It stinks that Kyle Harrison isn’t on the Giants anymore.
For all of the justified excitement and hubbub about Rafael Devers, the loss of an exciting and promising homegrown pitcher is impossible to ignore. The Giants orchestrated their 2020 draft around selecting Harrison in the third round, giving him almost as much bonus money as their three second-round picks combined. He was from Danville, and he came of age in the Giants’ championship era, which means he knew the magic of a Buster hug. He was hoping to get a besuited version.
Harrison was once the best left-handed pitching prospect in baseball, give or take, and while there’s been some weirdness between then and now, his stock was back to where it should have been. He was already a quality starting pitcher, and his ceiling was much higher. You’ll read comments from naysayers and grumplepusses about his lack of an off-speed out pitch, but that’s putting the cart before the horse.
Actually, let’s zoom in on that idiom because it fits perfectly here. There’s plenty you can do with a horse that doesn’t have a cart, but there’s not much to do when it’s the other way around. Harrison had the deception and fastball already, and that allowed him to be effective. That’s the horse. It’s already useful. You can ride around on it. You can put children on it and charge $5 a pop for pictures. You can brush it in the stable while telling it your problems. The off-speed pitches are the cart. Boy, you’d be cooking if you had one of those things, but it’s not very useful without a horse.
In the meantime, you can keep brushing the horse. The horse’s name is Cloppy, and it loves apples.
(Editor’s note: This analogy went on for 17 more paragraphs before I trimmed it. You’re welcome.)
After acknowledging that all pitchers come with some base level of risk — and a lot of it — there’s a higher floor with Harrison’s current profile. Even if he never learned that One Weird Trick of a slower, bat-missing pitch to complement his fastball, he’s already getting major-league hitters out. You would rather start with a deceptive, above-average fastball than a killer offspeed pitch, and it’s not especially close. If it was easy to be bearish on Harrison’s potential when his fastball was sputtering, it should be even easier to be bullish on him now that he’s back in the mid- and upper-90s.
The Giants have a lot of capable pitchers, though. They started spring training with Harrison as the obvious fifth starter, only to have a no-wrong-answers battle between Landen Roupp and Hayden Birdsong for the last rotation spot. Five starting pitchers on the Sacramento River Cats are on the 40-man roster, excluding Carson Whisenhunt, the best pitching prospect in the system. With Logan Webb thriving and Robbie Ray still under contract for next season, it was going to remain crowded.
If there’s anywhere you want depth, it’s on the pitching side, of course. Just because there are five worthy pitchers in a rotation and a half-dozen quality arms waiting for a chance doesn’t mean there will be five worthy pitchers in the rotation forever. There are countless examples, but if you’re looking for one that hits close to home, consider the 2016 Giants, who had two pitchers worthy of starting the All-Star Game. The 2017 Giants had two pitchers tied for the league lead in losses, and they needed 163 innings from Ty Blach, which wasn’t the original plan. Baseball comes at you fast.
Still, when it comes to a surplus of young pitching, there are two basic strategies:
1. Keep everyone, and let injuries and meritocracy sort it all out
2. Attempt to predict which pitchers will have the best major-league careers and trade the others for present-day value
There’s a lot of safety built into that first one. It doesn’t take an unfathomable amount of bad luck to get a random minor-league free agent in the rotation; it takes a regular amount of bad luck. If a team has five of the best 150 starting pitchers in the world before the season starts, it probably won’t have all of them by the end.
There’s safety with the hoarding strategy, but there’s also plenty of risk below the surface. Let’s use an exaggerated example to explain why. Say that a team has the 10 best prospects in baseball. Now let’s say they’re all catchers. A team that holds all of them will almost guarantee that it will get excellent production from the position over the next several years. The team will mix and match to find the best one, and it will have overqualified backups and emergency plans.
An invisible WAR counter is running backward over this team’s Baseball-Reference page, though. The eight catchers in the minors aren’t going to contribute any major-league value without an injury. The backup in the majors won’t contribute as much as he could with an everyday job. The backward-WAR counter tracks the missing contributions from the players the major-league roster could have had if those extra catchers were traded for major leaguers who filled an immediate need.
The analogy falls apart when you consider the differences between pitchers and catchers. Teams need two catchers, but they’ll need about 20 pitchers every season. A pitching logjam is much likelier to work itself out.
Still, that final value of a prospect or young player isn’t just measured by their career WAR. Tommy Joseph had a replacement-level career in the majors, and his career WAR with the Giants would have been around 0.0 if they had kept him. But the invisible WAR counter would have been ticking backward without Hunter Pence in the organization. Joseph was worth -0.5 WAR for the Phillies, but he would have been worth -2 CAR (Championships Above Replacement) if the Giants weren’t willing to trade him.
That doesn’t mean the smart play is always to trade potential future value for present value. It’s a delicate balancing act. You want depth, but you also don’t want a player’s perceived future value to dwindle completely without ever getting any real-world value.
There’s a way to blend the hoarding and trading strategies, though. Start with a hoarding-first strategy, but keep an open mind when an unexpected opportunity presents itself. Possibilities include another team’s prospect logjam at a different position, or a trade-deadline deal that’s a perfect fit. A franchise player who suddenly becomes available because of a front-office spat definitely qualifies.
If there’s safety in hoarding, there’s safety in the right trade, too. Who’s going to be more valuable in 2025? It’s Devers, no question. In 2026? Devers, most likely. In 2032, it’s probably still Devers, salary be damned. The invisible WAR counter was turned into a quite visible WAR counter overnight, and it’s now spinning in the proper direction.
The Dodgers considered trading Clayton Kershaw for Miguel Cabrera once upon a time, and while they would have missed out on the last of his kind if they had made the deal, their consolation prize would have been an excellent major leaguer for years and years and years. Devers ain’t Cabrera, and Harrison ain’t Kershaw, but it’s a helpful comparison on a smaller scale. Even in some of the less-desirable scenarios — Harrison turning into a perennial Cy Young candidate, say — the Giants should still get plenty of on-field value from Devers.
The Giants could have kept all of their young pitchers, or they could have used some of the lesser-known young pitchers to complete minor deals for lesser-known hitters. In the end, they picked one of the best young pitchers and traded him for the best hitter they had a chance at. He just happens to be one of the best hitters in baseball, in his late 20s and under contract for a long time.
Depth is nice. Future All-Stars are great. Current All-Stars are even better. It stinks that Harrison isn’t on the Giants anymore, but this wasn’t the normal kind of trade offer. This trade offer made it risky not to give Harrison up. The trade was a risk, but so was keeping all the young pitching, just in case.
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