Are Harris and Albies Starting to Get Right — or Just Teasing Us Again?

Atlanta’s struggling duo has looked better since the break, but is it the start of something real or just another short-lived spark?

Sitting at 43-54 as of Sunday morning and fresh off another bullpen collapse, the Braves are looking ahead to 2026. Injuries and underperformance have knocked them out of the postseason picture, and now two key questions are looming: Can Ozzie Albies and Michael Harris II reclaim their form? And if not, what does that mean for the offseason?

They’ve started doing some different things since the All-Star Break - is it a sign of finally figuring it out, or a brief blip in a long pattern of declining production? Let’s talk about it.

Harris has intentionally changed things recently

Harris entered the All-Star Break as MLB’s worst qualified hitter by OPS, so in an acknowledgement of what isn’t working, he’s changed his stance and handset get back to a time of success.

Namely, his debut season of 2022.

Here are images captured by 680 The Fan’s Brady Penn, showing Harris at three different stages of his career - 2022’s debut, earlier this season, and Friday night.

Here’s a shot from his first career hit:

High hands, something he featured in the minors, along with a slightly forward stance, weight back, and just a bit of trunk tilt towards home plate.

Now, here’s a shot from earlier this season:

While I’m a better pitching analyst than hitting analyst, I see three major changes here:

1. His stance is slightly more closed, with his right foot closer to the plate than his original stance.

2. He’s more upright, having lost a lot of that trunk tilt and load in the rear of the stance

3. His hands are significantly lower

The hands being lower is a classic adjustment from Atlanta’s previous hitting coach, Kevin Seitzer. Harris had an issue early in his major league career with being late on fastballs and rolling over pitches, so Seitzer channeled his time coaching Eric Davis and lowered Michael’s hands to allow him to have better timing. He also, in 2023, lowered Harris’s leg kick to better help with his rhythm in the box.

But after a nightmare start to the season, Harris has deliberately tried to go back to what was working for him when he won Rookie of the Year. Penn relayed what Harris said about it when the two spoke on Friday night:

“The hands are up to give him an earlier start to get around on pitches sooner. Told me the stance from 2022 is pretty much exactly what he was trying to do.”

Here’s a shot from Friday night, where you can see he implemented these changes:

Stance more open, a tiny bit of the trunk tilt is back with weight shifted more on the back foot, and the hands are much higher.

And the changes seem to make sense when you look at what Harris has been unable to do this season. His performance against fastballs has cratered from a .344 average/.631 slug in 2022 to just .200/.311 this year. He’s not excessively rolling over them - his average launch angle on all fastball types is around 6°, just 1° below 2022’s figure - but rather just doesn’t seem to be able to make quality contact against the pitch.

Having the hands higher, if it helps him get into his swing quicker, is a smart adjustment to make. Because here’s the thing - he’s always been prone to extreme levels of chase. Assuming that doesn’t change, and we’ve seen nothing to assume it will magically right-size to just below-average, we’ve seen that he can be successful statistically if he’s able to do damage on pitches in the zone. This is a path to fix that.

Best as I can tell, he started this at the end of the Sacramento series versus the Athletics. Since then (entering Sunday), he has a five-game hitting streak (6-19) with a homer, two doubles, four runs, and three RBI.

In the first two games of the Yankees series, Harris went 2-8 with a homer. While both hits have come off of breaking balls, it’s still a positive. The best evidence of his improvement on heaters is the absurdly impressive eleven-pitch walk from Saturday night. He was able to foul off hittable but not driveable fastballs to stay alive in the count, only getting goaded to chase once (a foul tip on a sweeper below the zone) before identifying ball four on a fastball inside for his first walk since May. Of the six fastballs he saw, four of them were up and away in the very top of the zone, a location that many lefties are possibly poking to the opposite field for a single at best, but likely punching to the left side to start a double play.

We’ll keep watching to see if Harris can get back into even average form between now and the end of the season.

Ozzie’s swinging the bat harder

Ozzie has a four-game hitting streak of his own, but one that’s even more impactful than Harris’s - he is 5-15 with two homers, nine RBI, three runs scored, and even a stolen base, for good measure.

Ozzie’s changes are a bit harder to pinpoint, but I think it’s related to finally recovering from his broken wrist in 2023, despite his protestations that the wrist wasn’t hampering him. “I cannot use that as an excuse,” Albies told the media on Saturday. “I mean, the strength is there. It's just, you know, when your swing is not good. You can’t put [up] numbers, and you can't hit the ball hard.”

When searching by bat speed per month this season, there’s a gradual improvement on a monthly basis. His first two months of the year saw bat speeds of 68.3 mph and 68.4 mph (on competitive swings only), one of the lowest marks in the league at 201st out of 217 qualified hitters.

In June and July, it’s trended up to 69 and 69.1 mph - still not great, but enough to bring him into the 180s in the player rankings. This shows up the most in his expected slug, at a season high .414 for his July sample so far versus a monthly low this year of just .281.

Breaking it down by game, he’s had 28 games this season with at least an average bat speed on competitive speed of 70 mph. All but eight of them have been from mid-May through now.

While bat speed was only introduced on Statcast in 2023, he averaged 70 mph that year on his competitive swings, finishing with a .280 average, .513 slug, and 33 homers.

The speed gains seem to be most prominent on his righty swing, which is a full mph higher than his lefty for the season. The lefty swing was two-tenths of a mph harder in 2023 and just half a mph slower last season, but the difference has grown to 1.3 mph this year.

He has also made an adjustment in his righty intercept point on the swing, making contact with the ball a full inch deeper vs the front of the plate. I don’t know if this is an inability to catch up on fastballs or an intention to allow the ball to travel deeper, but I’d argue he needs to be more out in front, not less. As we saw from both of his Yankees homers, getting to these pitches out in front and pulling them in the air down the line is the best way to make use of his sub-standard bat speed for power production.

Ozzie’s righty stance is more closed than his lefty, which are diverging. His righty stance has gotten 9° more closed, while his lefty stance is 7° more open. (He’s always had wildly different batting stances, though, to the point that when MLB.com introduced this to Statcast they used him as an example of the most different switch-hitter per side of the plate in the article.)

Credit MLB.com

I genuinely don’t know how much of the stance change is significant, however - I think the bat speed’s the more significant thing.

I know that going from 68.3 to 69.1 mph doesn’t seem like a lot, but consider that MLB average is just 71.8 mph and one standard deviation is about two mph in either direction, so even one mph is statistically significant.

This is a big deal for 2026

Forget salvaging this season — the real value in a Harris and Albies resurgence is what it tells Atlanta about 2026. If these mechanical tweaks lead to even league-average production, the Braves can spend their offseason retooling the roster instead of replacing two cornerstone players.

But if this is just a brief spark before things go dark again, Alex Anthopoulos has some tough choices ahead. Either way, what these two do over the next two months will quietly shape how competitive the Braves are next year — and beyond.