The Brewers Should Give Kyle Harrison a Playoff Shot

Ah, the end of September. For most teams in baseball, it’s a time for planning. Out of the race? It’s time to plan for the future. Playoff spot locked up? Time to plan for October. The Brewers are no exception. They’ve cruised to a postseason bye and look very likely to end the year as the top overall seed. But while the games the rest of the regular season aren’t of huge import to them, one decision is: What to do about Kyle Harrison.

If Jacob Misiorowski hadn’t been the Brewers’ biggest story this year, Harrison would’ve been. After a few tough years in San Francisco and a rocky half-season in Boston, he arrived in Milwaukee in the Caleb Durbin trade and impressed right away. He struck out eight in his first start. He kicked it into overdrive by the end of April. An early summer slowdown notwithstanding, he had spectacular numbers at the All-Star break, and I was surprised he missed earning his first appearance at the Midsummer Classic.

In the end, he wouldn’t have played in the game anyway. The Brewers put him on the IL on July 11 with forearm tightness. When he returned in August, he was down a few ticks of velocity and looked like he was searching for the form that had so befuddled hitters earlier in the year. After a few near-misses and inefficient outings, the wheels fell off in Chicago on August 31; the Cubs tagged him for nine runs in 3.2 innings, courtesy of a gruesome five home runs. In his next start, at Cincinnati on September 6, he gave up six more runs and walked as many as he struck out.

The Brewers pivoted. They’re awash in depth starters at the moment, the minors having delivered a bounteous haul, just like every year in Wisconsin. Harrison hit the bullpen and got lit up again – four batters faced, four hits, back to the showers. He got another shot at a start his next time out, but he didn’t last two innings, with the Pirates pouncing on him for five runs. His next appearance was as a middle reliever, and even then, two of the three batters he faced reached, and Pat Murphy pulled him after the minimum. Forget an All-Star snub; Harrison doesn’t look like he should be pitching in the big leagues right now.

If this had happened in July, the solution would be easy: Let him work it out in low-leverage situations, perhaps with an IL stint – the velocity implies he’s at least a little hurt – and some rehab assignments thrown in, or maybe have him work in a piggyback role as he regains his feel. Pitchers scuffle, and teams come up with plans to get them back on the right track. That’s nothing special. But this is happening just before the playoffs, to one of the Brewers’ best options in the rotation, when they’re serious World Series contenders. The normal option of letting time heal all wounds doesn’t work here.

That puts the Brewers in quite the bind. They need to go win a bunch of playoff games. They don’t have time to have their young starter find himself on the mound. Every run matters more. Lose three games in July, and you’re scuffling. Lose three games in the NLDS, and your season is over. Bringing Harrison in for a bad start could be disastrous.

At the same time, leaving Harrison out of the playoff picture doesn’t sound like a great plan either. I mentioned that Milwaukee is awash in starters, and that’s mostly true. Misiorowski is the best pitcher in baseball at the moment, and Logan Henderson’s rookie year has been such a smashing success that he’s an obvious playoff starter for them. But while the Brewers are still great at preventing runs, they don’t have a clear third or fourth starter for their playoff rotation. The options:

I used SIERA and FIP because they’re two stats I like to look at in small samples, not because they’re the only acceptable ones. The point here is that out of this group, only Dustin May is in great form at the moment, and that might be too kind to May. The Brewers have given him a ton of extra rest after he appeared gassed following his acquisition at the deadline, but despite making only three starts so far this month, he’s looked quite diminished at times. He only made it out of the fourth inning once in that set of three, and the one game they left him in for was already an 8-0 Milwaukee laugher after two innings.

Shane Drohan feels like the kind of fifth starter who you try not to expose in the playoffs. He’s a kitchen-sink lefty who thus far hasn’t shown a good enough changeup to get righties out. He got shelled in his last two starts and was banished to the ‘pen, where he’s been solid again in a tiny sample. His best pitch is a short slider he mostly discards against righties; maybe he’s a decent starting option against a lefty-heavy team without good platoon bats, but in an ideal world, he’d be deployed as a multi-inning reliever with the ability to get lefties out in short, high-effort bursts when necessary.

Likewise, Robert Gasser is a soft-tossing lefty with big platoon splits. Granted, he’s really good in that role! His low-slot sinker/sweeper game ties same-handed batters in knots, and he even has a sneaky four-seam fastball to pair with them. But against righties, that sinker/sweeper pairing stops being available and he doesn’t have a great plan B. He has a cutter that fills some of the fastball role – you can’t throw that many sinkers to opposite-handed hitters and prosper – but the math just doesn’t quite work.

You might have noticed that all three of these pitchers might be better suited for bullpen roles, either because of their pitch mix or stamina. That’s kind of a Brewers trademark: high effectiveness, short bursts. But two of them are going to be starting important games in the playoffs unless Harrison gets the call. That’s just how it is.

The first-level solution to this puzzle is simple, I think: Just leave Harrison off the playoff roster altogether. The other three have all been better than him recently. All three have worked as relievers in the majors and been effective, so the odd man out will surely still contribute to the overall effort. Whatever you think of their long-term true talent, Harrison has been the worst performer of the quartet recently, and we don’t know if he’d be good out of the bullpen. It would be easy to ignore him and move on. After all, they’ve been playing quite well even with Harrison giving them nothing; why not just keep things rolling?

But I think that misreads the situation. The Brewers have been very good in September, no argument there. But that’s largely because they’re scoring 6.4 runs per game overall, with eight-plus runs in more than a third of their games. The pitching has been solid, but not elite; even with 18 electric innings from The Miz, they’re middle of the pack in run prevention, and the matchups are only going to get tougher. The bullpen has been a strength all year, but it’s high-ceiling rather than deep. JoJo Romero and Antonio Senzatela, both acquired at the deadline, have been bad enough that I’d prefer not to lean on them in October.

Leaving Harrison off the roster makes that math tougher, though. Let’s assume the Brewers allocate five spots for the remaining starters – one as a piggyback option because I think that they’d pair at least one of Gasser and Drohan with May to make opposing platoon matchups tougher. The next three spots will go to their top relievers: Trevor Megill, Abner Uribe, and Aaron Ashby. Chad Patrick and DL Hall have been solid this year, so tag them in too; that makes 10. I’d also slot Grant Anderson in there, depending on matchups: He’s a righty specialist, which feels iffy against the Dodgers’ pile of dangerous lefties but useful against the righty-heavy Cubs, just to name a few opponents the Brewers need to prepare for this postseason. And I’ll even go out on a limb and say that I’d consider calling up Garrett Stallings, whose funky-righty style feels like a nice offset to the rest of the Milwaukee bullpen. But even then, that’s only 12 pitchers, which means that if the Brewers leave Harrison off the roster, they’re doing so in favor of Senzatela or Romero, or maybe even both if one of those two soft-tossing righties doesn’t make the squad.

Murphy has already shown his hand a little bit, bullpen hierarchy-wise. He’s using the two deadline acquisitions as middle relievers, interchangeable parts instead of late-inning features. Particularly in a five-game series with two possible Misiorowski starts, it feels wasteful to pack the roster with unexciting bullpen arms while leaving out one of the most electric arms in the organization, even one struggling badly right now.

The alternative is to roster Harrison for the NLDS and plan on using him as either a starter or a follower, with a short leash behind him. There’s some risk in this option, obviously. I’ve just told you about how bad his last few starts have been. But I think there are ways to mitigate that risk, and if I were the Brewers, I wouldn’t want to head into the playoffs already conceding the use of one of my best players.

They could piggyback him after May and let him start against a weak, lefty-laden part of the order. They could deploy him as the second arm in the game when they’re already up five runs. Heck, they could deploy him as the fifth arm in the game when they’re already down five runs. I’m not picky about the way the Brewers use Harrison in their first series. But I think it’s imperative that they give him enough rope to know whether he’s on the road to recovery, suddenly rejuvenated, or just plain out of it.

The way I’m thinking about this is that an average outcome isn’t usually good enough to win in the playoffs. The better team doesn’t always win, and the better team doesn’t even always play better. But it’s pretty clear that talent plays in the playoffs. In July, you can patch a key starter’s absence with a series of swingmen and hope that your team at 90% is still good enough to win. This is one of Milwaukee’s great strengths, in fact. The regular season is grueling, and the team is incredible at finding enough minor leaguers and journeymen to play B- backups when the opposition’s guys are more like D+’s.

The playoffs don’t work that way. The weak links aren’t there anymore. That skill of finding a less-fragile roster and winning on the margins is a marathon approach, and October is a sprint. The Brewers have run into this exact problem in the past; their regular-season form doesn’t hold up as well when they can’t manufacture extra wins out of their depth. It’s looming as a problem again this year. They’re light on the kinds of hitters who take over a series. They have one dominant ace but are trying to stitch the rest of their pitching together out of a variety of interesting-but-flawed options.

I won’t try to tell you that the only way to win in the playoffs is by having your stars out-talent the opposition. But it’s a really good way to win. Ask the Dodgers, or the Astros, or my favorite version of this, the 2019 Nationals. And for once, the Brewers looked like they had a team that fit that bill. Two ace starters, some All-Star hitters, and enough role players to fill in the gaps. Add in the fact that no one is better than Milwaukee at putting role players in a position to succeed, and the deal sounds pretty good.

But Harrison was a meaningful part of that picture, at least to me. At his best, he bordered on unhittable. And while his velocity is down a little in the second half, his stuff still mostly looks the part. His slurvy breaking ball still darts and dives away from lefties. His changeup is still nasty when he locates it. The problem has been with his command, his stamina, and to a lesser extent with him pitching out of the stretch. He looks unsettled out there; his delivery looks jerkier and less confident, for lack of a better way to put it. If he’s hurt, he’s hurt, but otherwise, he’s a great pitcher experiencing an unspecified problem.

Maybe that problem will be too much to overcome. Maybe the Brewers will have to try to win in the playoffs with a less-than-optimal roster, then see whether Harrison can bounce back with a winter to retool. It’s surely a possibility, even if they give him every chance to succeed. But deciding beforehand to not give one of your best players a shot in the playoffs feels to me like admitting defeat rather than taking a gamble, even a low-odds gamble, that could make the team meaningfully better.

I want the Brewers to do it in a low-leverage spot because like I said, it’s a low-odds gamble. Pitchers who look this bad mostly don’t figure it out overnight. This isn’t a percentage play; it’s a long shot. But why not make the most out of everything you have? If two innings of Kyle Harrison in the NLDS knocks you out of the playoffs, let’s be honest: You probably didn’t have the kind of team that was going to win the World Series anyway. And if you don’t find out whether he’s got it in the NLDS, you surely won’t bring him into the next series, or the one after that. It’s put him on the roster to start the postseason or forever hold your peace.

I don’t know what the Brewers will do in this situation. If I knew what the Brewers would do in all situations, I’d be picking between my choice of exorbitant contract offers from the 29 teams trying to copy their secret sauce. But I know what I’d do if I were them, and I think the reasoning behind it is sound. This isn’t the way that Harrison or the Brewers hoped to head into October. But this is where they are, and all they can do is play it as it lies. If Harrison bounces back, incredible. If not, well, they can always take him off the roster.