game before his senior year.
“He said he could pitch (when he was an underclassman), but I wasn’t convinced at the time,” Findley recalled. “But he worked on his own time and with our pitching coach and made himself into a pitcher. That summer (ahead of senior year), it was pretty evident that, yeah, dumb coach, you probably missed the boat on this guy. As a senior, he was our best arm, and he shut down a lot of teams.”
In that senior season in 2013, Garcia had a 2.19 ERA in seven games, with 56 strikeouts and a .136 opponent batting average. Despite a broken wrist that derailed his junior season and stunted his recruiting, Garcia’s performance as a senior caught the attention of MSU Denver, where the outfielder/pitcher went on scholarship as a two-way player.
After redshirting that first season in Auraria, the Roadrunners converted him to a pitcher-only, and after a decent 2015 season he emerged as MSU Denver’s ace in ’16. He posted a 2.90 ERA in 12 starts, leading to him being selected in the 10th round by the Phillies. He signed for an $80,000 bonus as the highest-drafted player in MSU Denver history.
“As he was growing through the back end of his first year playing for us and then that start of the second year in the fall, I started seeing that his ceiling was really high,” said MSU Denver deputy director of athletics Jerrid Oates, who was the Roadrunners’ baseball coach at the time. “The command of the fastball was there, but the breaking ball (curveball and slider) was really the thing that set him apart.”
The reset and adding a sweeper
Garcia began his professional career with only three seasons of pitching under his belt, so the right-hander entered the minors as a self-described “novice in pitching.”
“The first two years, I really had to learn the mechanics and how to mess up hitters’ timing,” Garcia said. “I just had to learn the art of pitching.”
By 2019, Garcia found his groove in High-A, posting a 2.78 ERA in 17 games (16 starts). Following the canceled COVID season, Garcia received an invitation to big-league camp during spring training in ’21, where he pitched across four levels and reached Triple-A. But he put too much pressure on himself and lost command of his slider, and in mid-July, got demoted back to Double-A.
There, he got lit up in one of the worst outings of his professional career when he gave up seven runs in two innings with three homers. The Phillies made him a full-time reliever during that time, and even though he returned to Triple-A later in the season, he says the lows of that summer “tore my confidence up.” By midseason 2022, it became clear he wasn’t in the Phillies’ future plans, and the organization granted his request for a release.
Garcia thought another opportunity would come quickly, but he found himself spinning his wheels.
“I was calling teams, texting teams, sending out video to anybody that would listen,” Garcia said. “I was posting videos on Twitter. I was on LinkedIn, trying to find anybody’s email that would give me a shot. I wasn’t giving up on baseball. But I knew I needed a reset to be around my family and to become a better pitcher and the pitcher that I knew I could be.”
In 2023, he worked out in the mornings and spent the evenings working at Slammers. Over the next couple of years, he abandoned his curveball and began developing a sweeper to complement his gyro slider and low-90s fastball.
The sweeper underscored his success in the Puerto Rican Winter League and the American Association, where he played for the Kansas City Monarchs in 2024 and ’25 before signing with the Reds. The sweeper, which he’s thrown over half the time through three appearances for the Reds, averages 12.3 inches of horizontal break according to Baseball Savant.
With an enhanced repertoire, Garcia emerged as a star with the Monarchs in 2025, setting a single-season franchise best with 163 strikeouts and finishing just five Ks short of a new American Association record. Ahead of that season and during it, Garcia started to pile up contract offers from foreign leagues, including Korea, Mexico and Taiwan.
But Garcia held out for another shot with an MLB organization.
“He started getting offers from overseas and opportunities to make a lot of money,” said Kansas City Monarchs manager Joe Calfapietra. “But he stayed razor-focused on his dream. I remember the conversations we had where he’d be like, ‘Joe, do you really believe that this is going to happen?’ We kept talking through all the different scenarios, and ultimately he just bet on himself.”
Cincinnati Reds pitcher Julian Garcia, making his major-league debut, delivers during the fifth inning of a baseball game against the Milwaukee Brewers, Tuesday, June 23, 2026, in Cincinnati. (AP Photo/Kareem Elgazzar)
‘Nothing’s changed’ for Garcia
Last year, the average age of a debuting pitcher was 25.2 years old. So to make his debut at 31, after a decade of chasing his dream and being in and out of affiliated baseball, Garcia needed more than just his drive and work ethic. He needed a camp.
His parents played a big role in that, as did his girlfriend, Hayley Fields, and his longtime trainer, Chris Adams.
Garcia and Fields started dating shortly before he was drafted, and Fields has been a constant throughout the pitcher’s highs and lows. When Garcia was starting his pro career in Low-A in Williamsport, Penn., in 2016, Fields took a job in Cleveland to be closer to him.
Fields, who works in the oil and gas industry, moved back to Denver after that and has traveled across the country and beyond to support her boyfriend.
“She pushed me to never give up on my dreams,” he said.
The two have put off marriage so Garcia could focus on his career, but Fields is hopeful the ring is coming soon.
“No matter where he’s been, if it was Kansas City with the Monarchs, I was driving the eight hours to go watch him on the weekends or stay a week,” Fields said. “Or I’d fly to New Jersey or (Florida) or wherever. I’ve always made it work and hoped that my presence would make him feel at home and a little bit less stressed about the situations he was in.”
Fields, who played softball at MSU Denver, would also often serve as Garcia’s throwing partner throughout the years — right up until the day before the pitcher left for Reds spring training this year.
“One of my favorite stories is I’m catching for him at my parents’ (retirement) community on the softball field,” Fields said. “Then the next day, he was throwing to Elly (De La Cruz). He just told me he was thinking, ‘How did I get here? I was just playing catch with my girlfriend last night.’”
Now that he’s finally in the majors, there has been less time for games of catch between boyfriend and girlfriend. But Garcia’s approach remains the same, Adams said.
“Nothing’s changed, because nothing’s guaranteed,” Adams said. “He still has to prove himself, and now at the highest level on a one-year contract. But he will be fully prepared for each moment, just like he was in all the years leading up to his call-up.”
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