I told y’all!

As the guy who’s maybe waxed the most prolix of any of us about our center fielder, it gives me no end of pleasure to quote myself once more in summing up Michael Harris’s very good sophomore campaign.

His miraculous rookie year was a bit too good to be true – indeed, given his pretty bad plate discipline, it was pretty clear that a certain comeuppance was coming. As I wrote last offseason:

His plate discipline was the weakest part of his game, and it’s a real concern… That said, I have nearly limitless confidence in his ability to adjust: his makeup is off the charts, and in his meteoric ascent from high school to the majors over the past three years, he has shown a preternatural ability to meet the challenges he’s faced on the field…. Money Mike’s sophomore campaign is likely to be a grind, but if he can learn what to spit on, the sky is the limit.

And it was hard, right out of the gate. He began the year 5-23, taking a .217 average to the Injured List when he got hurt on an attempted steal. He came back three weeks later but clearly didn’t have his timing, as he spent most of May well under the Mendoza line. By the middle of the month, he was hitting .194/.284/.292, but I thought the underlying numbers gave reason for hope, as I wrote on May 17:

Harris is showing signs of fixing the greatest holes in his offensive game: his walk rate this year is more than twice what it was last year, his strikeout rate has fallen, and he has significantly improved in both his O-Swing% and Z-Swing%, reducing the percentage of pitches he swings at outside the zone while increasing the percentage of pitches he swings at inside the zone… he appears to be making conscious strides towards controlling the zone, which was his single greatest weakness. He’s a star. He’ll get where he needs.

However, the next couple of weeks went even worse for Harris, as he hit .128/.208/.192 from May 18 to June 4. By that point, the “send him to the minors” brigade was pretty deafening, and I mounted a final, if slightly halfhearted defense of him:

He’s clearly pressing. We pretty much all knew that this year would be a lot harder for him, because he just didn’t control the zone very well last year, and once an obvious weakness in a hitter’s approach is identified, every pitcher in the league will exploit it…. Overall, his season stats suggest that he’s doing a better job of controlling the zone than he did last year, but he’s struggling to hang onto those gains as his slump enters its third month. In general, I tend to believe you just have to play through this stuff.

A couple days later, on June 7, I nearly lost faith, writing:

He has indeed raised his walk rate and lowered his chase rate this year, though some of the gains he made in his first month have eroded as his slump has deepened.

The team really only has three options:

  1. If he’s actually hurt (or, perhaps, not fully recovered from his injury early in the year), put him on the IL.
  2. If he’s overwhelmed by the pressure of the Show and needs a chance to work on his mechanical issues away from the spotlight, send him back to the minors.
  3. Let him play.

… I continue to think that letting him play through it is the best option… But if the team believes that the only way for him to make the adjustments he needs is to return to the farm, then that is what the team must do. The overriding consideration must be his long-term future success.

Immediately after that, he caught fire and never looked back, hitting .335/.360/.552 through the end of the year.

Overall, his year-end numbers were worse: he was worth about 5 wins in 2022 (in only 114 games), but he was only worth 4 wins in 2023, despite 20% more playing time. However, it was a tale of two seasons, and he did two things last year that bolster my sky-high confidence in his future:

  • He played through a genuinely dreadful two-month slump, and made the necessary adjustments while continuing to play terrific defense every day.
  • He noticeably cut his strikeouts, and he did that by significantly improving his contact rate, particularly on pitches outside the zone.

He’s still got plenty of worrying blue on his Baseball Savant page, most of all his Chase rate and Walk rate, each among the very worst in baseball. But the reason I spent so much time quoting the comments I wrote during the slump is to demonstrate that his in-season stats showed a conscious effort to address these holes in his game, and clearly, his adjustments paid off. Next year he may once again have a slow start, as his inability to take a walk clearly affects his offensive ceiling. But he has demonstrated the most important skill at the big league level: he has the ability to fail, work through a slump, and recover.

He won’t turn 23 till Spring Training. What a ballplayer.