Kyle Harrison didn’t think his option to Triple-A Worcester would last very long. After all, he’d been minutes away from starting a Sunday Night Baseball game against the Los Angeles Dodgers when the San Francisco Giants informed him that he was now a Red Sox, traded for Rafael Devers.
The left-hander spent nearly three months in the top level of the Red Sox farm system before his new organization brought him up to the big leagues for the first time.
Ironically, the Red Sox were in familiar territory at the time. The Athletics, on the move for the third time in franchise history, are sharing the Giants’ Triple-A ballpark while they construct a new home in Las Vegas. Harrison would be making his Red Sox debut in the place where he’d once dreamed of being a Giants big-leaguer.
“A little too familiar, but it was good to have family there and just a familiar ground” Harrison told the Herald. “It was really weird. It was so weird. I was even thinking about that, eating breakfast that morning. I was sitting there like, ‘I’ve eaten breakfast here for a couple years of my life.’ So it was just crazy that I was there.”
One thing Harrison didn’t need to worry about when he flew out to join the team? Finding his way around.
“I knew that place like the back of my hand,” he said with a chuckle.
Harrison also knows he’s a better version of the pitcher he was at the time of the trade. The Red Sox thought he relied too much on his four-seam fastball with the Giants; of 115 major leaguers who pitched at least 100 innings in ‘24, he ranked 113th in first-pitch strikes because batters knew Harrison’s weaker offspeed offerings forced him into a fastball-first game plan. Of 536 pitches he threw in 0-0 counts, 298 were fastballs, 156 were slurves, 81 were changeups. Once, he threw something resembling a cutter.
In Triple-A Worcester, he added a cutter and sinker to his pitch mix. On Sept. 10, he used them to pitch three scoreless innings in his Red Sox debut.
“Maybe it took a little too long to get here, but I think they were really taking their time with me. Learning the new changeup, learning the cutter and sinker, and giving me time to really feel those reps, feel the good ones, feel the bad ones,” Harrison explained. “Just kind of getting some experience with those pitches, because you never know: you get to a big-league ballpark, you throw those pitches for the first time, who knows what happens? So it was good to settle in and throw those new pitches and just get more and more comfortable with them. Now I’m comfortable with them, I can go and deploy them and have fun.”
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