PHOENIX – Ever since Kyle Harrison’s name has been on the scene, it’s been associated with a rising, riding four-seam fastball that explodes out of its low, left-handed slot and ambushes the hitter.
The pitch has been Harrison’s bread and butter, the biggest reason he ascended to one of the game’s premier pitching prospects.
Now it looks like it has a full plate to go alongside it.
In his unofficial Milwaukee Brewers debut March 3, Harrison dazzled with an enticing array of secondary pitches over three innings against Team Great Britain in the 85-degree Arizona heat.
“I think we got what we expected,” Brewers manager Pat Murphy said.
Kick change looks good in debut for Harrison
They may have gotten even more than expected courtesy of the brand-new changeup Harrison debuted.
The 24-year-old left-hander revealed after his outing that he entered camp this year throwing a kick change – a changeup thrown with a spiked middle finger that generates splitter-like movement vertically with changeup spin.
And it’s a good one.
Harrison threw 10 of them against Great Britain in the exhibition, getting anywhere from -6 to -8 inches of induced vertical movement on just about each one. That’s a lot of depth by any means of looking at it, and a ton of depth compared to the standard, boring changeup he was throwing last year between San Francisco and Boston.
It’s a pitch the Red Sox tried getting Harrison to throw after acquiring him in the Rafael Devers deal with the Giants last June, using prospect Connelly Early’s grip and movement as an example for what they wanted Harrison to try to do.
It never got past the experimental phase, though, as Harrison could never quite get the pitch to click during bullpen sessions at Class AAA Worcester.
“They thought, ‘Oh, we got some prospect that’s coming up, you might be able to throw his changeup,’” Harrison said. “Worked for two months in Worcester trying to figure it out and just couldn’t get it. Couldn’t get it. Two months of just a terrible changeup.”
This winter, Harrison started trying new grips during a conversation with Giants right-hander Hayden Birdsong, a friend and former teammate in San Francisco.
He had figured it out. He just didn’t know it yet.
“This off-season it was like, ‘Oh that’s starting to go down a little,’ but I didn’t start to realize it until I got on Trackman and started seeing all these negative [vertical movement numbers].”
When Harrison arrived in Phoenix following the trade in early February, he didn’t want to make a big deal of the kick change to coaches Chris Hook and Jim Henderson, just in case his new team wasn’t as fond of a new pitch.
When it came time for his first bullpen, though, the pitch did all the talking.
“I told them it was new but not that I had struggled with it,” Harrison said. “From the first bullpen, they just told me to throw it with conviction. They were like, ‘It doesn’t look new. You’re throwing it with conviction.’ That’s just something that they do a really good job with, is coming in and letting you do you. It’s, ‘Let’s see what you do.’
“They’re obviously going to tweak and change some things but I just love how open they are and it’s kind of like my show.”
Harrison hopes to flourish in Brewers system
The 24-year-old Harrison is far from the first pitcher to experience this after coming over to Milwaukee.
A year ago, Quinn Priester flourished in the system Hook has crafted. The bullpen is full of outcasts-turned-firemen, including Trevor Megill and Jared Koenig. Even this spring, newcomers Brandon Sproat and Shane Drohan have raved about how the Brewers onboard pitchers.
“My first thought was, ‘Oh, this is going to be a good spot to go to for me. I’m going to get better,’” Harrison said. “It’s easy to think like that, but the second I stepped in here and Chris Hook’s on you in catch play, doing all these different drills that I’ve never really drilled, it’s like, yeah, no wonder I’m getting better.
“I’m doing the little stuff. I’m holding myself accountable in catch play. All that stuff translates to the mound, man. It’s just been a cool learning experience.”
The tweaks with Harrison, in typical Hook fashion, are small but hopefully impactful. They’ve honed his slider shape a bit as well as trying some new experiments with his sinker, trying to get more separation with it from his four-seamer.
The pitch has been a hurdle for Harrison because it requires him to sequence his body and arm ever so differently from his four-seamer; the constant drilling of up-and-away four-seamers makes it more difficult for him to get in the proper spot to hit a gloveside sinker.
He saw progress in outing one.
“I felt like I was filling up the zone, working a lot more glove side,” Harrison said. “Hoping to keep the misses up and away and down. It’s just something they noticed here and something we’re going to hone in on and hammer the strike zone.”
It doesn’t take much to see the makings of another arm molded into a weapon by the Brewers’ pitching development in Harrison. If it goes as the team hopes, the secondaries will only make the fastball better, and he won’t be relying on one main course, but rather the entire menu.
“Now it’s like, I’ve got this cool weapon with the changeup,” Harrison said. “I got this cool weapon with the slider. I was able to mix in a couple sinkers today. So all right, we can mix in different looks. I just want to be a guy who can get guys out from every angle.
“That’s my main goal. Fill it up with every pitch.”
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Kyle Harrison showed up this spring with a new pitch, and it’s elevated his potential.
Reporting by Curt Hogg, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
