Splitting hairs on his greatness
Goatee or not, Harris among the best at what he does
The most underrated relief pitcher in baseball assumed his wife would disapprove. The demands of another baseball summer left the Astros with two days off between July 29 and Aug. 26, an unusually long time for Will Harris to be apart from Caroline, his wife of eight years, and their two children.
Three weeks of separation let Harris, a reliable pitcher because of his exceptional control, get a little wild.
He looked around the clubhouse, a living barbershop poster of lush, sharp, scruffy, trimmed and wiry facial hair styles. Jose Altuve’s is tight. Justin Verlander’s is cut off underneath the chin. Yordan Alvarez’s seems unable to grow above his top lip. Alex Bregman’s is confused.
Harris had gone with the same haircut for a decade. His face, so boyishly plump that from a distance “everybody thinks I’m way fatter than I really am,” was an empty canvas waiting to express his tonsorial inspiration.
He grew out a goatee.
By Aug. 25, he was three days from turning 35, with silver shoots poking from peppery patches refusing to come together around his jawline. The
growth did not shave off 10 years, but it made him feel younger.
“Every two weeks, Bregman has a different look,” Harris said of the 25-year old third baseman. “It looks like fun.”
Harris enjoyed it while he could. He planned to fly out after the Sunday game to see his wife and kids at their home in Louisiana.
“I may end up trimming it tomorrow morning if she’s not a fan,” he said.
He got home and gave Caroline a long-awaited, prickly kiss. It went as he had anticipated.
“I’m not a fan,” she told him.
Yet it’s October, and the goatee is still there.
“I wouldn’t say she’s come around,” Harris said. “She’s able to deal with it, which in married society, that’s half the battle.”
It is the only noticeable change to Harris in his years of being consistently elite for the Astros.
Over the last five seasons, only three relievers have totaled at least 280 innings and kept an ERA below 2.45: Aroldis Chapman (2.16), Harris (2.36) and Kensley Jansen (2.44).
Harris said that this season he put a bit more focus on “moving the ball around,” conscious of when opponents might find him to be predictable. His 1.50 ERA ranked second in the majors to San
Diego Padres closer Kirby Yates (1.19) among pitchers who threw at least 60 innings.
Harris held opponents scoreless in 28 of his last 31 appearances. Against the Los Angeles Angels on the last Friday of the regular season, he threw the team’s first immaculate inning (nine pitches for three strikeouts) in 15 years.
Despite the company he keeps statistically, Harris does not receive acclaim nationally like the overpowering strikeout artists who rack up saves and drive up free-agency offers.
“Generally, if you’re not the closer or a starter, you can pretty much assume to not get the attention you deserve when you’re having good seasons and maybe too much attention when you’re not,” Astros manager A.J. Hinch said.
Since joining Houston in 2015 — but most clearly this season, the best of his career — Harris has been the ballast of the bullpen, which at times looked rocky in the two months leading to the postseason.
“He’s been my guy for five years,” said Hinch, who began managing the Astros in 2015. “This is the guy I’ve gone to in the highest leverage imaginable.”
This season, Harris inherited a team-high 27 men on base and allowed only five to score. The 19 percent rate is his career low.
The 6-4 righthander is a strong choice to deaden
righties and lefties. Batters are hitting .151 (13-for-86) off his curveball.
“Will’s been here as long as I have, and I trust him as much as I trust anybody,” Hinch said.
A manager’s trust in a reliever is becoming fickler the further baseball gets into the all-hands-on-deck era of playoff pitching.
Harris might have been Houston’s most dominant reliever from the start and through the end of the regular season, but a pinstriped boogeyman is lurking in the Bronx, which the Astros, should they advance in the playoffs, might have to visit in the American League Championship Series.
Against the New York Yankees, Harris has an 11.88 ERA in the regular season (7.20 at Yankee Stadium). Their lineup is loaded with batters who have teed off on him. Two of his three postseason appearances against the Yankees have been scoreless, but he also crumbled in Game 4 of the 2017 ALCS. After his wild pitch let in one run, the three-run bomb he gave up to Aaron Judge solidified an 8-1 win over the Astros.
Harris is unsure if it was his mistakes or the Yankees’ skills that hurt him in 2017. He said he likely will have to examine video and devise a more sophisticated game plan with the coaching staff, although
usually that is not his approach. He counts on himself to execute the right pitches.
“I’m not one that dives too much into what other guys are doing and scouting reports,” he said. “Shoot, back in 2017, I thought I made some really good pitches against them. It didn’t work out in my favor. Maybe this year it’ll be different.”
No matter how the playoffs end for the Astros, the team will have to address a potential exodus of middle relievers. Harris, Collin McHugh, Joe Smith and Hector Rondon will be free agents.
With his 9.4 K’s per nine innings and average fastball speed of 91.5 mph, Harris never has thought of himself as a closer. He conceded that a game’s final outs, the ones that earned Chapman and Jansen megadeals, are worth more than the ones he is asked to get.
“I’ve had a lot of success doing what I’m doing now,” Harris said. “I don’t have a problem with those guys being better than me. I know they are. I just want to be good.”
The unpredictable freezes encountered by some pitchers the last two offseasons make Harris cautiously optimistic about his first crack at free agency. He would like to resign with the Astros, but the past few months, he, his agent and his family collaborated on a “wish list” of teams he hopes will make offers. There are other winning clubs and new cities his family might want to experience.
“I’d like to stay here,” Harris said. “But it’s also exciting to have an opportunity to go somewhere else and pick where I go.”
He also knows winning the World Series again will deepen his connection to the team that turned his career around.
“Part of the allure of staying here is because of the success I’ve had with this organization and with A.J. as my manager,” Harris said.
It does not bother him that fans rarely recognize him. It can make it more flattering when they do.
“You’re a lot skinnier in person,” he said they tell him. “I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
Harris is aware a goatee can be slimming, depending on how kempt it is. While his mouth recently pushed around piping hot bites of a quesadilla before a scheduled pregame catch, he nodded his head toward the showers.
“I’m trying to trim it up,” he said, trying not to burn his tongue. “We’ve got some manscaping tools in there I’ve been trying to use.”
His look, new or old, has not seemed to affect his performance.
“I’ve been the same guy here for a long time,” Harris said.