Happy Kyle Harrison Day!
Probably the last Giants prospect we'll be instructed to get hyped about this year
Without Kyle Harrison, the Giants currently have two starting pitchers. This system worked for a while, with the opener-and-bulk-guy thing getting good results through the first few months of the season. Then, when everything else fell apart, so did the bullpen game strategy. It’s not necessarily that the opener is bad — though, as we saw last night, when Scott Alexander is the opener, he’s usually been bad — but the bullpen just isn’t able to shut the other team down for 9 innings.
So the Giants, who had one of the best pitching prospects in baseball waiting in AAA, decided, hey, why not use that guy? The one who’s good? We could just call him up!
This is why Farhan gets paid the big bucks.
It won’t work.
I don’t mean that Harrison will definitely have a bad start or not be effective in the majors. I think that’s entirely possible, but not particularly relevant. Sometimes rookies have a hard time adjusting to the majors (see: Sean Hjelle, Brett Wisely, Wade Meckler). Sometimes rookies seem like they made the adjustment fine, and then the league makes its own adjustment, and the rookie faces some serious struggles (see: every other Giants rookie in 2023). A few bad starts from Harrison at the end of this season won’t mean a lot for his future as a Giant other than: Hey kid, here’s some stuff to work on for next year.
Logan Webb’s career ERA was more than 5 after his first 20 games in the majors, for example. He got better.
No, the reason it won’t work is that what the Giants are really looking for here is a lift. They want a rookie to give them energy and momentum to propel them through the second half. They are looking for a lift, any lift, that will push them forward, and folks, I am sorry, but they are not going to find that lift in Kyle Harrison. If the offense is scoring 3 runs a game, the goal has to be to improve the offense, not to get the pitching to give up just 2 runs a game. Even if Harrison is great, the team can’t be competitive with the hitters falling on their faces every night.
But maybe that’s overly cynical. Yes, every other rookie the Giants have called up over the last couple months has been rushed to the majors before he had taken enough at bats in Sacramento for the team to properly evaluate him against the highest level of minor league pitching, and they all eventually faded, but Kyle Harrison is different. He’s a pitcher, for one. And he’s been in Sacramento all year, so they’ve had plenty of time to evaluate. Maybe they just thought he was ready.
The thing is, though, it’s hard to see why. Yes, he’s been racking up the strikeouts all year and his walk rate got better after the first couple months of the season, but he’s still walking too many guys and giving up a lot of home runs. The pure stuff is phenomenal, and no one has any doubts about it. His ability to harness it is still a question mark, and that’s putting it mildly.
So why call him up? For the moment we’ll disregard my initial theory of trying to catch rookie lightning in an inexperienced bottle, and presume that the team had some other reason. Well, Giants brass has been making noises for a while that they wanted Harrison to get his first taste of the big leagues in July, but he got hurt. Once he came back, they gave him one start in the complex league and three for the River Cats, and now today he starts in Philadelphia.
And look, of those three starts he made for Sacramento, only one was clearly good. You can make excuses for Harrison — shaking off the rust would be the obvious one — but when a top pitching prospect gets called up to the big leagues, you want to see him pitching well at the time of his call-up. You don’t want to say, “Sure, he gave up three runs in four innings to the Tacoma Rainiers, but it’s cool, no one on the Phillies would be able to crack that lineup anyway.”
Here’s what this move smacks of to me: “We meant to call him up around now, and it’s now, so we’re calling him up.” I don’t know that there’s much more to it. The team had a plan, and now they’re going to execute it no matter the facts on the ground. Maybe that’s wrong. Maybe there’s all kinds of proprietary data that tells the Giants he’ll do great. If so, I hope it’s better than the proprietary data they had on Mark Mathias, for example.
Kyle Harrison will not save the Giants because no one can save the Giants. He may well have flashes of brilliance today — I expect him to — but they won’t be enough to turn the season around. And he’s likely to have a lot more rough patches than good ones, just like he did in AAA, where the hitters aren’t quite as good. I don’t think this move makes a ton of sense. He doesn’t seem ready yet.
But hey, a shiny new toy’s a shiny new toy. It’s not like I won’t be watching.
Pithy job, Maestro!