Kyle Harrison Brings the Heat

Everyone loves a beginning — the christening of a new battleship, the birth of a new zoo giraffe, the major league debut of a top pitching prospect. On Tuesday night in Philadelphia, San Francisco Giants lefty Kyle Harrison emerged from his pupal stage. It went… pretty well: 3 1/3 innings, two earned runs, five hits, one walk, five strikeouts, one hit batter.

In a short start, Harrison pared his repertoire down to — with very few exceptions — just his fastball and slider. He gave up lots of hard contact, including a home run, but also, said manager Gabe Kapler, Harrison “missed a lot of bats. He missed bats in the zone. His fastball was carrying.”

Harrison entered the night as the no. 17 overall prospect on The Board, and the no. 5 overall pitching prospect. Every team in the playoff hunt could use a fresh, talented starter, the Giants more so than just about anyone. San Francisco is running a rotation out of the mid-20th century: Two very good starting pitchers and then a lot of improvisation. Webb, Cobb, and pray for fog. Or something like that. If you can do better than a slant rhyme, I’m all ears.

When Harrison took the mound, the Giants had had a pitcher throw 80 or more pitches in a game just 67 times this season, the lowest mark in baseball by some distance. (The Astros, who lead the league in this incredibly specific category, had 121.) Just the night before, the Giants had used an opener, Scott Alexander, in a pivotal game against the Phillies, a direct Wild Card rival, and Aaron Nola. Alexander and bulk relievers Sean Manaea and Sean Hjelle conspired to allow 10 earned runs, and so Harrison’s job was to balance the ledger.

Harrison kept the Giants in the game, departing with a one-run deficit that the Giants came within two outs of converting into a one-run win before blowing the lead in the bottom of the ninth.

At 6-foot-2, 200 pounds, Harrison is bigger than your average guy off the street but small for a major league starter. He doesn’t have a stereotypical long-limbed pitcher’s body; I’d call him compact, with a powerful lower half. He has a distinctive delivery; his windup starts with a long pause, about a full second, in a leaning posture that almost looks like a reversed still photo of Tim Lincecum. Harrison then brings his arm back and down in a stabbing motion before swinging around to the left for a low release point.

As for what comes out of Harrison’s hand then: a fastball that normally sits in the 93-94 mph range, which isn’t spectacular in this day and age, even for a left-handed starter. (Harrison was able to crack 97 a couple times, particularly in the first inning when his adrenaline was surely peaking. By the time Gabe Kapler came to get the rookie with one out in the fourth, Harrison’s fastball had dropped into the 92s.) But this pitch is why Harrison was able to strike out half — yes, exactly half — of the 118 batters he faced in High-A and 36.4% of the batters he faced in Double-A last year.

It was mostly effective against big league hitters as well; Harrison threw 47 heaters in his debut and got 11 whiffs on 23 swings.

“It wasn’t just major league hitters — really good, right-handed major league hitters that he was throwing the ball by,” Kapler said. “I’ve seen J.T. [Realmuto] a lot, and he can certainly catch up to a fastball. He threw the ball by J.T. a couple of times. He threw the ball by Trea [Turner] a couple times, threw it by [Nick] Castellanos a couple times. Those are some elite right-handed hitters, particularly against left-handed pitching, and you just don’t see it very often.”

Because Harrison’s fastball comes from an odd, low arm slot, it has wicked rise and arm-side movement, and it caused obvious problems when he could locate it.

“You get a low three-quarter release, which creates an [odd] approach angle,” catcher Patrick Bailey said after the game. “He’s getting two-plane break, vertical and horizontal. Probably the most comparable is like a Josh Hader.”

Hitting this fastball must be like trying to fend off an angry bee with a rolled-up magazine, particularly when Harrison can throw strikes low in the zone early in the count, then put a little extra on a fastball at collar-level for strike three. See some of the swings Harrison forced Phillies hitters into, and it’ll become clear why this kid was striking out more than a third of his minor league opponents.

The best punch out of the bunch was a three-pitch strikeout of Castellanos, the third Phillies hitter of the game: a slider on the inside corner for strike one, a fastball to climb the ladder for strike two, then a second fastball almost middle-middle that nonetheless froze Castellanos for a called strike three.

I was trying to think of a low-to-mid-90s fastball that gets on hitters the way Harrison’s does, and I came up with another fastball-slider guy: Cristian Javier. It’s a terrible comp, because everything from windup to pitch shape to throwing hand is different about these two, but the effect on hitters is similar.

The slider, a low-80s offering with big lateral break, was a decent complement to the fastball, but an imperfect one. Because it moves side-to-side instead of down, Harrison doesn’t get the most out of the 10-15 mph velocity differential when he pulls the string. Almost exactly a year ago, David Laurila chatted with Harrison about the young lefty’s repertoire; Harrison stopped short of calling his breaking ball a sweeper, perhaps because the term has only come into vogue since then. Statcast marked it as a slurve, which it definitely looks like, even if that classification is unfashionable nowadays. For his part, Harrison reiterated after the game that he calls it a slider, no matter what the analytics say.

Two pitches after Harrison took Castellanos’ lunch money, he dragged a breaking ball right into Harper’s bat path. The resulting two-run home run constituted the entirety of the scoring against Harrison in his debut.

“It could’ve been down, but in a 1-0 count I’m trying to back into it, get a strike,” Harrison says. “But he’s a good hitter. I gave it a little too much up in the zone.”

But Harrison’s slider can be effective when he gets on top of it: it produced one Johan Rojas swing so ugly I heard the guy behind me in the press box mutter, “Jesus Christ!”

The other knock on Harrison is his command, and true to form, that was a bit of a mixed bag in his debut. Harrison threw 43 strikes on 65 pitches and dotted the corners at times, but he also walked a batter, hit a batter, and left a few fastballs over the plate. Lucky for him, the pitch moves so much that when hitters did swing, often as not it was a probing effort, like looking for batteries in the junk drawer.

When the Phillies could get bat to ball, Harrison suffered. Eight of the 16 batters he faced put a ball in play; all eight of those balls had exit velocities over 91 mph, and five of them went out at over 98 mph. Three of Harrison’s five hits allowed went for extra bases. Harper seemed to have him dialed in pretty easily, adding a single to his first-inning home run. So did Bryson Stott, who crushed two hard line drives for base hits in his two plate appearances off Harrison. In fact, all five hits came off the bats of left-handed hitters, a fact that Kapler brushed off as happenstance, though Harrison admitted that lefties had been giving him trouble his last few minor league starts.

The result: Lots of traffic on the bases. Harrison allowed two runs in the first, left the bases loaded when Trea Turner lined out to center to end the second, then picked Harper off to end the third before leaving with Stott on first in the fourth.

It was unlikely that Harrison was ever going to go much further into the game. In addition to the Giants’ general propensity for short outings, Harrison has been kept on a light workload in the minors. In 21 starts, he’s had just four decisions and one win, because he’s only completed five innings once this season; his 65-pitch big league debut was his longest outing since June. (Harrison also spent about a month on the sidelines while recovering from a hamstring injury before returning to minor league action in early August.) Kapler said he’d had Harrison scheduled for between 60 and 65 pitches, and that’s exactly how long Harrison went.

This outing was also fastball-heavy; Harrison used the slider a little more than half as frequently as he had in recent minor league starts, and we saw his changeup just twice all night, and only in the second time through the order. At one point in the bottom of the second, Harrison threw 11 fastballs in a row.

“That was the plan, just filling up the zone early, and trying the best as I can to get ahead,” Harrison says. “Just trusting in Patty back there and trusting what he’s putting down.”

Kapler neither confirmed nor ruled out that Harrison would start again in five days. Harrison wouldn’t solve all of San Francisco’s problems; he’s still a little raw, and given his workload to date, it’s a long shot he’d be able to turn over a lineup more than twice. But no Giants starter, perhaps not even Webb and Cobb, can miss bats like Harrison, and that’s something they’ll need down the stretch.