Michael

Harris II

Harris had a 111-mph leadoff single with the Braves down 2-0 in the eighth, only to let the team down by getting picked off afterwards. Fortunately, he made up for it an inning later, though his rocket groundball up the middle might well have been a game-ending double play if it hadn’t caught Carlos Estévez in the leg and bounced high in the air for a single. Harris, who hit seventh versus Michael Wacha tonight after batting ninth against a lefty in the opener, is 4-for-8 with a homer and three RBI through two games.

Harris did strike out once, but he has five strikeouts and four walks in 35 plate appearances this spring, which is fine. The 25-year-old has also swung outside of the zone only 27 percent of the time this spring. It’s a tremendously small sample size, but his career rate is 40 percent, so it’s a pretty stark contrast. If he is even able to carry over half of those gains, we may finally see the production he displayed in 2022 carried out over a complete season.

Today’s doubles won’t count in the statistics, but Harris has now put nine balls into play this spring at an average of 99 mph. He’s also struck out just once and walked three times, and even if the quality of pitching he’s faced isn’t great, that’s still nice to see from a guy who had a 128/16 K/BB last season.

It’s Harris’s first 20/20 season, as he stole four bases the previous three games to reach the 20 mark there. Harris previously came very close as a rookie (19 HR, 20 SB in 114 games) in 2022 and as a sophomore (18 HR, 20 SB in 138 games) the following year. That he got there this season was largely a function of him being able to play in 158 games. He’s 29th in the NL with 635 plate appearances, even though he’s mostly hit in the bottom half of the Braves order.

The dynamic 24-year-old outfielder clobbered a 444-foot (107.8 mph EV) solo shot off of Brad Lord in the fifth inning, evening the score at 1-1. He then socked a 416-foot (108.8 mph EV) dinger off of Konnor Pilkington in the seventh inning that made it a 3-1 ballgame. While he has finished the season strong, he’s still slashing an underwhelming .246/.266/.404 on the season to go with 19 homers, 85 RBI and 19 stolen bases.

Harris kicked off an impressive three-hit performance with a 109-mph line-drive to right field that brought home Ha-Seong Kim from second base in the second inning. He scorched a run-scoring single as part of Atlanta’s five-run outburst in the ensuing frame. He wasn’t done yet as he drove in another run on a fielder’s choice in the fourth before adding a sixth-inning single. The three steals matched his previous career-high mark set back on July 16, 2022 during his stellar rookie campaign. It also puts him one theft shy of reaching the 20-steal threshold for the third time in the last four seasons.

Harris changed his batting stance right before the All-Star break, raising his hands so that he could fix his bat path to the ball. The results were immediate as Harris led baseball in batting average (.426), OPS (1.214), and hits (46), among other categories, from July 22nd through August 18th. However, Harris is now 11-for-86 in his last 23 games and is back among the bottom five MLB-qualified hitters in OPS. Batting stance adjustments usually take time to fully click in, so this should have been our expectation. He’s too talented to fully give up on in fantasy leagues for 2026.

Harris had a pair of hits that scored multiple runs; a two-run single in the third and a two-run double in the fifth. The 24-year-old outfielder has looked the part after a borderline disastrous start to the season, and he’s now slashing .252/.273/.415. That’s more impressive when you consider he was hitting .213/.239/.326 at the start of July.

Harris lost his streak of multihit games at eight when he went 1-for-5 on Sunday, but this makes him 22-for-43 with five homers in his last 10 games. His OPS stood at ,550 on this day one month ago, and the Braves would have been totally justified in sending him to Triple-A. Now, he’s all of the way up to .706.

His other hit was a double. The homer was projected at 452 feet, one foot shy of his career-long blast from 2023. It’s Harris’s eight straight multihit game. He’s 17-for-34 with four homers and 13 RBI during the streak, which has raised his OPS from .630 to .690. Harris is the first player this year to have eight straight multihit games. Luis Arraez and Jonathan India did last year. Xander Bogaerts, in 2022, was the last player to make it to nine games.