ABQ

Michael Harris, OF

Edit player ✎
FanGraphs → MLB →

Scouting report

Harris was a switch-hitting, two-way high school prospect who many teams preferred on the mound because of his mechanical grace and ease, his fastball's action and angle, and his curveball's depth. He stopped switch-hitting as a high school senior (he had good feel for contact as a righty hitter but was much less explosion than from the left side) and while many teams continued to prefer him on the mound, the Braves were one of the clubs that viewed him as a hitter, so blown away by his BP during a pre-draft workout that they didn't bother to ask him to pitch during it. After they picked him, Harris went to the GCL and raked. Not only was his on-paper performance fantastic (.349/.403/.514) but so was his underlying TrackMan data, as both Harris' average exit velo and hard-hit rates were well above the big league average. Remember that these numbers are still from 2019, our last minor league season, but Harris' average exits were top 10 among teenagers, and only one of those ahead of him (Liover Peguero) clearly has a better chance of staying at an up-the-middle defensive position long-term. Exposed to a fair bit of 2021 big league spring training, Harris has played well and produced some amazing individual highlights. He hit an oppo homer off of Peter Fairbanks and made a running catch in The Triangle at Fenway South. He may not be a long-term fit in center because we're talking about a compact young man with a very low center of gravity and a bottom-heavy frame who is rapidly approaching physical maturity. Conversely, this is a short-levered hitter with seemingly innate feel for making impact contact all over the zone, and while there may be a frame-related cap on his raw power projection, the hit tool might enable Harris to outperform his raw juice in games. The industry knows less about Harris because aside from PG National, he did not participate in the big showcases before his draft year, and his first full season was lost to COVID. There's a slice of the industry that thinks elite players just perform all the time, with any kind of extended failure or statistical hiccup evidence that a player won't be elite. If that's true then Harris is one of a handful of players who has a chance to be elite because he technically hasn't failed yet, in part because he's had fewer opportunities to. He's a fantastic athlete who has looked like a terrific all-around baseball player when he's been able to play, and he's gone from a third rounder to someone who we value on par with a mid-first rounder in the span of two years. (Fall Instructional League)