Okay, this isn’t even a “daily question” in the sense of “a question that fosters discussion.” I’m going to tell you the answer, eventually.
Last night, Michael Harris II went 4-for-4 with a homer and a double. That’s a pretty great batting line, but given that we saw a game last year where he went 4-for-4 and finished a single shy of the cycle because he had two triples, it wasn’t a career-best day or whatever. (He also had a two-homer game late last year that I bet no one remembers that nominally
yielded a higher wRC+ than last night’s contest.)
But, he also did something else that was kind of amazing. Here’s a plot of the pitch locations and types that led to his four hits:
Three of those are not very close to the zone… and one is maybe a ball, maybe not — at least in our brave (ly awesome) new ABS strike zone world.
Baseball Savant lets us query the most hits a player has had outside the zone in a game, based on MLB’s pitch-tracking technology all the way back to 2009. The leader of the query is Charlie Blackmon, who somehow managed to do it five times in a 9-3 loss to the Twins at Coors Field back in 2014. So, Harris didn’t quite a set a record for the pitch tracking era. But, say what you will about Pitch F/X and MLB’s 2009-2014 data, but it wasn’t quite the level of… precision, I guess, that we expect from the Hawkeye cameras and Statcast that went into effect in 2015.
If we limit the group to 2015-onward, then we get a set of five players that have had four hits on pitches outside the “rulebook” (or, I guess, Hawkeye/Statcast-defined) strike zone. The most recent was Gavin Lux in April 2025. Before that, no one else had done it since 2019. Braves legend Eddie Rosario did it back in 2017.
So, does Harris join this… illustrious group?
Apparently not. You see, that one changeup apparently juuuuuust clipped the ABS zone. So, Harris has to settle for four hits, only three of which came on not-defined-strikes.
But, wait. That hit on the “higher” changeup was a single. Harris had two extra-base hits, on pitches further away. Is that some kind of record?
Alas, no. There are four players in the Statcast era with three extra-base hits on pitches outside the zone. One of them is Eddie Rosario, again, who — very bizarrely — did it in a different game than the game in which he had four hits on pitches outside the zone.
So, in conclusion, Harris did not tie a quirky record last night. He did come close. But, in the land of getting hits on pitches that aren’t strikes, he hasn’t quite dethroned Rosario. At least, not yet.
If you want just a little bit more substance, I’ll throw this out there. Back during his Rookie of the Year season, I noted a few things that amounted, in part, to “Boy, Harris hits non-strikes really well.”
Here are Harris’ values in wOBA and xwOBA when making contact with a pitch outside the zone, over the years, among players with 50+ balls hit toward the field of play that came on pitches out of the zone:
- 2022: .426 wOBA (2nd of 230) | .322 xwOBA (38th of 230)
- 2023: .311 (83rd of 209) | .308 (72nd of 230)
- 2024: .231 (178th of 211) | .285 (102nd of 211)
- 2025: .218 (171st of 188) | .303 (64th of 188)
- 2026 so far, for players with 20+ such balls: .482 (12th of 208) | .344 (50th of 208)
I think this tells a bit of a twee story about the Braves changing Harris’ approach to not do so much of what he was doing in 2022, and focus on max damage on stuff he didn’t quite have to reach. Harris is chasing more than ever this year, and he’s missing more than ever when he chases, too. When he hits it, though — it’s not quite as feeble as it was before. Will he or the Braves rein it in again? Maybe. But after last year’s disaster in approach change, maybe they’ll let Harris be Harris from here on out. (If he wants to do the stuff he was doing in 2023-2024, that’d be cool too.)
