Prior to the first game of the series between the San Francisco Giants and Milwaukee Brewers this week, Logan Webb spent nearly an hour catching up with Kyle Harisson in the outfield during batting practice, learning what his former teammate has done to take off as baseball’s top breakout arm this seaosn.
A day after hearing about it, Webb got to experience it.
Harrison, in his first career outing June 2 against the team that drafted him and he made his major-league debut with, shoved. He struck out 12 Giants across 5 ⅔ dominant inning, allowing one run on four hits and two walks in an 8-3 Brewers’ victory, pushing his scoreless streak to 23 innings before a Willy Adames solo homer with two outs in the sixth spoiled that run.
“100%, it’s always going to feel personal,” Harrison said. “I grew up 40 minutes from that ballpark [in San Francisco]. Had a great time and cherish my memories with them. It feels good, but I got to do it in another five days. You can’t get caught up in that. Just go out and compete.”
Harrison’s ERA now sits at 1.57 through 11 starts to begin 2026, the type of performance many in the Bay Area surmised might one day come to fruition.
They just didn’t expect it to happen in Milwaukee.
“I said it when he was traded, I was like, ‘This kid’s going to be really good somewhere,’” Webb said. “I thought it would be [with] Boston.”
So did many with the Giants once he was sent to Boston in the Rafael Devers blockbuster last June, but things for Harrison never quite clicked into place in his short time there.
As Harrison spent most of his time with Boston at Class AAA, tinkering with his arsenal, arm slot and different pitch grips, he did make progress. It was just that those incremental steps never fully showed themselves in game action as he walked 27 in 50 innings in the minors post-trade.
The Red Sox weren’t patient enough. The Brewers, who had targeted him in deals with the Giants for years, were.
“They traded him over here and I think these guys have a long track record of really building up pitchers,” Webb said. “We’ve kind of seen it with Kyle. He was already going to be really good. Get him with a group like this and you can see it paying off.”
Harrison’s outing shows how he’s improved since time with Giants
Webb didn’t enjoy how Harrison sliced and diced the Giants offense with his two-pitch mix. But he also isn’t surprised that Harrison is now doing that to opposing lineups with regularity.
“Not at all,” he said. “You’re not named the No. 1 left-handed pitching prospect in baseball for no reason. The talent has always been unbelievable.”
Webb makes a good, simple point. It can be easy to get caught up in the small tweaks Harrison and the Brewers have made and overlook the most important reason why he’s found success in Milwaukee: He’s really good.
Heading into 2023, Harrison rated as the No. 18 prospect in all of baseball, according to MLB Pipeline. A few months later, in his second career game, he struck out 11 in 6 ⅓ scoreless innings as a baby-faced 22-year-old.
“I saw it then,” Webb said. “I saw it a bunch when he first came up and got to know him pretty well. You could see the explosiveness that it comes out of his hand with.”
The flashes were there, but Harrison struggled to repeat them.
An outing against his future team on August 28, 2024 encapsulated this perfectly.
Through 4 ⅔ innings against the Brewers in Milwaukee that night, Harrison went pitch-for-pitch with Freddy Peralta, dotting slurves on both edges of the plate so well that Pat Murphy sat in the other dugout wondering how his ERA began with a four.
Then, to three straight batters, he left a pitch down the middle: a slurve to Jackson Chourio, a fastball to Blake Perkins and a changeup to William Contreras. Single, double, home run.
That’s often how it went for Harrison through the three years he spent in the big leagues with San Francisco; he had the ingredients, but putting them together to create something delicious was the problem.
“All those experiences, every time you touch the mound, you learn something about yourself,” Harrison said. “You learn, ‘Hey, this pitch works here,’ where you get beat, spots in the zone where your ball doesn’t play the best. It’s not too crazy. I think I’m still somewhat the same pitcher. I still got that same edge to me.”
How Harrison has gotten better breaking ball results
A pitch in the first inning against the Giants showcased where Harrison has made the leap from promising-but-inconsistent youngster to bona fide contributor:
On a 3-2 count to the game’s opening batter, Harrison froze Casey Schmitt with a backdoor slurve at the knees for strike three.
That’s a pitch that Harrison not only had trouble executing with the Giants, but one made even more effective by nature because of a slight adjustment that took place after he joined Milwaukee.
The approach against Harrison when the Brewers faced him two years ago, outfielder Blake Perkins said, the approach was simple. From Harrison’s angle on the third-base side of the rubber, for him to throw a breaking ball in the zone, he had to start it at such an angle that it would pop out of his hand. Because of that, Perkins could simply sit on the fastball and make the easy adjustment to the breaking ball because the spin was instantly recognizable.
Now working from the other end of the rubber, Harrison’s fastball tunnels significantly better with his slurve. It comes out of his hand and heads toward the plate at such a steep lateral angle that a hitter simply can’t always tell what it is based upon the way it’s traveling until it’s too late.
Harrison was so nice to the Giants he flexed that exact development with his tunneling twice to Schmitt alone. In the third, during a stretch of eight consecutive outs coming via punch out, Harrison followed up early-count heaters with a pair of slurves below the zone, both of which got a half-hearted swing out of the Giants left fielder.
As he stood at his locker postgame, Harrison was glad to have gotten his first game against the Giants over with.
And following two trades in a calendar year, he will be even happier to wake up the next day knowing he’s somewhere he knows he’s valued.
“It has been weird,” Harrison admitted. “Nice to finally find some footing here.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: With 12 Ks, Kyle Harrison shows the Giants just what they’re missing
Reporting by Curt Hogg, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
