Glendale’s Brandon McCarthy returns to Los Angeles

Major League Baseball pitcher Brandon McCarthy has a new home – about 10 miles from his first-ever home.

The Los Angeles Dodgers officially announced the signing of the Glendale-born pitcher Tuesday morning to a four-year contract valued at $48 million dollars.

“I grew up 10 miles from the stadium,” McCarthy said on a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon. “The Dodgers were what I knew. The Dodgers were the people I looked up to as a kid. My whole family knows the Dodgers.”

McCarthy will become the first local to play for a Southern California major league club since Crescenta Valley High’s Trevor Bell tossed out of the bullpen for the Los Angeles of Anaheim in 2011 and the first area product to wear Dodger Blue since St. Francis High alum Mark Loretta ended his career in 2009.

The 6-foot-7, 200-pound right-hander is coming off a banner second half of a season with the New York Yankees after having been traded from the Arizona Diamondbacks on July 6.

Counting McCarthy’s final two starts with the Diamondbacks, the 31-year-old tallied a 9-5 record with a 2.80 earned-run average from June 27 until the Yankees concluded the regular season.

McCarthy allowed 32 earned runs over 103 innings pitched during that stretch and finished with an overall record of 10-15 with a 4.05 ERA in 32 starts, which amounted to exactly 200 innings. Not only did McCarthy set a career-high in victories last year, but his 175 strikeouts and 200 innings were also the best in the pitcher’s career.

After his success with New York last season, McCarthy saw many similarities between the Yankees and Dodgers, which eased his decision to sign with Los Angeles.

“It was such an easy, simple fit and then it has the same mentality as the Yankees, where you demand winning and the fans demand it,” McCarthy said. “There’s a large fan base and it’s a big market and the pressure is on you and it’s something I felt like I really responded to well in New York.

“I felt like the Dodgers can replace that. It has all those some same ingredients there and it’s closer to home.”

McCarthy owns a career mark of 52-65 with a 4.09 ERA in nine years and has played with five clubs since he was drafted in the 17th round by the Chicago White Sox in 2002.

From an ERA perspective, McCarthy’s two best years came with the Oakland Athletics when he followed up a 2011 campaign that included a 9-9 record with a 3.32 ERA in 25 starts with an 8-6 mark in 2012 highlighted with a 3.24 ERA compiled in 18 starts.

During those two years with the A’s, McCarthy’s talent was perhaps overshadowed by nagging shoulder injuries, which were a concern to then Oakland Director of Baseball Operations Farhan Zaidi, who was recently hired as the Dodgers new general manager.

“Brandon’s a guy I’m obviously familiar with from our time in Oakland,” Zaidi said on a separate conference call. “Even the first year we had him in Oakland, in 2011, I think was him sort of him clearing a major hurdle from the issues he’d had prior to that.”

After the 2013 season, one in which McCarthy spent time on the disabled list recovering from shoulder inflammation and a seizure suffered that June, the pitcher committed himself to a new workout regime.

“I’ve gotten about as confident as I think I can possibly be,” McCarthy said in referencing the health and durability of his shoulder. “The proof is going to be able to do this, repeat that, repeat last season for a number of years now. Every sign that you would possibly need last year was there.”

Those signs were enough for Zaidi.

“The shoulder’s been an ongoing issue for him, but just to hear Brandon talk about it, he changed his offseason routine, he did more upper-body work,” Zaidi said. “The proof is in the pudding. He got more than 200 innings last year. Just as, I think, informatively, he added two miles per hour to his fastball, which is pretty unheard of for a guy at his age, a starting pitcher, to do that.

“We feel really good about him having turned the corner last year. He has the ability to carry that kind of workload into the future.”

While McCarthy spent a good portion of Tuesday’s call going over his new workout regiment and his optimism for 2015, he also took a stroll down memory lane.

McCarthy grew up in Pasadena a Dodgers fan, idolized and eventually met icon Orel Hershiser at Disneyland and was ecstatic to visit Chavez Ravine before his family moved out of the area prior to his 11th birthday.

“Yeah, [I remember] actually going to Dodgers games when I was a kid,” McCarthy said. “I think we maybe went to two or three a year.

“Either my parents would get the tickets or maybe someone at work would get them. We always kind of knew in advance what game we were going to. You had that child-like anticipation just building – two weeks to go until the Dodgers game, one week and we’ll go to the Dodgers game and today we’re going. It just builds.”

Los Angeles Times staff writer Dylan Hernandez contributed to this report.