Did Michael Harris II tie a quirky record last night?

Michael Harris II went 4-for-4 with a homer and a double. The pitch locations and types behind the four hits show that three of the hits came on pitches not close to the zone, while one was borderline under the ABS strike zone. Baseball Savant can identify games where a player recorded the most hits on pitches outside the zone since 2009. Charlie Blackmon holds the overall lead with five such hits in 2014. From 2015 onward, only a small set of players have had four hits on pitches outside the ABS-defined zone, including Eddie Rosario in 2017 and Gavin Lux in April 2025. Harris did not join that group because a changeup clipped the ABS zone.

"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.)"

"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"

Read at Battery Power