June 19, 2023

By J.P. Antonacci

Canadian Baseball Network

Early in his career, Rich Harden’s fastball averaged a league-best 94.3 mph, and once warmed up he could hit triple digits.

But Harden’s best season came after a major shoulder injury forced the right-hander from Victoria, BC, to find new ways to generate swings and misses at an elite clip.

Pitching for the Oakland Athletics against the New York Yankees in April 2007, Harden reached skyward to field a comebacker and tore his right shoulder capsule, effectively ending his year.

He pitched with the injury for four seasons before having it surgically repaired in 2012.

“My shoulder was in bad shape. Every pitch I threw was just killing me,” Harden recalled while touring the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in St. Marys, Ont., on June 17 ahead of his induction as part of the class of 2023.

No longer able to buzz his heater past hapless hitters, Harden needed a new approach – and a new pitch.

After the season, Ron Romanick, then Oakland’s minor league pitching coordinator, helped Harden find a new path.

“He worked with me so much – broke down my mechanics, taught me my changeup,” Harden said.

The changeup was a work in progress heading into the 2008 season, and Harden leaned on his forkball to complement his fastball.

“At one point, I damaged a tendon in my finger and I couldn’t throw my fork,” Harden said. “And I didn’t have the confidence in my changeup to throw it, because I’d never tried it in a game.”

Left with a breaking ball that “wasn’t great,” Harden had no choice but to get his changeup game ready. The results surprised him.

“So I started throwing a changeup and learned that it was my best pitch – almost better than a fastball,” he said.

“I had very good command with it, and depending on how I threw it and where I located it, it would move differently. The more I threw it, the more I made it work for me.

“There were games I started when my fastball was only 85 miles an hour and the changeup was 80 miles an hour, so it wasn’t really that different. But I was able to keep consistent mechanics for a while and throw it where I wanted it, and that’s when I had success.”

It was a mental adjustment to go from being among the hardest throwers in the league to getting hitters out through deception, but Harden embraced his transformation.

“It surprised me. Kind of blew me away that I could start a game at 85, top out at 87, and still have a high strikeout ratio,” he said.

The changeup – an emergency pitch he turned to out of necessity – soon became known as the “ghost pitch,” since it seemed to disappear as batters swung at it.

“Hitters had a hard time with it,” Harden said with a smile.

“I threw it hard. I threw it just like my fastball. It wasn’t your typical changeup, where somebody’s holding it deeper in their hand and trying to slow it down more. That was such a good pitch for me.”

Harden’s changeup emerged during his best year in 2008, when he made 25 starts for Oakland and the Chicago Cubs and posted a 2.07 ERA and 1.06 WHIP, punching out 181 in 148 innings and going 10-2.

For his career, the Canadian hurler pitched in 170 games, all but 10 as a starting pitcher, in parts of nine major-league seasons, recording 949 strikeouts in 928 1/3 innings along with a 3.76 career ERA and 1.30 WHIP.

Whatever his top speed, strikeouts were Harden’s calling card.

“That was always something even when I was a kid that was fun and I wanted to do,” said Harden, who came up as an outfielder and only got serious about pitching in Grade 12, when he hit the weight room and his velocity increased with his muscle tone.

“It seemed like every year (my fastball) just got harder and harder and gained velocity, and a little more command,” he said.

That extra speed helped him rack up strikeouts in the minor leagues.

“There were times I didn’t want strikeouts. With somebody on base, I’d rather get a ground ball and get a double play,” Harden said.

But more often than not, his stuff generated swings and misses, foul balls on late swings, or weak pop flies.

“I’d actually end up throwing more pitches because of it,” he said.

“I tried throwing a two-seam fastball or sinker to get more ground balls, but it never really worked for me. Things might be different now, when you have high-speed camera technology and you can really break down your pitches and create them. That probably would’ve helped me.”

It’s been a decade since Harden last stepped on a major-league mound, but he admits to still missing the thrill of getting a batter to swing through his best pitch.

“For me, it was a really good feeling, and that’s probably something I miss a lot – standing out there in a big situation, runners on base, and getting a big strikeout to end an inning or a game,” he said.

“That’s an exciting feeling, and you can’t really match that outside of the game.”

Looking back, Harden said it was “extremely hard” to have short-lived runs of excellence on the mound interspersed with injuries.

“It was very challenging, mentally, to go out there and feel so good, and then have some little thing come up like an oblique strain,” he said.

“I had great stretches of my season where I was feeling great and having success, and then it was back on the DL.”

Harden can appreciate his success at the sport’s highest level while wishing his impressive numbers were across more innings.

“I wouldn’t change anything. But it was hard then, and it is hard looking back on it now, because I know what I was capable of when I was healthy,” he said.

He wonders if advancements in sports science, particularly today’s better understanding of the importance of rest to aid recovery, could have changed his career trajectory by avoiding the raft of minor injuries that kept him off the field.

“I loved working hard. I loved that process of training for my next start – throwing, working on things,” Harden said.

“At times, it was probably too much. Looking back, it’s easy to see that now.”