How Giants prospect Bryce Eldridge is adjusting to life in the big leagues

Want the latest Bay Area sports news delivered to your inbox? Sign up here to receive regular email newsletters, including “The Dime.”

LOS ANGELES – It was Clayton Kershaw’s night, so 20-year-old Bryce Eldridge watched from the Giants’ dugout as the legendary Dodger was honored, adored, and celebrated a day after he announced this is his final season.

Eldridge isn’t starting against left-handers, but it would have been nice and a valuable education if the kid got a chance against Kershaw, one of the best who ever threw a baseball.

As it was, Kershaw exited in the fifth inning Friday and received a tremendous ovation from a rocking Dodger Stadium crowd. He waved to the Giants’ bench, where everyone was standing and cheering, lifted his cap to the fans, and blew a kiss to his family. Shortly thereafter, Shohei Ohtani and Mookie Betts homered on consecutive Robbie Ray pitches, and the Dodgers were well on their way to a 6-3 victory.

Eldridge, who’s expected back in the lineup for both weekend games because the Dodgers are starting right-handers, is seeking his first big-league hit. In three games, he’s 0-for-9 with five strikeouts, which suggests the experiment to promote him with 13 games left in the season isn’t trending in the right direction.

A deeper look at the numbers and at-bats suggests otherwise.

All four times Eldridge put the ball in play, he crushed it. Three fly balls at 105.9 mph, 105.2 mph, and 102.4 mph (one in each of his games, the first two traveling more than 400 feet) with expected batting averages on those batted balls, according to Statcast, at .930, .620, .420.

Eldridge, at 6-foot-7 the Giants’ tallest player, also grounded out at 99 mph. In baseball vernacular, that’s extremely hard hit. All were outs, but there was a good amount of bad luck involved.

“The most important thing in these last couple of weeks is for us just to watch him,” hitting coach Pat Burrell said. “The last thing we want to do is bombard him with a bunch of information and take him away from what he’s been doing. He’s really squared up the ball, and we just want to keep that rolling.”

To show the quality of Eldridge’s contact, let’s look at the stat xBA, which is a player’s expected batting average. It’s based on how hard he hit the ball and at what angle and considers the likelihood of a batted ball being a hit. Eldridge’s xBA, according to Fangraphs, is .303.

Another stat, xwOBA, expected weighted on-base average, is more complex and takes into account exit velocity and launch angle to provide an expected outcome on batted balls. Eldridge’s is .563, says Fangraphs, way north of the big-league norm.

And, yes, the Giants’ front office cares about this stuff when valuing a player. Suffice it to say the folks upstairs think Eldridge will be remarkably special.

Three big-league games is an extremely small sample size, but it’s clear he needs to work on cutting down on his strikeouts. On three of his five K’s, he swung and missed at strike three well below the strike zone. In Triple-A this season, his strikeout rate was 30.8%, his walk rate 9.8%. Narrowing the gap will be a constant objective.

“Pitchers try to stay low on me,” Eldridge said. “But if I’m spitting on those, they’ll try to go in. They try to not let me get extended. It’s just an adjustment I’ve got to make. I’m comfortable with that pitch and just have to anticipate it.”

Pitchers know the lefty swinging Eldridge loves fastballs and are feeding him a steady diet of soft stuff and breaking stuff. In his first career at-bat, he saw four straight changeups. He has handled the hard stuff better. Three of the balls he put in play were fastballs, the other a slider.

So far, Eldridge has seen 51 pitches. Here’s the breakdown:

20 fastballs

12 changeups

8 curves

6 splitters

4 sliders

1 sweeper

Here are the results of the 51 pitches:

19 balls

12 swings and misses

9 foul balls

7 called strikes

4 balls in play

Eldridge has had just one at-bat against a lefty, Dodgers reliever Jack Dreyer, and drilled a vicious liner to right fielder Teoscar Hernandez.

In Triple-A, his splits were comparable:

Versus righties: .251 average, .328 on-base percentage, .502 slugging percentage – .829 OPS

Versus lefties: .267/.327/489 (.815)

Yet he’s predominately facing righties because management preferred a softer landing spot and an easier path to success. Wilmer Flores has been platooning at designated hitter with Eldridge and was Friday’s DH against Kershaw. Eldridge was a first baseman in Triple-A, but Rafael Devers and Flores are sharing that spot for now.

Manager Bob Melvin said “the position we’re in” was a reason Flores, a free agent after the season, is getting DH time ahead of Eldrige versus lefties. Perhaps that’ll change now that the Giants fell to four games behind the New York Mets – five when considering the tiebreaker – for the final wild-card spot with just eight games to play.

“His at-bats have been good,” Melvin said of Eldridge. “We’d love for him to get his first hit out of the way, but he certainly has not looked overmatched. So he’ll start against righties, and we’ll see where it goes against lefties.”

Being such a tall hitter can be a challenge but also a benefit.

“Better coverage on the outside of the plate,” Eldridge said of the advantage of swinging at his height, “which a lot of guys struggle with. It’s one of my strong suits as I can hit to all fields. I think covering the high pitch is a little bit easier, too.”

For taller hitters, the strike zone is bigger, at least vertically. The inside pitches can be tougher to get around on – though Burrell said Eldridge is “pretty good in there,” citing the inside fastball he turned on for the 99 mph grounder – and compact swings aren’t exactly a thing. But with height comes power, and Eldridge has plenty. He hit 54 homers in 249 minor-league games  including 25 this season.

Perhaps it helps that the Giants have the tallest hitting-coach tandem in the league with Burrell at 6-foot-4 and Damon Minor at 6-foot-7, the same size as Eldridge, and he also played first base for the Giants.

“You’re covering a bigger strike zone, but you have a little more coverage with longer arms, and he can get to the inside pitches,” Minor said. “But it can be more challenging to play first base as a tall guy, understanding how low you have to be. As tall guys, we have a tendency to be up and work down, but you need to be down and work up.”

The Giants got ahead of Kershaw 2-1 after Heliot Ramos homered to open the game and Flores added an RBI single in the third. But with Kershaw on the hook for a loss, his teammates rallied and his fans roared. Ohtani hit an opposite-field, three-run homer, his 52nd of the season, and Betts followed with his 20th. That ended Ray’s night.

“The fact I faced a legend and Hall of Famer and to get a chance to see him in his last game (at Dodger Stadium) is a privilege for me,” Ramos said. “I’m proud of myself, of course, and I admired the type of career he had. It’s definitely a good highlight for my life, my career.”

The pitching matchup for Saturday is Kai-Wei Teng versus Tyler Glasnow. The Giants haven’t named a starter for Sunday. It’ll be Emmet Sheehan for the Dodgers.

Eldridge is on deck.