Is D-backs' top pick the next Marcus Stroman?

Duke right-hander Bryce Jarvis used a big start to his junior season to catapult himself into first-round consideration, and those efforts paid off when the 2020 Draft got underway on Wednesday night. Here are 10 facts you should know about Jarvis, whom the D-backs selected with the 18th overall pick.

• Jarvis made some Blue Devils history, as only one Duke alum had previously been selected in the Draft’s first round. That alum? All-Star and Gold Glove Award-winning pitcher Marcus Stroman, who is set to star in the Mets’ rotation when baseball resumes. Jarvis’ stuff caught Stroman’s attention a couple times this spring on Twitter.

• Actually, Jarvis is already in the Duke record books. In February, the righty authored the first perfect game in the school’s 131-year baseball history, striking out 15 Cornell hitters and needing only 94 pitches to pull off the feat in an 8-0 Blue Devils win. It was just the 31st perfecto twirled by any NCAA Division I pitcher on record.

Jarvis was also the tough-luck loser during Vanderbilt star Kumar Rocker’s 19-strikeout no-hitter in the 2019 NCAA Tournament, allowing just one run across seven innings in defeat.

• Jarvis has big league pedigree in his veins thanks to his father, Kevin, who owns a wealth of experience from life in The Show. After four years at Wake Forest, Kevin played in parts of 12 Major League seasons for 10 different clubs, spending the most time with the Reds at the beginning of his career. Jarvis also pitched for Japan’s Chunichi Dragons in 1998 and helped the Minor League Vancouver Canadians claim the ‘99 Triple-A World Series championship. He went on to scout for the Padres and Angels before taking time off to watch his son play.

• The Yankees drafted Jarvis in the 37th round a year ago, but he turned down a substantial bonus offer to return to Duke and improve his stock. As evidenced by that perfect game (and a one-hitter just two starts later against Florida State), he’s made huge improvements since then. Jarvis skipped the Cape Cod League to work with both Driveline Baseball and Cressey Sports Performance and, as a result, added 20 pounds to his frame and about three to four mph on his fastball. Jarvis also improved his breaking ball from an average offering to one that he can manipulate into either an upper-70s curve or a mid-80s slider. Even more, his changeup is seen as one of the country’s best.

When the 2020 NCAA season was suspended due to the coronavirus pandemic, Jarvis owned a 0.67 ERA (two earned runs across 27 innings) and a 40 to 2 strikeout-to-walk ratio.

• Jarvis hasn’t shied away from big moments. In high school, he outdueled future Vanderbilt ace Mason Hickman to send Brentwood (Tenn.) Academy to the state championship game. And Duke wouldn’t have advanced to that 2019 NCAA Super Regional matchup against Vanderbilt without Jarvis’ eight scoreless innings (11 strikeouts) against West Virginia in the Morgantown Regional matchup.

• Though he didn’t get a chance to compete in this year’s NCAA Tournament, Jarvis was an absolute money pitcher in his first two tastes of tournament play. He finished his collegiate career having allowed just two earned runs across 22 tournament innings (0.82 ERA), striking out 31 of the 87 batters he faced.

• Brentwood has seen five of its previous alumni selected in the Draft, and, if Jarvis makes it all the way, could see two of its former stars in MLB at the same time. Pirates catcher Jacob Stallings, who appeared in 71 games for the Bucs in 2019, graduated from Brentwood in 2008. Stallings wound up playing college baseball for Duke’s biggest rival: UNC.

• In fact, Brentwood athletics in general has been on a huge roll lately. Last year, the school saw former athletes drafted in three different major professional sports with the NBA’s Cleveland Cavaliers taking point guard Darius Garland fifth overall and the NFL’s Buffalo Bills drafting tight end Dawson Knox in the third round, in addition to the Yankees picking Jarvis before he decided to return to Duke.

• Kevin Jarvis suited up for 10 Major League clubs (one of only 23 modern-era pitchers to do so), was released five times in his career and waived three times during the 1997 season alone. Yet he still strung together more than a decade in the bigs, and he passed that persistence on to his son. In high school, Bryce missed most of his freshman season with a stress reaction in his back and a deviated septum caused by a bad-hop grounder that came up and hit him in the nose.

• One of Jarvis’ clearest memories of his dad’s career didn’t happen in a game. Kevin Jarvis’ final season came with the Red Sox, giving his son a chance to roam the outfield at Fenway Park.

“I was shagging BP and I was in right field,” Jarvis told Tennessee’s Williamson Homepage, “and I caught a line drive off of Manny Ramirez’s bat. That was pretty special.”