Michael Harris II and the secret breakout season
The back of the baseball card says 2023 was a sophomore slump. It's wrong.
Imagine yourself in the dark ages (in this context, the pre-Statcast days). You watch Michael Harris II make his major league debut in 2022, and for the next four months, he sets the league on fire. An .853 OPS in 114 games with elite center field defense!
And then in 2023, he does what many talented players do. He takes a step back in his second year. Oh, it’s not a bad season. An .808 OPS, still with great defense. But instead of being a 7 WAR/162 player, he’s more like a 4.5 WAR/162 player. The league has probably adjusted to him. The wear and tear of a full season has gotten to him a bit. And that Jeff Schultz guy is making some great points about his playoff numbers!
Wake up. We’re back in 2024. We do have Statcast data. We know exactly how hard Michael Harris II has been hitting the ball and at what angle. We have precise data on how often he chases pitches. We can rank him against every other player in the league. And what do we learn when we do that?
Michael Harris II was a significantly better player in 2023 than he was in 2022, even though the results didn’t show it.
So let me show you how we get there.
Part I: Michael Harris II way overperformed his inputs in 2022
If you’re reading this, the odds that you know what xwOBA is are extremely high. But quick refresher: xwOBA considers all walks, strikeouts, and batted balls and provides a single bottom-line number that tells us how well a player should have hit in a given year if not for luck. On the other hand, wOBA looks at outputs and then spits out a number on the same scale. Put another way: xwOBA distinguishes between a seeing-eye single and a hard-hit line drive single; wOBA does not.
In 2023, Michael Harris’ xwOBA was .335. This is good; it put him in the 71st percentile of MLB hitters, which is quite impressive for a player who had barely played above High-A before getting called up to the majors. It is particularly good for a player who plays a premium defensive position well. Here’s the full Statcast card.
In 2023, Michael Harris’ wOBA was .368. That’s elite - a hair below Shohei Ohtani, a hair above Pete Alonso.
That was the 14th biggest wOBA-xwOBA differential of the 246 hitters with at least 350 PAs in 2022. Michael Harris II was getting the 18th best outputs from the 71st best inputs.
You’ve heard the old line about regression to the mean, so maybe you have an educated guess about what happens next. 2023 rolls around, and MHII stays the same; he just doesn’t get lucky anymore.
Not exactly.
Part II: Michael Harris II way underperformed his inputs in 2023
Let’s look at Michael’s 2023 Savant page.
xwOBA? Up from 2022. xBA? Way up. xSLG? Up. Hard-hit rate? Up. K rate? From problematic to much better than average. It’s not all roses - he walked even less in 2023 than he did in 2022 - but Michael Harris II pretty clearly had better inputs in 2023. He grew as a hitter, and he had a .357 xwOBA to show for it!
So what happened? Well, this time, instead of being the 14th luckiest hitter in baseball, he was the 70th unluckiest out of 245. (Given that Acuña, Murphy and Ozuna were all even unluckier than him, I doubt MHII will get a lot of sympathy for this in the clubhouse.)
Part III: Michael Harris II is really, really good now
As 2022 Michael Harris II and 2023 Michael Harris II show us, luck is fickle. When we try to project players’ trajectories, we should look for growth in their inputs. Inputs were what told us there was always hope for Marcell Ozuna to rebound. They’re what got the Braves to acquire guys like Charlie Morton, Pierce Johnson and Jorge Soler, even when their surface stats weren’t pretty. And Michael Harris II’s inputs tell us he was a top 50 hitter in baseball last year.
To provide some perspective, Harris II debuted around the same time as two consensus Top 10 prospects who play the same position as him: Julio Rodriguez and Corbin Carroll. Both of these players are the unquestioned faces of their franchises. They’re talked about as transcendent talents. Rodriguez has even drawn some Acuña comps.
Take a minute and look at Corbin Carroll’s and Julio Rodriguez’s Savant pages from 2023. Then compare them to Michael Harris II’s page. Right now, Michael Harris II is pretty clearly a better player than Corbin Carroll and arguably better than Julio Rodriguez, at least as far as inputs go. It’s reasonable to dream on J-Rod’s power potential or to believe that even though xwOBA accounts for sprint speed, it’s underselling Carroll’s ability to turn doubles into triples. But at the very least, Harris II - who is maybe the sixth best hitter in the Braves’ lineup - deserves to be in the ‘young superstar’ conversation with these guys.
Not bad for a sophomore slump.