What's going on with Michael Harris?
Atlanta's young centerfielder is mired in a terrible start. What happened?
There’s a tradition in Atlanta: about once a generation, a hometown kid gets drafted by the Braves and debuts to major fanfare.
First it was Lilburn, GA native Jeff Francoeur in 2005, making the cover of Sports Illustrated after just 23 games.
Then it was McDonough, GA native Jason Heyward in 2010, getting his own Sports Illustrated cover the next spring.
While Michael Harris hasn’t yet been on the cover of Sports Illustrated, the Stockbridge, GA native debuted in 2022 and took the league by storm, winning Rookie of the Year that season (over teammate Spencer Strider) and positioning himself as one of the game’s premier two-way talents in centerfield. Across his first two seasons, Harris hit .295 with 37 homers, 40 stolen bases, and Gold Glove-caliber defense in centerfield.
But after an injury-marred 2024, one in which he hit just .264 while missing multiple months for a hamstring strain, he’s struggled to open 2025. Harris is hitting a career-low .220 and is on pace for less than 20 walks over the course of a full season (600+ plate appearances), which would be just the 20th time that’s happened in the Wild Card era.
What’s going on with Money Mike? Let’s talk about it.
We’re going to introduce a new statistic here
Not new to the world, but new to this newsletter: SEAGER.
Created by Baseball Prospectus’ Robert Orr back in 2023 and named for Rangers shortstop Corey Seager1, it’s an attempt to combine two things into one score: how aggressive a player is when getting hittable pitches in the zone combined with how willing they are to lay off pitches outside of the zone. Think of it as a fancy version of zone swing rate (Z-Swing) minus chase rate (O-Swing rate).
As you can imagine, Corey Seager is the patron saint of this metric since its inception, being one of the best at pulling the trigger in the zone with one of the best at not chasing out of the zone.
The Baseball Gods call Corey Seager when they want order. Michael Harris is who they call when they want chaos.
Michael’s SEAGER score entering Sunday is negative, coming in at -2.4, a precipitous drop from his past seasons:
2025 = -2.4
2024 = +3.6
2023 = +6.6
2022 = +13.1
It really feels like Michael’s approach is stuck between two extremes. Let’s break it down.
He’s making the most zone contact of his career
Money Mike doesn’t get cheated when you throw him a strike. He’s making contact at a 91.6% rate on swings in the strike zone, by far his best career mark and tops on the entire roster.2
He’s just not swinging enough in those situations.
Michael’s actually grading out negative on pitches in the heart of the zone (-4 Run Value), mainly due to not being aggressive or productive enough on no-doubt strikes. He has a swing rate of just 71.67% on pitches in the heart of the zone and 68.3% on pitches in the strike zone overall, both down from his rates last season.3 His average exit velocity on those pitches in the heart of the zone is also down almost a full 2 mph from last year, which we’re getting to.
In short, he’s still taking too many hittable pitches. You’d trade a few percentage points of zone contact for some more aggressiveness, because swinging at strikes is how you get extra-base hits.
Of note here is that he’s also not swinging as hard overall - his hard-hit rate is down a whopping 14.6% from 2024 to 2025. He’s letting the ball travel in the zone more, going from an intercept point 0.7 inches in front of the plate to -2.9 inches. The reduced exit velocity comes from more than just where he makes contact, though4 - his swing speed is lower (-1.8 mph) and the swing length is shorter than last year. This is all intentional.
So, he’s making a lot of contact when swinging at pitches in the zone, but doesn’t do it enough or with as much power behind it. The other problem for Harris this season is that those aren’t his only swings.
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Holy chase rate, Batman
Michael’s chase rate has climbed from his normal 38-39% to 41.0% entering Sunday’s action, making him a 2nd percentile performer in the entire sport in this regard.
Now he’s never been good about chasing, mind you, consistently coming in in the bottom 5% across the league on chase every season of his career. But predictably, this has lowered his already anemic 4.8% career walk rate to just 3% in 2025.
The reduced bat speed has also impacted his performance when he does make contact out of the zone, putting up a .146 batting average and a career-worst 78.4 mph average exit velocity on pitches outside of the zone.
As I said earlier, he’s not on a great pace for full-season walk totals (assuming he reaches 600 PAs for the first time in his career.) And the list he’s in danger of joining isn’t exactly filled with Hall of Famers:
So, to recap, Michael Harris is chasing more this season while swinging at fewer strikes and not hitting the ball as hard when he does actually swing.
How has this manifested besides the obvious statline?
Early at-bat production
The biggest area where you can see the dramatic change in approach hurting Harris is early in at-bats.
For his career, Harris has been a .304 hitter when swinging at the first pitch, putting up 25 home runs in 494 plate appearances. If you scale his 25 homers over 494 plate appearances to a full 600, you're looking at about 30 bombs. Not bad! Right where we assumed he’d finally land in a “breakout” year.
This season? He’s a .220 hitter with just two extra-base hits when swinging at the first pitch. Whether he takes or swings at the first pitch literally doesn’t change his odds of getting a hit this year, either - he’s exactly a .220 hitter either way.
The Tim Hyers approach versus the Kevin Seitzer approach entails being more selective with their swings, whether it’s balls or strikes, and more ‘situational’ baseball - shortening up and putting the ball into play versus always trying to hit for a homer. The upside is more walks and prolonged at-bats, the downside is less ambushed “get-me-over” first pitches.
But for Michael Harris, it just isn’t working. He’s being more selective in the zone but less selective out of the zone. He’s also not hitting the ball as hard when he does swing in the zone, with his average exit velocity falling 2 mph from 2024 to 2025 even when isolating just batted balls on zone swings.
He needs to pick a lane - be aggressive at everything, or be more passive at everything. Because he went in the exact wrong direction on both options, and it’s not working out to this point in the season.
Technically “SElective AGgression Engagement Rate”, but obviously named after Seager and joining the “player as stat” pantheon of NBA’s ‘LEBRON’ metric and MLB’s ‘Mendoza Line’ and ‘PECOTA’.
Alex Verdugo’s beating Harris’ 8.4% zone whiff rate with his own 2.9% rate in the zone, but doesn’t have enough at-bats to qualify for the leaderboard.
This Zone Swing rate is right around league average, which is 67.0% (so roughly two out of every three strikes elicit a swing across the league.)
The one positive thing I’ll say about the intercept point being deeper in the zone is that his increased opposite field batted balls are in the air versus on the ground, so it’s more likely he’s able to shoot these the other way and get them down in shallow left field for a hit rather than grounding out to the third baseman.
He is missing the experience that AAA would have given him.