I’m not going to do one of these every day, all in a row, but I’ll do them when I can’t think of a good daily question that fills the space otherwise. Also, I’m going in order of 2025 playing time from most to least, only for players under definite control. I probably should have done Ozzie Albies here, but given the slight chance the Braves pull a Family Guy-esque unmasking gag and do a bunch of weird stuff this season that involves declining Albies’ option, I’ll save his post for when they choose to retain the diminutive second baseman instead.
If there’s one thing that definitely feels like it needs correcting over and over, it’s the idea that Michael Harris II has declined consistently since his rookie year. He hasn’t, but his results have. Harris won the 2022 NL Rookie of the Year award with 4.7 fWAR in 441 PAs… because he outhit his .335 xwOBA by an egregious amount. Only 12 other hitters with more PAs than Harris outhit their xwOBA by more that year. In 2023, his xwOBA went up but the wOBA went down, so 3.7 fWAR in 539 PAs. 2024 was an injury-marked campaign with a huge xwOBA underperformance — the fourth-biggest in baseball, as if to somehow pay him back for 2022. And then, we all know what happened in 2025 — whether for team-driven approach reasons (probably, yes) or otherwise, he had a career-worst season, producing at a below-average rate for the first time in his four-year career.
Harris is signed through 2030, earning $8 million next year, $9 million after, then $10 million for a couple of seasons before the salary jumps to $12 million in 2030. The Braves then hold $15 million and $20 million options for 2031 and 2032, which would be his age-30 and -31 seasons, respectively; each option has a $5 million buyout. From a “worth it” perspective, he largely justifies his salary even in a bad season, so there’s not too much concern there. But, the jagged edges of his production in 2025 do create a hazy outlook.
In a way, all of Harris’ performance as described above is “recent.” But the focus here is largely going to be on 2025. Before 2025, Harris had some degree of evolution, namely going from a guy falling over the plate to hit away stuff to left (and missing a bunch) to a guy more in line with the “pull stuff hard in the air” conventional wisdom of the era, but his swing decisions were generally consistent (and involved swinging a lot, especially in 2024). 2025 was just a mess when looked at from the top down, with Harris chasing and swinging more even though the ostensible instruction from the team was to be more patient/selective/passive, but also with him adopting a relatively slappy, contact-over-power approach that killed his contact quality and the excitement level of his plate appearances. Still, even with all that, Harris posted basically an average xwOBA in 2025… except again, he underhit it a bunch, so, blah.
His defense has been fairly consistent (I’m not getting into the weird FanGraphs center fielder defensive valuation issues here) and he’s probably a marginally plus baserunner (2024 was just weird in this regard). The real questions for his outlook are what happens with him offensively in 2026.
The disclaimer as briefly as possible: once upon a time I built a projection system to try to mirror/get at the workings of Steamer and ZiPS. I called it IWAG. You can figure out what that means, maybe. I’m bringing it back for this series of posts. Here’s Harris, for 2026. The point estimates are not that informative.
This is going to be a place where IWAG likely deviates from the projections more than for most players. As you can see, the other projection systems, which had Harris as an MVP-esque talent going into 2025, still retain a fair bit of that, figuring he’s a well-above-average, 3-4-win player. IWAG is uh… driven by whatever happened to Harris in 2025 that somehow neither he nor the team fixed, and figures that factors in a lot relative to his fundamentally exciting physical tools. There’s some exposure to being on the wrong side of “the way we do things” for IWAG here given that Harris still has a 3.4ish fWAR/600 rate over his career, and IWAG clocks in a full win lower here, but it is what it is. Harris is still young enough that he can easily make IWAG look dumb and become a preseason MVP candidate hype guy once again, he just needs to… not… do… whatever was happening in 2025.
Distribution plot? I bet this looks vastly different from what any other projection system has:
Check out that tail! Basically, and very roughly, the above translates to something like a one-in-two chance that 2025 misery extends, a one-in-four chance that he’s a solid regular and above, and a one-in-four chance that he’s an awesome All-Star-to-MVP-ish guy. That’s a gamble but a good one, but boy, the Braves need to get their house in order when it comes to just not starting Harris off on a metaphorical broken foot come 2026.
Alright, I’ve given you the info. Well, some info. You may have your own info. With that, I ask you:
