His season began with a “?” but ended with a “???” — did it seal his fate?
2024 stats: 24 GS, 124.1 IP, 4.56 ERA, 4.33 FIP, 9.0 H/9, 1.3 HR/9, 3.0 BB/9 8.5 K/9, 0.8 fWAR
Whenever I think about Kyle Harrison, I think of my high school alma mater, De La Salle — the same as his. At the end of the day, this is the only thing I have in common with a professional athlete. And so, on that note, the only thing I’m maybe qualified to evaluate him on is his opinion of the campus layout, the course curriculum, the theater company, and perhaps a few teachers who were still there 20 years after my graduation. But, as a baseball blogger, I’m going to put on my analysis cap anyway and go for broke.
It would be way too easy to continue the comparisons between the two of us. Like Harrison, many people expected great things from me after De La Salle. Unlike me, however, Harrison still has his whole life ahead of him. So, given that, it’s okay to just admit that Kyle Harrison’s sophomore season was a disappointment, right? A let down. Concerning. Unsteady. Those are all apt descriptions, I think, but no matter how accurate, 2024 wasn’t career-defining.
Still, I had to go back and look at his 11-strikeout performance against Colorado — truly one of the most remarkable games the San Francisco Giants had this season — just to refresh my memory of how good he looked.
My enduring recollection of him for the past three months was a guy who looked gassed and unsteady. After this dominant game, he’d make just 6 more starts (26.2 IP) and sport a 7.76 ERA (5.98 FIP). His season ended on September 6th with a left shoulder impingement.
Steven led off last year’s review with this simple question:
What do the San Francisco Giants have in Kyle Harrison?
A year later and I think we still don’t know. The kneejerk answer is that he’s not A Dude. That maybe he’s maybe a depth piece the team shouldn’t count on to play an important role in their plans going forward. Two seasons are enough to evaluate him, right?
Nah.
Development isn’t linear… a line we’re hoping is true when it comes to all sorts of prospects — Luis Matos and Marco Luciano chief among them — but especially Kyle Harrison. Recent examples (Heliot Ramos, Hayden Birdsong, Sean Hjelle) are efficient fuels for said hope. After that Colorado start, Harrison was up to 97.2 IP with a 6-4 record in 18 starts (he missed time in June with an ankle sprain). His 3.69 ERA / 3.88 FIP and 1.2 fWAR (70th in MLB – min 90 IP) didn’t evoke Lincecumean or Bumgarneresque imagery, but he looked like a guy who’d managed to… held serve?… as the league got to know him.
To put it another way: through July 26th (the date of that Colorado start), Sean Manaea was 6-4 in 20 starts with a 3.74 ERA / 4.18 FIP in 106 IP and he went on to revamp his delivery and become a postseason hero of sorts for the Mets. Health is a big factor in success, of course, but the game of baseball is a game of adjustments, and there’s every indication that Harrison is the type of competitor who will never let up on that facet of the sport.
Indeed, his fire for competition might’ve provoked too intense of a response.
Last October, Harrison told Alex Pavlovic of NBC Sports Bay Area, “I want to get stronger and built up […] I want to be like Webby, going out there six innings at a time and building up to 200 innings. I’m really just going to pound the weight room.” Pavlovic added:
That work will be done alongside Logan Webb, who has become a close friend and mentor. Harrison plans to work out with Webb in the offseason at a facility in the Phoenix area, and he also has considered visiting Driveline Baseball, which was an Alex Cobb recommendation.
Did all that extra work in the offseason simply wear him down before the season got going? If you’re not cottoning to that notion and just want to look at the full mph off his fastball year over year (93.6 in 2023, 92.5 in 2024) as evidence of looming injury or flop potential, please do also consider that he had worked his way through a Giants system that for a while there had starters only going 3-4 innings per start, Harrison had injury troubles in the minors as well which limited his overall usage as well, and those 26.2 IP after the Colorado start pushed past his personal best for innings pitched in a year. He’s learning on the job.
For a prospect held in such high regard who’s been tagged with high expectations, pretty much every step of the way for him has been bumpy and inherently limiting. He was drafted in the middle of a global pandemic. The 3-4 inning minor league development pitching plan. The aforementioned injuries. He simply hasn’t gotten enough reps and figured out how to manage a heavier workload.
On top of that, there are the philosophical inconsistencies the past couple of seasons. Going from Andrew Bailey as pitching coach to Bryan Price. The front office’s desperate need to cover innings, which forced them to go Tampa Bay on him. And now, he might receive some instruction from… Madison Bumgarner? It couldn’t hurt.
It’d be nice if the team could feel confident slotting him in as their #3 or #4 starter, even if the expectation was that he’d be a #2 or borderline ace. He’s an uncomfortable fit from a starter perspective for the time being — though, to be clear, the Giants should (and will) give him every chance to stick as a starter. The earlier grumblings on social media about turning him into a reliever was… misguided, though understandable. He’s not going to face Colorado in every start.
None of this is a portent of doom, though. Since 2000, just 60 dudes pitched at least 120 innings in their age-22 season. By fWAR, Harrison’s 0.8 is 52nd. There are very few players on this list who didn’t stick around for a while. Matt Cain’s 2007 (4.1 fWAR) and Madison Bumgarner’s 2012 (2.7) are in the top 25, but Harrison’s results are parallel — in terms of WAR, anyway — to 2003 Jake Peavy (although he pitched 194.2 innings that season), 2008 Johnny Cueto (174 IP), 2000 Mark Mulder (154 IP), 2013 Martin Perez (124.1 IP), 2015 Carlos Rodon (1391. IP), and 2022 Hunter Greene (125.2).
Kyle Harrison very much remains a work in progress.