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SPOKANE, Wash. — Even in the euphoria of the moment, Ryan Murphy heard it.

There were 17 picks left in the 2020 draft, and the young right-hander sat restlessly, his eyes glued to the television. Due to the pandemic, the draft had been shortened to five rounds, and Murphy’s chances were running out. They seemed slim to begin with. He hailed from Le Moyne College, a small Division II school in upstate New York, and guys like that don’t get drafted in the top five rounds. The seventh or eighth round? Maybe. But there would be no seventh or eighth round this year.

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Murphy held his breath anyway. The Giants, a team that had shown interest in him, were on the clock. And then the MLB Network broadcast cut to what felt like an interminable commercial break. The ever-present news scroll at the bottom of the screen even disappeared for a time. Murphy couldn’t stand the wait. But just as the tension began to feel unbearable, the broadcast returned. Announcer Matt Vasgersian stepped to the podium. With the 144th pick in the 2020 draft, the Giants were selecting … him.

It was a joyous moment, undercut just a bit by what happened next. Despite the din of celebration, Murphy was listening as the broadcast cut to analyst Carlos Collazo of Baseball America. For all five rounds, Collazo had been ready with a detailed scouting report on each draftee. But this selection had left him admittedly stumped. “I guess we’re at the point where I have to shoot around texts,” Collazo’s voice beamed through Murphy’s TV, “so I don’t look stupid here.”

Nearly two years later, parked in a seat behind the visiting dugout at Avista Stadium, Murphy can think back on that moment and laugh. He gets it — he was pretty far off the radar. “I wasn’t at any Perfect Game thing. I wasn’t a big prospect,” Murphy says. “I wouldn’t expect him to know anything of me.” But that was then. As Murphy speaks, the 22-year-old is 24 hours away from making his second start of the 2022 season. In his first, he’d allowed only one hit and fanned seven through four scoreless innings for the High-A Eugene Emeralds. It was an apparent continuation of his 2021 season, when he was one of the most prolific strikeout pitchers in the minor leagues.

Last year, in his first taste of pro ball, Murphy pitched to a 2.52 ERA in 107 1/3 innings across two levels of A-ball. He racked up 164 strikeouts, third-most in the minors, and he might have claimed the strikeout title if not for a minor back injury late in the year. He struck out 39.3 percent of his batters, the second-highest rate of any qualified pitcher at a full-season affiliate. His K-BB percentage — his strikeout rate minus his walk rate — was 33.1 percent, also second-best. His 15.8 percent swinging strike rate was 16th.

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Many of the pitchers surrounding him on those leaderboards — Grayson Rodriguez, Cade Cavalli and fellow Giants farmhand Kyle Harrison, to name a few — are blue chip prospects. But Murphy, as Collazo’s draft-day befuddlement made abundantly clear, was not. He didn’t throw particularly hard. Scouts rated his secondary offerings as average. He went to a college with which few were familiar. These other pitchers had been on the radar for years, but getting drafted was the first time Murphy had even registered a blip.

Now, after mowing down A-ball hitters all last year, Murphy is squarely on the map. “My goal from the get-go, no matter if I was drafted or undrafted, was to show them I was a legit prospect and I could pitch, I could play, I could hang,” he says. “I guess I did that.” He’s gotten in the door of pro ball and shown that he belongs, but now a new mission awaits. Murphy’s breakout may have been the most surprising development in a San Francisco system filled with whiffmeisters, but that performance has bought him only so much room for error. Because he was a surprise, because he doesn’t have overwhelming stuff, he more than any of his fellow strikeout leaders must answer a crucial question:

Can he do it again?

“If you’re good enough, you’ll be seen.”

That was the voice of Le Moyne head coach Scott Cassidy, not a whisper in an Iowa cornfield, but Cassidy believed it just as fervently as Ray Kinsella. Decades earlier, he too had pitched at Le Moyne. He’d gone from undrafted free agent in 1998 to big-league pitcher in 2002, pitching parts of three seasons in the big leagues. It could be done, and he more than most knew how to do it.

That was his pitch to Murphy in the spring of 2017 as the young right-hander finished his senior year of high school. Cassidy had just watched Murphy pitch in a sparsely attended showcase and had been impressed. He liked how his arm worked and his presence on the mound. He offered him a scholarship the same day. But Murphy also had a walk-on spot at the University of Albany, a Division I program. Why should he go to Division II?

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Because he would start right away, Cassidy told him. Because Cassidy would do everything he could to prepare Murphy for a professional career. Because if Murphy was good enough — and Cassidy thought he would be — he’d be seen.

Murphy was convinced.

“My heart of hearts told me I needed to play to be seen,” he says, “and I needed to play early.”

For the next three years, Cassidy guided Murphy’s pitching education. One thing he didn’t have to worry about was teaching the young pitcher to throw strikes. Murphy had long excelled at that. “If you can’t throw strikes,” his prep coach had told the team’s pitchers, “you’re not going to play.” Murphy wanted to play, so he put the ball on the plate.

At Le Moyne, that essentially allowed Murphy to test out of Strike-Throwing 101, jumping instead into Cassidy’s advanced course on pitching. While other pitchers spent their bullpens learning to repeat their deliveries and fill up the zone, Murphy worked on the opposite. He could get ahead of hitters, but he needed to learn how to put them away. The importance of throwing strikes had been so ingrained in him in high school that he often threw too many of them. Hitters didn’t have to expand.

“I’m going to throw strikes and fill up the zone,” he says, “so they’re going to be free-swinging.”

Cassidy taught Murphy plenty else about the art of pitching, or at least allowed experience to teach Murphy for him. Unlike many college coaches, Cassidy does not call pitches from the bench. If his guys are going to have a chance of succeeding at the next level, they need to learn how to conduct at-bats themselves. He’ll huddle with his battery between innings or after the game, but he wants them to fend for themselves during it. “It’s you and the catcher,” Cassidy says, “and you’ve got to figure it out.”

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So, Murphy learned some things the hard way. Initially, he approached hitters like an agent of chaos, trying always to anticipate what they weren’t anticipating. “I put myself in their shoes,” he says. “If I’m hitting right now, what would I think I was going to throw? And try to throw the opposite.” But being random isn’t the same as being surgical. Murphy would beat a hitter twice on inside fastballs and then, concerned with being too predictable, would flip him a breaking ball that would get crushed. He’d hear from Cassidy after that.

“That was the number-one thing my coach would get mad at me for,” he says.

Over the course of three seasons at Le Moyne, Murphy became more and more adept as missing bats. His strikeout rate rose from 22 percent as a freshman to 25 percent as a sophomore. Through his first four starts of his junior year in 2020, he struck out 41 percent of his batters. And then the world shut down.

Were those four starts going to be enough? How do you get seen if scouts are grounded and no one is playing baseball? The truncation of the draft, from 40 rounds to just five, seemed to further doom him. He may have been good enough for pro ball, but was he good enough to go in the top five rounds? He didn’t know those answers. “I was hoping and praying,” he says.

But the Giants had seen him, although not as much as they would have liked. They did think he was good enough. They had a plan — for what skills they valued, for how to develop them and for how to conduct that draft in particular — and Murphy happened to fit right in.

“Would you take $22,500?”

Conducting any draft is like putting together one very complicated financial puzzle, and like all teams, the Giants were conducting some last-minute reconnaissance. Clubs tend to get creative when divvying up their bonus pools, and the Giants had contorted themselves to draft Harrison in the third round. To sign him, they’d need $2.5 million, and $1.8 million of it would have to come from money ostensibly earmarked for other picks.

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Murphy’s selection was part of that calculus, and the bonus the Giants were offering was a steep discount over the $379,000 slot value for the 144th pick. But it was also $2,500 more than what Murphy would receive if he went undrafted. Seventeen picks away was a steep financial cliff. He had two years of college eligibility remaining, but he felt he was ready for pro ball. So did Cassidy. When you’re a Division II pitcher and a major-league team wants you, you don’t say no.

“Yeah,” Murphy had told the Giants, “I would take anything over the $20,000 maximum that a free agent was getting.”

In the immediate aftermath, it would have been tempting to think of 2020 as the year of the Kyle Harrison draft, and to think of Murphy’s selection as a necessary reach to make it all work. But Michael Holmes, San Francisco’s senior director of amateur scouting, stresses that is not the case. Yes, Murphy fit into their pool. Yes, getting him far below slot value allowed the rest of the organization’s draft to click into place. But the Giants don’t just throw away picks for the savings, especially in a five-round draft.

The Giants had gotten two live looks at him before the shutdown and they’d liked what they saw. They felt they got on Murphy early, before a lot of other major-league clubs had the chance to catch up. They liked how he threw strikes, how he repeated his delivery and, obviously, how he missed bats. He may have been a fifth-round talent they could sign cheaply, but he was a fifth-round talent nonetheless.

“I want to make sure that everyone understands the talent alone was the most important part of that,” Holmes says.

If there were any doubts about that, Murphy’s first pro season shushed them almost immediately. There was only one moment Murphy felt outclassed as a pro, and it was his first appearance in instructional league in the fall of 2020. He faced a minor-leaguer with the A’s — the name escapes him, but he knows the guy was “way above my skill level” — and beat him inside with a fastball for a swing-and-miss. Then he tried to hit the same spot again. “He did not miss it. He took me like 450 to center field, off the wall for a couple,” Murphy says. “I was like, ‘Wow, welcome to pro ball.’” To succeed, he’d need to get better.

Over that offseason, Murphy worked to simplify his delivery. For the first time in his life, he dug into the numbers on his pitches, learning how they work and the best way they should play off each other. (Nationals starter Josiah Gray, a teammate at Le Moyne who preceded Murphy into pro ball by two years, was a frequent source of guidance. “He knew a lot about it,” Murphy says, adding that he and Gray talk almost daily.) He worked on evolving his control into true command — the ability to put the ball exactly where he wanted.

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That last element was paramount. “I’m not a guy who lights up the radar gun. I’m not going to throw 99 by you all the time,” says Murphy, who sits 92-94 mph and sometimes touches 96 mph. “My fastball characteristics play well, but at the end of the day, if you can’t command the zone, you’re going to have a hard time having success in professional baseball.”

So far, he’s had a lot of it.

Look through the minor-league strikeout leaderboards and you start to sense a theme. Murphy may have owned the best strikeout rate of any pitcher in the system with enough innings to qualify for the ERA title, but he was hardly alone. Harrison, the pitcher around whom the Giants structured that draft, has been nothing short of a revelation. He owns a career 2.84 ERA, has struck out 38.7 percent of batters and already has reached Double A at 20 years old. A host of other Giants pitching prospects also are missing bats.

Carson Ragsdale, a 2020 draftee by the Phillies acquired by San Francisco later that year, finished second in the minors in strikeouts last year. Nick Swiney, a second-rounder in 2020, struck out 41 percent of hitters in a half-season of work in 2021. Mason Black, a third-rounder in 2021, is fanning 34 percent of his batters this season. Randy Rodriguez, 35 percent. Wil Jensen has the second-best swinging strike rate of any full-season pitcher in the organization. Murphy’s breakout is just the most surprising development of a system-wide trend.

What are the Giants doing? A little bit of everything. Holmes doesn’t deny that San Francisco hunts for strikeout ability when scouting potential draftees. But there’s more to that than gravitating toward the prospects with the nastiest stuff. Missing bats in college is easier than missing bats in the pros. Cassidy always told Murphy you can’t get a third strike before you achieve the first two, and Holmes looks at pitchers the same way. He wants guys who get ahead and pound the zone, especially if they can miss bats early in counts. “In-zone swings and misses are equally if not more important than out-of-zone swings and misses,” he says. Murphy checked that box.

Once pitchers are in the system, the Giants are confident they can maximize their abilities. That includes arm strength — “The one thing we do feel confident about is the ability to grow guys’ velocities,” Holmes says — and that means the bite and movement of pitches. Here, it is again no secret that San Francisco is chasing strikeouts. “We can’t deny,” says farm director Kyle Haines, “hitters are striking out more than ever.” It’s true: The top 15 seasons for league-wide strikeout rate in major-league history are … each of the last 15 seasons. Might as well lean into that skill set.

To do that, San Francisco’s player development department provides pitchers with a host of resources. Swiney, Murphy’s teammate for the last two years, says he’s received “a spreadsheet” each spring showing “what those percentages should look like” for his pitch mix. Murphy says he’s learned a lot about what makes his pitches work and how to sequence them. Murphy has worked closely with Matt Daniels, the team’s coordinator of pitching science, and holds him in high regard. Daniels “has a very brilliant mind,” Murphy says.

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It was Daniels, along with associate analyst Samantha Unger, who helped Murphy figure out his slider during a midseason skid. The righty had experimented with a different grip, one that allowed him to throw the pitch a bit harder, but it just turned into a cement mixer. Daniels suggested he go back to his old grip, which had more depth and played better analytically. Unger urged him to trust the pitch and throw it often. Murphy had posted a 6.61 ERA in his last four starts in June but, armed with his old slider, he had a 1.74 ERA and struck out nearly half his batters in his next five. That earned him a promotion from Low-A San Jose to High-A Eugene, where his success continued unabated.

After a back injury delayed the start of his 2022 season, Murphy is back at Eugene again. His strikeout rate through three starts? It’s 38.3 percent, which would rank 10th in the minors if he had enough innings to qualify.

If they’re being honest, even Murphy’s biggest believers have to admit they didn’t see his 2021 season coming. “Could you guess that?” says Cassidy, his college coach. “There’s no chance.” Holmes, who drafted Murphy, tends to agree. “We like to believe in all these guys and feel like they can go out and do it,” he says, “but the truth of the matter is they don’t.” Third in the minors in strikeouts? Bold predictions like that are reserved for the very best prospects in the game.

“That’s a special year,” says Haines. “To ask that of anyone is almost unfair.”

Murphy’s 2021 breakout didn’t so much position him as a future ace as much as shift the general consensus about what he could be from draft afterthought to potential big-league starter. Even after last season, Murphy appears on no top 100 lists. Entering 2022, he ranked 16th among Giants farmhands, according to The Athletic’s Keith Law, and 21st in the system, according to FanGraphs. MLB.com and Baseball America, which update their rankings more frequently, list him at No. 11 and No. 10, respectively.

Scouts nitpick his stuff. The command stands out, they admit, but they question the lethality of his secondary stuff. The velocity is fine, but they wonder if Murphy will have enough margin for error at the upper levels, where the hitters are better and the lineups are deeper. When Murphy scuffled during one recent start against High-A Spokane, one scout in attendance questioned whether pegging Murphy as a back-end starter was too generous.

It’s hardly one of life’s unsolvable mysteries; Murphy’s pitching this season and beyond will answer those questions definitively. But Haines thinks evaluators are missing something. “Naturally, they’re going to look at him and he’s not the 6-4, 6-5 physical presence,” Haines says of the 6-foot-1 Murphy, “but he’s got enough stuff and enough command to be whatever he needs to be in that moment.” What does he need to add to his game to have success as he climbs the organizational ladder? The game itself may reveal that in time, but Haines says the biggest key will be just being consistent with what he does well already.

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“When he’s on his game,” the farm director says, “he can pitch at any level right now.”

Murphy can’t say he saw himself dominating so completely in his first pro season, but neither did he believe he lacked that capability. “I have the confidence I can do these type of things,” he says. It won’t show up in his metrics — and one would never guess by talking to him — but Murphy is intensely competitive. He approaches each at-bat with a certain disdain for the opposing hitter, although he’s careful to never show it. It helps his stuff play up. “Pitching mad is the best fuel I’ve ever had,” he says. “It really gets you going.” In his first start of the year, a batter flailed so badly at one of Murphy’s pitches that his bat wound up in the stands. The thought of it makes Murphy grin. “I was really happy about that.”

Can he do this again? Can he out-whiff even the Giants’ stable of better-known bat-missing prospects? Murphy will do his best. “I know when I go out there, I’m going to compete and I’m going to dominate — or I’m going to try to dominate,” he says. Time and innings will tell how good his best is.

But he’s already accomplished at least one thing. The next time his name surfaces on MLB Network, no one will have to scramble to find out who he is.

(Photo: Gary Breedlove / Eugene Emeralds)

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