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Tuesday, August 22, 2023

Harrison is here, best time of year!

Kyle Harrison is here, ready for his major league debut.

I wanted to write more but life has been busy, so I’m going to share a few thoughts, then add an addendum to give more details.

I think Harrison is a future ace. His strikeout rate is elite in the majors, and that is a rate that translates well into the majors, from my experience watching prospects matriculate to the majors. 

I’m not that worried about the walks. One, that was early season, explained by him adjusting to the ABS system. Two, no walks last two starts. Three, his K/W ratio is very high and his k%-w% is very high as well, which is a sign that as high as his walks are, he is so elite at strikeouts that the walks won’t matter. 

I did some reasoning why that worked when Dirty was a prospect but don’t remember now, I will need to dig up and share in the addendum. But the basic idea is that at above 9 k/9, you are talking one strikeout per inning, leaving, say, a walk every 3 innings, and so it is harder for the other team to manufacture a run off that walk, with all the strikeouts.

I’m excited but know that not all prospects produce at once. But with his dominance, deceptive pitching motion, and stuff, I’m hoping his short 10 start MLB season (10 turns of rotation left), will be as successful as Cain’s 7 start start to his career, but midfielder of Cain’s struggles the following season.

Cain is a good comparison, in terms of build and stuff, he has Bumgarner’s deception, and Lincecum’a strikeout abilities. He can be a monster for us. 

7 comments:

  1. About Harrison's inning usage, people are very upset about his lack of IP, and about being a featured pitcher.

    First off, Zaidi has made it very clear that Kyle is starting. They understand starting, and that's why all those pitchers aren't starting, they were not able to get the top of the order out easily, so they had to go with the opener in order to get more effective performances out of them.

    It took me until now to understand the benefits of the Opener. The idea of the Opener is that ideally you have a pitcher as the opener who can get out the top of the lineup. Generally, it is a platoon based strategy, where the Opener is more effective getting out the top of the lineup, and then turning it over to the Feature pitcher.

    The Feature pitcher, generally, is either a failed starter, unable to get through the lineup more than two times, or a prospect they are giving bulk innings to. The idea is that the Feature pitcher starts pitching to the bottom of the lineup, so that when he gets through the lineup twice, which is the normal time pitchers seem to lose their ability to fool the top hitters, instead, they are now facing the bottom of the lineup, which they should be more able to take care of, enabling them to pitch to another 3-5 batters, whoever is at the bottom, and if they happen to be doing well, could even attempt the top of the order.

    Thus, these pitchers who would only get through the lineup twice, if they have a good game, they might be able to extend to another 3-5 batters, as they would be facing the bottom of the lineup. This is a crutch for the failed starters like Wood and Manaea, and an opportunity to show what they can do, for the prospects.

    Zaidi understands the benefits of having starters, that's why he signed so many and had 7 to start the season, but injury and or poor performances have reduced them to two starters until Harrison became #3.

    Also, I'm wondering if they are continuing to use the failed starters only as featured pitchers in order to irritate them enough that they don't exercise their player options for a contract next season. We'll see what happens.

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    1. About the pitch count, most of what I've seen is nonsense.

      First off, the Giants last year starting Harrison low and built up his pitch count to the 80-100 range, reaching 100 a few times in the second half of the season.

      This season, he was already up to 80 pitches when he got injured. They would have easily gotten him up to 80-100 at some point.

      But because he was injured, they had to ratchet him up again. About 40 his first two starts back, then 60 in his last MiLB start.

      Thus, the 65 pitches he did in last night's start was reasonable. They probably would have allowed him to go another batter had he not given up a hit, that's usually a sign to take the pitcher out.

      So I have no doubt that he will be stretched out further and be in the 80-100 pitches range, as long as he's doing well, shorter if not.

      With roughly 50 games left, that means 10 turns of the rotation, so Harrison should get at least 10 starts, or roughly 40-45 IP. He was at 67 IP, so roughly 107-112 IP total for this season. He reached 113 IP last season.

      Using the Krukow 25 IP increases rule of thumb for more safely developing and stretching a pitcher's usage, Harrison would have 26-31 more IP he could do after the season.

      If they make the playoffs, he'll be able to continue to pitch for us. And if now, he'll likely be placed on the AFL squad to pick up IP and increase his usage to 135 plus, so that he can be stretched out to 160 IP plus next season, which should be first first full season.

      And that's the benefit of Zaidi's plan of starting pitchers on a low pitch count and then increasing as the season goes on, it allows the Giants the option of utilizing Harrison in the push for the playoffs, instead of having to shut him down, as well as being able to use him in the playoffs, unlike Strasberg, who had to be shut down.

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    2. A comment I left on TA:

      It is not just the 5 K’s in 16 batters, which is a very high 30% strikeout rate, it is also his 5x k/w ratio as well as his sterling numbers all through the minors, and his great improvement in starts from the start of the season to the promotion to the majors.

      I don’t have as much experience as you (only 50 years), but I have studied pitching sabermetrics, and those are numbers a pitcher can be very successful with. And the five hits, the rule is that BABIP regresses to the league mean of .300, and as that’s 5 hits out of 9 balls on play, .555 BABIP, dropping that to .300 means 3 hits.

      Lastly, I would add that even Lincecum had a tough first start, the nerves would get to him initially, but then he would settle down eventually. Harrison settled down after the first.

      Of course, both Cain and Lincecum took a full season to figure out how to be consistently good. So Harrison might need a lot more time to figure things out. However, given that he struck out so many in the minors, and continues to steamroller hitters in the majors, I think he’s capable of figuring it out with his ten or so starts this season, and at least be above average next season, then becomes the ace his minor league stats suggests.

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    3. Looking over his pitching line further, clearly he can't give up so many hits. As noted above, BABIIP reversion to the mean would bring it down to 3, but I should note that this is if he's a MLB caliber pitcher, a saber who joined a FO noted in an interview that BABIP control is a skill (which is one reason I disagree with saber orthodox that BABIP control is a not a skill, that there are pitchers, like Zito and Cain, who can maintain a lower BABIP than the league mean, as well as pitchers who can't control) that MLB pitchers have that those in the minors don't.

      A poor part of his outing, the 5 hits, is further accented by the 56% Line Drive rate. Per Baseball Forecaster, pitchers have minimal control over that rate, and the average is around 23%, which should reduce the number of hits by half or so, which aligns with the BABIP regression to the mean. So another sign that he should be better in future starts.

      But the best sign is that he continued to strike out so many batters, even though he's now facing MLB hitters, while controlling his walks. I would not expect him to only have one walk per five strikeouts, but his pitches seem to be lethal to hitters all through the minors and they continue to be so up in the majors. He had 66% strikes thrown, which is a good but not elite percentage, and his strikes looking and strikes swinging are good (15% and 20% respectively) but not elite (that I recall), so his pitch sequencing must be the elite part, and that's something that will last through his career, unlike velocity.

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    4. I would also add that Beck has been similarly brought slowly along because his seasonal high IP was 111.1 IP last season. He's now at 90.2 IP, which means he can probably go another 35-40 IP to get around the +25 IP seasonal increases prescribed by ol' Doc Mike Krukow.

      He's been saying this forever on broadcasts, not that the Sabean era Giants listened, as Cain, Lincecum, and Bumgarner, among others, were jumped many more innings than that. But to be fair to Krukow, none of them stayed dominant into their 30's, which could be related to them increasing so much.

      Beck, since he's now 27 and went to college, was used in the 70-100 pitch count range all last year, and was used similarly early this season, but has been used mostly a featured reliever while in the majors, this season. In fact, his longest outing was his 81 pitch first MLB outing this season.

      I think if he didn't suddenly couldn't get anyone out in the fifth inning yesterday, he likely would have made it to 5 IP, and more than the 70 pitches he had last night.

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    5. Given what I noted above, it was not surprising that Harrison was allowed to go to 91 pitches in the start today, going 6.1 IP for his first MLB win. Gave up only 3 hits and 2 walks, striking out 11 (out of 24 hitters), and gave up no runs. A 5-PQS quality start, and he kept up his 5+ K/BB ratio.

      Also, he struck out the side again in the first inning. And struck out the first five batters before a pop fly out.

      Looks like we got most of our rotation for the rest of the season. With 31 games left, Harrison and Beck should each get another 6 starts, with a 5-man rotation going. (ignore my starts info above, I must have been looking at a team record that wasn't updated with the latest W/L, my deepest apologies; I'm certain 31 games is the correct number now, in any case, with less games, less IP will happen, even if Harrison is throwing 7+ IP in the remaining starts, so he'll be available for the team to use if they make the playoffs, and possibly could be slotted behind Webb in the playoff rotation order, if he continues to pitch like he did tonight).

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    6. Alas, Harrison ran into more problems than hoped, much like Lincecum did in his first MLB season.

      Still, there are good things to note. First, his K-rate was a sterling 10.7 K/9, which is elite for any pitcher of any age or experience. He only limited his walk rate to 3.0 BB/9, which is probably the best one can hope for when he has been so wild before. In any case, 3.0 is still a pretty good rate for most pitchers, and together, that's 3.63 K/BB ratio, which is very good.

      A better way to view these stats are by percentage of Plate Appearance. His K% is 27.1%, which is significantly better than the league average of 22.7%. His BB% is 7.5%, which is much better than the league average of 8.6%. That leads to a K%-BB% of 19.6% vs. the league average of 14.1%.

      Unfortunately, he just gave up way too many homeruns. That's a sign of his aggressiveness in attacking hitters, and a sign of his great confidence in getting hitters, even the best ones, out. And that leads to too many pitches being put into the hitter's sweet spot of the zone where they can hammer it out of the park.

      The rate he allowed was roughly double what most pitchers give up, so i'm confident that he can reduce that closer to the league mean, but how much is the bigger question.

      But given his performances in the minors, ZIPS still project him to be in the low to mid-3 ERA over the next couple of years, as he has figured out his problems pretty fast in the minors. In addition, his SIERA is 3.90 and his FIP+ is 4.10, both good numbers for a rookie, and also an indiction of how well he pitched this season in the majors, assuming he gets the homers down to league norms. Thus I feel good that he's eventually fix this homeritis problem.

      Based on the Pitch Values on Fangraphs, it looks like his major problem pitch is his curveball, which was the largest negative value out of all his pitches. https://www.fangraphs.com/players/kyle-harrison/27758/stats?position=P#pitch-info-pitch-values

      But based on per pitch value, his cutter is even worse. https://www.fangraphs.com/players/kyle-harrison/27758/stats?position=P#pitch-info-pitch-values-100

      And cutting his HR rate would drop his WHIP to a more reasonable 1.25 or so.

      People are upset, but rookies will have ups and downs. Overall, Harrison looks every bit the dominant pitcher he was in the minors. The key is figuring out how he can be consistently like he was in his brilliant second start.

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