SAN FRANCISCO — Kyle Harrison received one heck of a gift on his birthday.
What could be better than a front-row seat to watch the major-league pitcher he’s idolized since he was a Little Leaguer? How about watching that pitcher from the rail in the Giants dugout? That’s where Harrison stationed himself on Aug. 12 as Atlanta Braves left-hander Chris Sale spun seven shutout innings while striking out 12.
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Well, OK, maybe the present would’ve been cooler on Harrison’s 13th birthday instead of his 23rd. You can’t quite fanboy over Sale dominating a lineup when the hitters he’s carving up are your friends and teammates. But how could Harrison not marvel at the opportunity to study Sale from such close range? How could he not appreciate the way Sale pitched off his slider like it was his fastball, throwing it 58.9 percent of the time, locating it for backdoor strikes to right-handed hitters, and then getting them to flail helplessly at the ones that started over the plate and ended up at their back foot?
“Super cool,” Harrison said. “It was probably 10 years ago that I was watching him pitch off that mound. I liked to drop down a little lower when I was younger, try to throw like him. And now we’re both here. It’s cool to see him still doing it.”
Sale has six top-5 finishes in Cy Young Award balloting over his 14-year career. This year, he’s a clear frontrunner to take home the hardware. He is 15-3 with a National League-leading 2.58 ERA and 2.07 FIP.
Harrison’s less remarkable numbers will not warrant serious consideration for any postseason awards. He is 7-6 with a 4.22 ERA in 23 starts. He’s averaging nearly a hit allowed per inning. His average fastball velocity was down to a season-low 91.9 mph in August. Harrison has been mostly competitive from start to start and also durable, aside from a sprained ankle he sustained in a box jumping mishap in the gym. It counts as an accomplishment any time a pitcher as young as Harrison begins a season in a major league rotation and pitches well enough to keep his place for a full season without getting sent down.
But it’s a rookie season that, on the surface, might not jump off the page, might not herald a future staff ace, and might be viewed as underwhelming by those who expected immediate dominance from the young left-hander often cited as the Giants’ best pitching prospect since Madison Bumgarner.
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This is when their current staff ace, Logan Webb, taps you on the shoulder with a reminder: He wasn’t immediately dominant when he was a rookie, either.
“I was the second-worst pitcher in baseball,” said Webb, who had a 5.47 ERA in 11 starts and two relief appearances as a 23-year-old in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. “You get here and you’ve been the best pitcher in Little League, you’ve been the best pitcher in high school, and for Harry, he was pretty much the best pitcher in the minor leagues. He never really gave up runs — ever. Then you get here and it takes awhile to be that guy. There are expectations. It can be tough on you. There’s a building up process and you’re thrown to the wolves. And it’s a very small percentage of guys who are really good the first year in the league.
“So I watch what Harry is doing and he’s already a lot better than I was at that age. You’re seeing his maturation process and it’s been fantastic. He’s on the right trajectory. I think you’ll see him pitch for the Giants for a long time.”
Kyle Harrison, 91mph Paint. 🖌️🎨 pic.twitter.com/Z3zt8L4175
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Webb, of course, totally reinvented himself in the big leagues while evolving from a pitcher who worked off a four-seam fastball into a sinker-changeup artist who plows through innings better than anyone in the majors while churning groundball outs. That’s not the path anyone expects from Harrison, whose explosive, four-seam fastball had been a separator at every level.
And there’s no getting around this part: Harrison hasn’t been equipped with the same fastball that he used to dominate the minor leagues while racking up 452 strikeouts in 279 1/3 innings. He still throws the pitch from the same three-quarters arm slot, which drew all those comparisons to Sale from the time he was an emerging draft prospect at De La Salle High School in nearby Concord, Calif.
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He still spins the pitch in a way that keeps it on plane and allows it to ride at the top of the strike zone. It induces its share of whiffs and pop-ups. The fastball still has an Average Run Value that ranks in the 90th percentile, according to Baseball Savant. But Harrison hasn’t been able to tap into the upper-90s velocity he had in the minors. He hasn’t had the 94.4 mph that he averaged when he reached the major leagues late last season and struck out 11 in a dynamic home debut, either.
His fastball has been merely good for most of the season. Not great. And lately, it’s been a struggle to keep hitters off it.
Harrison’s fastball usage was 65.6 percent in April. It has dropped a bit in each subsequent month. In five starts in August, he threw his four-seamer just 48.1 percent of the time while he boosted the usage of his changeup and his slurve. It was an adjustment that was less about thriving and more about surviving. Harrison has lost more than 1 mph on his average four-seamer since April while getting accustomed to the grind of his first full season in the big leagues — a bigger adjustment than ever for young pitchers who often have their innings conservatively capped in the minor leagues.
In five starts in August, opponents hit five home runs against Harrison’s fastball. They racked up a .696 slugging percentage on the pitch.
But Giants catcher Patrick Bailey sees a silver lining in those struggles.
“I’m thoroughly impressed with what he’s done this year,” said Bailey, who arrived in the same 2020 draft as Harrison and worked with him up the minor league ladder. “Coming up through the minor leagues, he had one of the best fastballs there was. It was all he needed. Even last year in the big leagues, he was able to rely on that explosive fastball, mid-90s with the upshoot, and had a lot of success with it.
“So that’s the coolest thing for me about what he’s doing now: with the velo being not where it had been, he’s really learned how to pitch, in my opinion.”
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Bailey, Webb and Giants pitching coach Bryan Price each expressed their own variation on this theme: Harrison will be a much better pitcher next season because of what he had to learn this season. He learned how to pitch and compete without his best stuff.
They also agreed on one other point: Harrison’s best stuff is still in there.
And if they’d been around the organization a bit longer, they also might have mentioned this: Bumgarner had a worrisome velocity drop early in his career, too.
“Kyle shouldn’t have to change his delivery to access more velocity,” Price said. “The velocity is there. There’s not a hindrance in his delivery. I think you’ll see him settle into velocity as he learns more about himself, how to prepare, how much to throw in the offseason.”
It’s a bit of a paradox in modern pitching development: starting pitching prospects are throwing fewer innings in the minor leagues than ever as front offices seek to reduce attrition through injuries, yet more players are getting off a mound earlier and earlier in the winter and often arriving at spring training weeks ahead of schedule. Harrison and Webb have worked together in the offseason at Push Performance in Arizona and Harrison, who has thrown a career-high 121 2/3 innings and counting, said he expects to be even more determined this winter.
“It’s about building that engine,” said Harrison, who acknowledged working through shoulder fatigue during his first full season. “I’m feeling better now. I’ve worked through stuff in my routine I wasn’t feeling good with. I’m doing more arm care stuff now.
“I just have to clean up little misses and stay locked in every pitch with the same mentality: Going after guys and leaving everything out there. Some outings I felt maybe I left something in the tank. Just go empty it. That’s what I’ve learned this year. When you don’t have your best stuff, use your other pitches to land strikes. And go out there and compete. It’s been a seesaw but we’re getting there and feeling better.”
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Bailey said Harrison began the year as mostly a fastball-changeup pitcher without much feel or confidence in his breaking ball. He’s able to compete with more of a true three-pitch mix now.
“He wasn’t spinning it very well,” Bailey said. “Then he started backdooring the breaking ball and that’s been something we can go to. He’s developing in the big leagues, which is insanely hard to do. It’s the hardest part of the game as young guys, having that perspective. We’re still figuring ourselves out. He’s figuring himself out. He’s doing this against the best of the best.
“So when he gets that velo back to 95, 96, touching 97, the ceiling is unmatched. I’m really excited and really impressed with what he’s done.”
Even when Harrison was dominating the minor leagues, club officials fretted over his 6.4 walks per nine innings at Triple-A Sacramento last season. So Price said he is doubly impressed. Not only has Harrison cut that rate in half, averaging 3.0 walks per nine innings, but he’s remained competitive in the strike zone at a time when many young pitchers would be pitching with a lack of confidence or hellbent on avoiding contact.
“If we have a mantra as an organization, it’s ‘Throw the ball over the plate and the hitters will teach you how to pitch,'” Price said. “It’s a tough theory at the big-league level but until the ball is being thrown over the plate consistently, we can’t evaluate what we have. Kyle has a lot of swing-and-miss ability but also had a high walk rate (in the minors). So his ability to throw three pitches for quality strikes has made all the difference in the world. That said, the goal has not been to sacrifice arm strength or pitch quality to get the ball over the plate. That doesn’t work, either. But there’s a way to blend the two. He’s handled the situation as well as any young guy that I’ve ever had.”
Price noted that some of Harrison’s best starts have come at Coors Field, which seldom rewards a pitcher for batted-ball contact.
“I’ve only had a small handful of pitchers in my life who never let on that they were scared to throw the ball over the plate, and he’s one of them,” Price said. “If he’s not throwing the ball over the plate, it’s not because he’s afraid to do it. It’s because he’s just missing. There’s no reluctance to challenge hitters in the zone.”
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There is no shortage of predictive data when it comes to pitching evaluation, but Price and Bailey are quick to fall back on intangibles when they talk about what they find most encouraging about Harrison’s rookie season.
“He’s a wonderful student,” said Price, who also lauded the work that pitching coaches Garvin Alston and J.P. Martinez have put in with the left-hander. “He’s a sponge who wants to get better. He’s super self-aware and he’s also self-critical. That’s a knife that cuts both ways because you want to be an eternal optimist, but at times as a pitcher, you have to be a realist, too.
“I couldn’t be more proud of a pitcher on this staff than Kyle simply because it’s his first full year in the big leagues, he’s a hyped prospect, he’s pitching in front of family and friends. There could be easier places to pitch than San Francisco and he’s handled it extremely well. He’s a mature guy and I’ve been super impressed with him.”
Webb took Harrison under his wing last season and this spring, but this is far from a personal project. Webb said he loves seeing Harrison soak up knowledge from fellow left-handers Blake Snell and Robbie Ray — two pitchers who have not only won Cy Young Awards but have been at the top of the leaderboard in strikeout rate.
Webb said there’s no reason Harrison cannot join them in that upper echelon soon.
“The more you grow, the more you learn what makes you a consistently good pitcher,” Webb said. “Kyle’s in the process of finding that out. He’s starting to have more consistent outings and feel good. He’d probably tell you something about his velo, but honestly, that doesn’t matter right now. I wasn’t like him and I never threw 98, but I’d touch 95, and in 2021 when I was building up my innings, my velo dropped. You’d think, ‘Why is this happening to me?’ But it’s not complicated. You’re throwing more. He’s not the only young guy who’s seen his velo drop. You might spend too much time thinking about it. But then you realize that you’ve got an offseason to build up again. You learn what you need to do to get your body ready.
“I’ve been throwing harder these last couple starts but I haven’t changed anything. You just learn what your body needs to be ready.”
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Maybe it was short-sighted for club officials to think that Harrison could pitch in his first full season in a major league rotation, still be an asset in the September throes of a pennant race, and potentially contribute pressure-packed innings in a postseason series or three. But next year, if he continues to develop his stuff and stamina, it might not be such a difficult ask.
“He’s gotten frustrated but he shouldn’t be,” Webb said. “He’s done a great job. He’s been super fun to watch. He has so much talent and there’s so much in him that he hasn’t reached yet. And he’s just 23 years old.”
(Photo of Harrison: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
Andrew Baggarly is a senior writer for The Athletic and covers the San Francisco Giants. He has covered Major League Baseball for more than two decades, including the Giants since 2004 for the Oakland Tribune, San Jose Mercury News and Comcast SportsNet Bay Area. He is the author of two books that document the most successful era in franchise history: “A Band of Misfits: Tales of the 2010 San Francisco Giants” and “Giant Splash: Bondsian Blasts, World Series Parades and Other Thrilling Moments By the Bay.” Follow Andrew on Twitter @extrabaggs
