The Orioles tried to outsmart the rest of baseball when they picked up Jason Garcia in last winter's Rule 5 draft. This wasn't even their own selection. The O's paid a small $25,000 sum to the Astros to draft Garcia for them. Just 22 years old, Garcia had never pitched above the High-A level when the Orioles got their hands on him. As the season went on, the O's seemed to have outsmarted themselves. In the end, they didn't pay much of a price for a player who still has some potential value in the future.
Through spring training, the story about Garcia was that the O's, one of only a few teams to have video in their Gulf Coast League complex, got their eyes on Garcia when he was rehabbing with the GCL Red Sox.