Giants’ President of Baseball Ops, Farhan Zaidi, made his customary appearance on KNBR yesterday, and had plenty to say regarding the future of Kyle Harrison, as well as pitching development in general in the system. So, before making our daily rounds, let’s dig into Farhan’s comments, which you can listen to in full at the KNBR Podcasts page. (Parenthetically, if you’re interested, you can also find some Roger Munter guy talking about Giants’ prospects on KNBR last night on the same page). Or, if listening’s not your thing, you can read the salient comments as reported by NBC Sports Bay Area.
Zaidi talked a lot about the short pitch count that Giants’ pitchers have worked with this year, laying out two primary reasons behind their unique development strategy. The first, as I suggested yesterday, was simple logistics of thinking how Harrison will play into this year’s major league team. In the best case scenario, Harrison will be helping this club into October — a month he’s never pitched into before — so ensuring that he still has some bullets left by that point, and, as Farhan said, avoiding “a Strasburg-type situation is part of the thinking there.”
By while Tolbert and Copes’ questions were focused on Harrison, There R Giants’ readers know perfectly well that when Zaidi says that “we've kind of been in that (four innings pitched/60 pitch) range with Kyle,” that this is a truth that applies much more broadly across the system. It’s not specific to Harrison or even to upper-level pitchers whom the Giants might want to have play a role at the top level (Keaton Winn, for instance, whom we’ll meet again soon). Every starter in the system has been held in that four innings/60 pitch range for the season so far. Quite literally, we could count the exceptions to that on one hand.
This is where the second rationale that Zaidi laid out really matters:
"The other [reason] is there's research that we've done that we've seen out there that pitchers, generally, you can mitigate injury risk by building them up more slowly throughout the season. Not just going 4/60, 5/75, 6/90 in successive starts, but letting guys repeat those levels multiple times to build up arm strength. It's both to manage injury risk and to preserve bullets for later in the season."
We’ve heard Zaidi mention this before, but laid out like this, we have, I think, the first in depth articulation of development philosophy that is pretty unique to the Giants. They’re certainly not the only club that is thinking about pitcher health or ideal ways to preserve their pitchers, and they’re not the only club that is asking guys to throw less innings in the minors. But this specific four inning/60-70 pitch process that we’ve seen applied as regularly as a metronome to virtually every starter — extended out over the first two months of the season — really is something unique to them. I’ve had several scouts from other teams ask me about it this year, actually (often annoyed, since it gives them a little less to evaluate on).
It’s always hard to know how to evaluate efforts to mitigate pitcher injuries — since they will always be pretty ubiquitous in an industry that asks the human arm to withstand really unnatural levels of stress. But this is something of a flagpole planted by the Giants, regarding their thinking for preserving arms, and we’ll have to watch and see how it plays out over the long haul. Will the Giants have outsized success at developing their arms into major leaguers and reduce the amount of development time lost to injury? That would certainly be a boon for the system. But, as is often the case, that will be something we won’t necessarily be able to see for several years.
But back to Harrison, Zaidi did mention that he should be stretched out to the 5 inning/75 pitch range “as soon as his next start,” and that he’ll probably get one more pitch count bump before they call him up to the majors (which would seem to put the timeline for that having at maybe another 3-5 starts?).
Finally, Zaidi noted that Harrison unveiled a new, shorter breaking ball in Tuesday’s outing. “And one of the issues is he doesn't get a lot of swings at [the slider], because it's so big that guys just give up on it. So he's been working on a shorter one that I think debuted in that last outing, and I think it helped him a lot with the strike-throwing. I think you'll see him build up to this next time out."
That’s an issue I’ve mentioned in some of his earlier outings that definitely bears watching — he’s not getting chases on his slider at this level. That’s no doubt shocking to him, as he’s always garnered plenty of swing thrus on the slider at every other level. Here, batters are letting it go. Even in Tuesday’s successful start, Harrison only had one swing through (and just four swings) on the 19 sliders he threw. He did, however, get it called for strikes seven different times. In an ideal world, he’ll be able to do both, steal strikes in the zone with it AND get hitters to chase the pitch out of the zone, and having a shorter, sharper break that can fool the best hitters in the world should help with that. I’m also going to be keeping an eye on the changeup usage, which has barely made an impression so far this year. The fastball is special, but he’ll need other pitches when he goes up against big leaguers, so getting those two other pitches where they need to be will be an important box to tick before he joins the big club.
HITTER of the NIGHT: Hayden Cantrelle (Rich), 3 for 4, 2 HR (3), 2 R, 4 RBI
PITCHER of the NIGHT: Keaton Winn (Sac), 4.0 IP, 4 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 2 BB, 8 K
Hey, I told you we’d be meeting Mr. Winn again today! And I should say that, while an 0 for 3 didn’t quite qualify for “Hitter of the Night” honors, there was a pretty exciting hitting debut last night!
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