Kyle Harrison had no idea when the Giants would give him The Call. Back in early March, with spring training’s clean slate hope springing eternal, there was no way to know.
But there are truisms Harrison always has in the back of his mind. No matter where he pitches, or at what level, it’s still baseball — 60 feet, six inches, 27 outs, et cetera.
Harrison knows the importance of not dwelling on poor results, the need to flip the page.
Regardless of who’s in the batter’s box, Harrison realizes he needs to execute his pitches and throw strikes.
Harrison has been a pro for three years, but talks like a seasoned veteran. The Giants’ top pitching prospect is polished. He has all the baseballisms down.
But one of them rolls off his tongue a bit differently.
“At the end of the day, I love competing out there,” Harrison told KNBR.com on March 2. “I love to win.”
It seems as if Harrison’s brain is wired this way, with the ins and outs of baseball pre-programmed. In some ways, that’s true — his grandfather was a left-handed fireballer who pitched in MLB, his mom played college field hockey and his dad recognized his gifts at an early age and helped put him on a path to test his limits.
Part genetics, part nurture, Harrison has always been bound to get to where he’s going. What that kismet looks like on the field and in the clubhouse is a rare combination of maturity and competitiveness that those closest to Harrison say make him equipped for the bigs.
“I just think he’s mature beyond his years,” Logan Webb said in February. “That’s probably the big thing. You know the pitching’s really special. He’s very mature.”
Unlike many in the organization expected, Harrison didn’t join the Giants early in the season. He didn’t dominate Triple-A like he did every other minor league rung. On Tuesday in Philadelphia, he’ll be the 11th Giants rookie to debut in a season defined by a wave of prospects developing at the big-league level and trying to wash the club into the postseason.
Regarded as the best left-handed pitching prospect in baseball, the 22-year-old’s natural gifts aren’t limited to just the left arm that pumps 97 mph fastballs and hooking sliders. They’re also between his ears and inside his chest. Harrison will get to prove as much when he reaches the level he was almost predetermined to summit — beginning with his start against the Phillies.
“He’s a special kid, special arm,” Giants catcher Patrick Bailey said in May. “I had him in ’21 in San Jose and ’22 in Eugene. Seeing him in Sacramento, he’s one of the most mature high school (draftees). His composure beyond his years has always stood out to me.”
Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
The adage, from Confucius, served as the prompt for a 12-year-old Kyle Harrison’s seventh grade class in Danville.
Even in 2013, Harrison knew what occupation wouldn’t feel like work. He probably wasn’t the only one in his class who wrote that he wanted to be a baseball player when he grew up; lots of kids dream of the big leagues. But Harrison’s response was a bit more specific.
Harrison wrote: “If you are a pitcher and that’s what comes easy for you, like you’re not afraid to pitch in a stadium filled with thousands of people and work out 8-10 hours a day and this is what you wanted to do all your whole life.”
Harrison, who moved to the Bay Area from Orange County four years prior, accompanied his written entry with a drawing of himself pitching left-handed in an Angels uniform.
“It almost feels like it was destiny,” Harrison’s dad, Chris, said.
By then, Harrison had already fallen for baseball. The family would often talk about the sport, with tales from grandpa, Skip Guinn, providing an inside look. They’d go to games at Oracle Park and the Coliseum. Harrison played basketball and football, too, but he could really, really pitch.
So Kyle’s dad, Chris, researched the best high schools in the area for baseball. To be the best, you have to face the best, the thinking went. De La Salle, an all-boys catholic school in Concord, was a perfect match. The school was a perennial powerhouse, with two workout facilities. Its campus is closer to a mid-sized college than a high school.
“We weren’t like, ‘you’ve got to play pro baseball, you’ve got to do this, this is what we want you to do,’” Chris told KNBR.com. “We were just ‘hey, be a kid, have fun. As long as you love it and enjoy it.’ And then he got really good and really strong. Then obviously when you’re throwing high-90s or mid-90s, it’s like gosh, you’re pretty good at this. Like, born to do it. Everything just came together.”
David Jeans hadn’t heard of Kyle Harrison until the southpaw stepped onto the De La Salle campus. That’s par for the course for Harrison, who has never been braggadocious despite his rare talent.
Harrison, though, quickly impressed Jeans, De La Salle’s baseball coach.
“People have always asked me, what are the Giants fans going to love about him most?” Jeans said. “It’s his competitiveness. He loves to win. He loves to compete on the mound. I think that sets him apart. A lot of guys have tools, but he has tools and he’s a die-hard winner…He cared more about winning with his teammates than he did about himself.”
Harrison pitched on junior varsity as a freshman, then closed out the championship game as a sophomore to cap De La Salle’s winningest season ever — a 29-1 state title campaign.
That year, Harrison verbally committed to UCLA. But even after doing so, he never showed off to classmates by wearing Bruins swag, Jeans said. He served school lunch for extra petty cash and remained dedicated to his high school team.
“Well the two words are maturity and competitiveness,” Jeans said. “That’s what set him apart as a freshman. His maturity to the game. We run a pretty complex system at De La Salle, and he just understood what we did. He was calm. Wasn’t a big talker. Wasn’t boisterous or flashy. He was just a ballplayer. And when you got him on the field, he was just a calm competitor. That’s what I liked about him.”
Harrison blossomed in the environment he and his parents hand-picked. But then came a decision they couldn’t have prepared for, when the Giants drafted him in the third round of the 2020 MLB Draft during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Sometimes, Harrison thinks about what the college experience would’ve been like, he admitted. But the decision to sign the $2.5 million bonus to forego UCLA and turn pro was an easy one for Harrison and his family.
After all, it skipped a step on his personal staircase of fate he envisioned as a preteen.
The Giants only saw Harrison pitch once before deciding to draft him with the overslot bonus. They could only do so much research, with all sports halted and in-person meetings thwarted during the pandemic.
The franchise drafted him on his generational left arm. But, as Harrison’s father often notes, lots of kids can throw in the 90s. The ones that rise to the top rely on more than just arm slots and pitch shapes.
Harrison, by all accounts, has the other stuff, too.
“The most impressive thing about Kyle is just his emotional stability,” Lenn Sakata, Harrison’s first manager in pro ball, said. “He acted a lot older, a lot more seasoned than a lot of the guys who were coming out of college.”
Harrison’s maturity has only grown with more experiences. The long bus rides, the shared rooms, the quaint ballparks.
When Harrison walked into Sakata’s clubhouse at Low-A San Jose, or Dennis Pelfrey’s at Double-A Richmond, or the Giants’ spring training facility in Scottsdale, he fit right in — even when he’s almost always one of the youngest players with a locker.
“He’s the type of person who can walk into a room and not know a single person in the room, and an hour later be friends with half the room,” Pelfrey said. “He gets along with people really well, he has a really good idea of what he’s trying to accomplish as a baseball player and human being, I think. The maturity is well beyond his years right now.”
Even as he rose through the minors, Harrison set aside time to return to De La Salle and chat with the current team about what it means to be a professional, Jeans said. He’s answered questions about his mentality, what aspiring players should and shouldn’t worry about, about how to handle yourself.
The precocious pro was giving back knowledge even as a 19 and 20-year-old.
“I think it came from, you know, my parents,” Harrison said when asked of the origins of his maturity. “Them always believing in me. Them always pushing me to go to baseball workouts when I was little, even when I didn’t really want to. ‘If this is really what you want to do, you’ve got to put in the work.’”
As his wisdom has remained through Harrison’s early 20s, so has his will to win — even when minor leaguers are incentivized to prioritize personal performance over team success.
“I’ve been on some winning teams,” Harrison said. “I’ve really grown to just like winning. At the end of the day – yeah, I know minor league baseball is a lot dependent on your stats and you move up based on how you do and that. But if you get a good group of guys and everyone’s pulling on the same rope and you’re winning, then everyone’s going to move up. So that’s kind of the mindset that I keep with the guys and I feel like they keep it as well.”
Growing up, Harrison, his younger brother Connor and their dad were always competing. Board games, cards, driveway basketball, golf, pickleball, tennis.
So it’s only logical that Harrison brings that fire to the mound.
In a high school showcase in Las Vegas, Jeans remembers Harrison crushing a home run over the scoreboard. He’s always had a knack for escaping bases-loaded jams with punchouts, elevating his game with a slow heartbeat when the situation requires it.
In the minors, sometimes the defense behind him would put unnecessary runners on base and extend innings. Oftentimes, Harrison would take matters into his own hands to clean things up.
He’d pick runners off aggressively. One time, in Low-A San Jose, there was a pickle between third and home. In that situation, pitchers are taught to cover a bag, but then cede it once a position player can recover and replace him. This particular day, Harrison wasn’t going to leave anything up to chance; he stayed in the play, got the ball and chased down the runner himself.
“I classify him as a winner,” Sakata said. “That’s one of the things in my personal category, that’s number one: is he a winner? And that’s not analytics, not metrics to me. It’s an it thing. All the people who have been around the game enough can see it.”
Paul Oseguera, the current Double-A Richmond pitching coach who has worked closely with Harrison since his senior year at De La Salle, has seen it all up close.
“When he takes the ball, he wants the baseball, he wants to lead the guys,” Oseguera said. “And just has an extremely high passion to win. Not just like to have a good day himself, but he wants to win at the end of the day. Winning is very important to him. He puts that on his shoulders, like since I’m the starting pitcher, I’m pitching today, I want to make sure I’m giving our team a chance to win.”
That, like Harrison’s subconscious rolodex of clichés, isn’t a learned behavior; it’s innate for him.
At every level, Harrison needs a few starts to really get comfortable. It’s something his dad has noticed through the years.
At Low-A San Jose, with family and friends he grew up with cheering him on at home games, that learning curve happened. He finished as the California League’s Pitcher of the Year at 19.
At High-A Eugene, after learning how to do his own laundry, he needed just seven starts to prove that level of competition was below him. He struck out more than two batters per inning.
Then the adjustment period came at Double-A Richmond, as Harrison and Oseguera continued to develop his changeup. He ended up fanning 127 hitters in 84 innings, becoming San Francisco’s undisputed top prospect and the best pitching prospect the organization has seen since Madison Bumgarner.
“Kyle’s not going to be in his man strength until he’s like 24, right?” Chris said. “Isn’t that scary?”
In spring training this year, Harrison struggled against the first MLB hitters he experienced. That continued in Triple-A, where the automated balls and strikes system inflated his walk numbers — as with many pitchers — and led to higher pitch counts. He had a 7.50 ERA through his first three starts.
For the River Cats, Harrison has only reached five innings in one start — partly by design to limit his work load, but also because of inefficiency. The Giants wanted to bring him up before the Aug. 1 trade deadline, but a mild hamstring strain sidelined him.
When it was clear San Francisco was viewing Harrison as “start-to-start,” the southpaw delivered two of his finest Triple-A starts. In his 19th and 20 games for Sacramento, Harrison struck out 11 without issuing a walk. With Ross Stripling sidelined with a mid-back strain and other veteran pitchers remaining as question marks, Harrison could very well be up for good.
“We think he’s ready to come up and help us win baseball games — that’s the most important thing,” manager Gabe Kapler told reporters after announcing Harrison’s promotion.
The trend of needing time to acclimate may continue in MLB. The results likely won’t be flawless immediately. The days of a 1-2 homegrown, local kid punch of Webb and Harrison probably aren’t upon us just yet.
But Harrison’s make-up is as clear a blueprint as there is to show he’s ready.
“You put it all together where he’s got the body, the size, he’s smart, determined,” Chris said. “I think he’s destined to do a lot of great things as long as he stays healthy and goes about his business the way he does it. That’s what’s exciting. We’re just starting to see what Kyle can do.”