Why Michael Harris, Bryce Elder & Joey Wentz Could Have BIG Seasons in 2026 | Atlanta Braves Podcast

We're going to be relentlessly positive today and talk about why Michael Harris, Bryce Elder, and Joey Wentz could be in for really good seasons. Let's talk about it. [music] [music] Yes. Welcome on in to Braves Today, your source for news, notes, and updates on your Atlanta Braves. I'm your host, Lindsey Crosby, award-winning baseball writer and podcaster. You can follow me on social media at Crosby Baseball. You can find all my written work, bravestoday.com. That's the Braves Today Substack, as this is both a podcast and a newsletter. We're proudly part of the Believe Podcast Network and presented to you by FanDuel. Download the FanDuel app or go to fanduel.com to get started. And I want to do something a little bit different today. It's Friday and I want us to kind of talk about some players that we need to have big seasons, right? They need to either improve from where they've been or they need to be better than they were last year. And the number one guy for me is Michael Harris. And the reason that I'm choosing him first is because I think we may have already seen some sort of adjustment or offseason work for him paying off. So like the thing to know about Money Mike is when he is on he is like one of the better players in baseball. a legitimate fivetool talent that can hit close to 300, can slug in the high fours. He's got speed, he's got power. 2023, he had 18 home runs and 20 stolen bases. 2025, despite a lower average and on base, he finished with 20 home runs and 20 stolen bases. But he has a massive, massive flaw. Right. The biggest issue that Michael Harris has faced in his career is his chase rate. I'm not surprising anybody with this. We all know if you've watched a Michael Harris at bat, you know that there is going to be multiple swings at pitches out of the strike zone. And because of that, he's ended up having some of the worst walk rates in baseball last year. 2.5% walk rate for Michael Harris, which obviously I don't have to tell you is absolutely dreadful. He played 160 games. He had 641 played appearances. He walked 16 times in a in 641 played appearances. He walked 16 times. His walk rates never been great, right? 4.8%, 4.6%, 4.9%, but last year 2.5. The worst it's ever been. His on base percentage was 268. Like his on base percentage would be a good not great batting average. We all thought that Nick Allen was bad because he couldn't hit for power, right? Nick Allen's slugging percentage was 251. So Michael Harris's on base was in the same ballpark as Nick Allen's slug if that tells you how much Michael struggled. And again, it all comes down to Chase. He is a very good hitter in the strike zone. Last year contact like contact in the zone. Michael Harris had an 88.2% 2% contact rate in the strike zone. He has a gift to be able to make contact. The issue is he chases so much and he swings it so many terrible pitches that he's not any better than league average at making contact out of the zone. 55.3% last year. MLB averages 58. And that was a drop. He used to be in the 60s. So like he got worse. He chased more out of the zone. He made less contact out of the zone while also making more contact in the zone. What was the response here? They threw the ball in the strike zone less, which is what I would do too, right? I we commonly have had conversations on this show on the newsletter that you could entirely be justified at just throwing nothing but balls to Michael Harris and you could still get a strikeout or a weak ground out or whatever. And this isn't to dog Michael Harris. I'm a big fan of Michael Harris. But this is the glaring issue that he needs to fix. And when you look in spring, it's possible that he has done like you can see where he may have done a lot of work to fix that problem. Okay. Last year, and shout out to the Braves Today Discord for doing this research. Shine in the Discord did a lot of this digging for us and found this last year. In all of those played appearances, again, 641 played appearances, Michael Harris had exactly 82 that went to a three ball count and he had 16 total walks. That's like 13%. 13% of his played appearances did he ever get two three balls to even have the opportunity to walk. He's swinging early and he's swinging often. Okay. in spring. So far, he has six official plate appearances. He has four three ball situations. Now, this is an incredibly incredibly small sample size. Let's understand that. But this is a step in the right direction. of his four six played appearances, four at bats. He's got the two walks. He has one base hit, which was, I believe, 111 miles an hour. Like they were facing the Pirates, an O'Neal Cruz, who has some of the highest exit velocities in baseball. And the hardest hit ball in the game came from Michael Harris. And more importantly, he has no walks. Now, lots of caveats here, right? Small sample size caveat applies. You have the quality of competition caveat applies. And when we get a little bit of a larger sample, you okay, Bandit? When we get a little bit of a larger sample, we can go back and look at the quality of of competition he faced in spring. Baseball Reference actually has this as a stat on a player's individual page. It's called opponent quality. And when you look at their spring training numbers, they take the level the guy played at the previous season to and give you a number score. If you have a number of a 10, then um the opposing pitchers you faced were all major leaguers last year, right? And this goes all the way down, you know, from 10 to like one or whatever. So, we can pull that a little bit later when the spring is over. Look at what his walk rate was. look at his three ball counts and figure out like was he not swinging because he just didn't think they could throw strikes or was he legitimately getting better at pitch recognition? Because when you dive into the the stat cast pages on a lot of this stuff, the he was positive last year against curve balls and cutters, like plus five run value against both of those where he really really struggled with sinkers. And he didn't just struggle with sinkers from a he faced a lot of them and it's an accumulation stat for run value. When you look at the rate stat, run value per 100 pitches, he was negative 3.7 because that's the type of pitch that depending on if it's a two seam or a sinker, right? They're all kind of grouped together in that same class of type of fast balls. It could look like a strike and then drop below the zone or run out of the zone, right? Like it could have horizontal movement takes it out of the zone. It could have some drop on it and you know sink literally it's a sinker sink on it and go below the zone. So that's one where like you would think the biggest issue would be sliders and stuff like that. And he did whiff like 35% of the time on sliders. But on sinkers is where the contact ability kind of hurt him because there were times when he would be able to spot the slider and just not swing. But on the sinker often times if you're if you have good locations you can make it look like a strike and then take it out of the zone either down or you know run it horizontally. I'm curious to see. I need to go back maybe this weekend and watch all of those plate appearances to figure out like what pitches was he not looking at or I guess what pitches was he not swinging at was he picking up out of the hand and holding up his swing on and things like that but it's a very good sign and kind of anecdotally it feels like a lot of the Braves players this spring the regulars the major leaguers have been working longer counts have been getting deep into at bats. And so part of me hopes that's an internalization of the Tim Hires process, right? We're not just firing off home run swings every pitch. We're looking, we're recognizing stuff out of the hand and looking for balls that we can drive, right? So, if this holds, it's very, very early, but if this holds, this could be I don't want to call it a breakout year for Michael Harris. He hit .297 with a 514 slug his first year in the season or his first year in the league, but this could be the year where it all comes together. Cuz you saw that first season again, he hit almost 300, OPS of 853. It was a 133 OPS plus. Yes, he won rookie of the year with 19 homers and 20 stolen bases, but he also got down ballot MVP votes. And if 2026 Michael Harris can get back to that high batting average and cut down even just 10% on the chase and the whiff out of the zone and the suboptimal contact on things like sinkers combined with his power, his speed and ability to steal bases and hopefully Antoine Richardson helps with that. And then his his defense, his gold glove caliber defense in center field. Michael Harris could be an top 68 MVP finisher. That is very, very lofty. Right. When we do our hot takes before the season starts, I'll probably have something about Michael Harris. But that's the skill set he has. That's the package you have here. And the one thing that's holding it back right now is that chase. That is the one thing. And at least very, very early in spring, it looks like he may have done a lot of work towards fixing that. In just a minute, let's talk about pitching. I've got reasons to be optimistic about Bryce Elder and Joey Wentz. We'll talk about those next right here on Braves Today. But first, today's episode's brought to you by our friends at our friends at FanTracks. The absolute best fantasy baseball app in the market. If you're the commissioner, the platform is incred is it's the most customizable platform there is. Tons of different options you have there. Also, they have a league treasurer, so it can handle all the payments for you versus you needing to use a third-party site and have people send you money, right? If you're a player, the player pool is by far the deepest of any fantasy baseball app. There's a lot of different options. You can play reddraft. The Braves Today Discord has a reddraft league that we are setting up through fan tracks. I think there's one or two more spots left if you if you're interested. join the Discord. Links in the episode description, links in the show notes, but they've got reddraft, they've got dynasty, they've got best ball, which is a really fun way to play, kind of hands off. Uh you can access it every single day. Tons of features. I love that if I forget to update my lineup, it will ping me a notification to my phone that like, hey, you got this guy in your lineup, but he's not playing today. You might want to make a correction. So, love that feature. Go to fantraxswith with an x.com/bravestoday to sign up. That's fantra fa ntrx.com/bravestoday to sign up for a free account and play fantasy baseball today. Welcome back to Braves today. Lindseay Crosby. Let's talk about Bryce and Joey Wentz. I know that this is not going to be as popular as a lot of people are expecting because everybody wanted the Braves to sign a starting pitcher over the offseason. I get it. This is not we're not relitigating that today. We are being relentlessly positive on today's show. And let's talk about the reasons why Bryce Elder and Joey Wentz could work out for the Braves this season. I think the number one thing when we get to Bryce Elder specifically is health. There is no such thing as a healthy pitcher. just a guy who has not been hurt yet. But Bryce Elder, not only, knock on wood, has not gone on the injured list, he's also shown through the course of last season that he was getting better as the season progressed. He wasn't wearing down. He wasn't having velocity issues. He wasn't having workload issues. He was getting better and better throughout the course of the season. We've talked on here quite a bit about how much harder he was throwing in the month of September. He was getting up to 95 miles an hour and the six hardest forcing fast balls of his career all came late. That start against Washington, the very last start of the year, he had some of the hardest pitches he's ever thrown. And he threw 156 major league innings last year, plus more in the minors. Uh, we did get some news on this thanks to Mark Bowman of MLB.com who wrote a piece. Apparently, Bryce Elder was working with a uh biomechanics expert. He started working with him last year. The guy's been doing this since 1988. He's the guy like he started working with Nolan Ryan back then. And apparently this is somebody that Walt Weiss knows. We don't know how Bryce Elder got connected to him, but they were working together. This is the same guy who helped with Michael who worked with Michael Sroa after Sroa's Achilles injuries. And what this gentleman did with Bryce Elder biomechanically working to make his delivery more efficient, more streamlined to the plate. So, if you have lateral movement side to side, that's energy that's not going towards the plate. That's wasted movement. And ideally, when you're finishing, unless you have a unique situation, like Chris Sail's a different thing. Chris Sail is a different dude, right? He does everything different. But a normal normal arm angle pitcher Bryce Elder, you want to have as much energy going going directly to the plate and you want to be centered in your balance. Think about prime Spencer Strider in 2023. how he would get a strike out and he would be so balanced after the pitch that the momentum he would just kind of spin on his plant foot and he would like almost piouette right there on the mound cuz he was perfectly balanced not only left to right but forward to backward his center of gravity was ideal. Bryce Elder that was one of the big things they were working on was his balance, his center of gravity and not having wasted movement laterally. And again, he was popping some of the hardest fast balls of his career down the stretch. And I do think this matters because if you look at what Bryce Elder did down the stretch, yes, he still had blowups and yes, he still had issues. Like I'm not like I'm not saying that he is an amazing pitcher and he even said when talking to Mark Bowman like he's never going to be a massive strikeout guy with the four seamer. that's just not who he is. But he does think like he has the ability to go back and get a little bit more. In the final two months of the season, 11 starts for Bryce Elder. He had a 404 erra, a 351 fielding independent pitching. And again, a lot of his issues, he had three blowups, right? He gave up eight runs on nine hits and four and two/3s against the White Sox. Braves still won that game, by the way. He had five runs on six innings versus Miami. The offense scored one run. Atlanta lost 5 to1. And he gave up six runs on 10 hits and four and a third versus Houston. Atlanta lost that one six-2. Outside of that, the other eight starts were all quality starts. So, six innings, three runs or less. And most of them didn't get to three runs, right? One run on seven innings in Detroit. No runs on seven innings in Chicago. And then facing Chicago again five days later at home and giving up one run in six and a third. Like, quality teams here. The Mets, two earned runs on seven innings, right? Cincinnati in their ballpark. The Phillies in Philly held them to one run on three hits in seven innings. There is, it is entirely plausible to believe that if he has that additional velocity, if the Braves put him in the rotation and let him stay in the rotation instead of bouncing back and forth because he does better when he is gets consistent run at the major league level and with a little bit of different possible changes that he could make using the four seamer more. I've been on the record multiple times as saying he needs to throw a cutter. Not just because I love cutters, but because it would be a really good bridge pitch between the slider and the four seamer that he's probably going to throw a little bit more. Can also help him if he doesn't have his locations on the four seamer. I'm sorry, his locations on the slider. And then he has gotten better at sequencing as well. But it's very easy to see how the positive trend of his velocity combined with a new pitching coach has the ability to make him more consistent. And if they do, how he could genuinely be a more than just a number like a number five starter with an erra over five. I'm not saying he's going to be an ace. Not saying he's going to be, you know, your number two or anything like that, but if he could consistently give you six innings and have a quality start rate of 50% or better, like he had that last year, if he can minimize the blowups a little bit, is it entirely within the realm of possibility that he could have an RA in the threes? I think it is. again those final 11 starts even with the blowups his fielding independent pitching was a 351 and you know he did have home run issues in some of those but even outside of that the like the lesser walks against Washington that final start of the year he gave up two homers but if no walks if I remember right I think they were both solo shots like I think it's there I think it's possible I'm really excited to see what he does this spring. We saw him the other day. Really struggled in the first inning, bounced some sliders and things like that. Didn't look great and then rebounded and from that point on just shut him down. Had like three strikeouts in the rest of the outing over like the end of that inning and in the second inning and then was done because they're going short in spring right now. Like quintessential Bryce Elder start if he can minimize that first inning damage. I think he gave up like one run and that was all that he gave up. Maybe it was two, I don't remember. But either way, minimize the damage there and then shut him down the rest of the way. That's better than these five run or six run blowups that he's prone to have from time to time. I think it's a big deal. In just a second, let's also talk about Joey Wentz because we're all kind of thinking of him as a long man, and I think he's the long man, but there is reason to be optimistic. And I think I may have looked and figured out why Joey Wentz is somebody that they want to use and they have confidence in this year. We'll talk about that next right here on Brave Today. But first, today's episode's brought to you by our friend at Grand Slam Getaways. This is the ultimate bucket list baseball trip if you are a Braves fan. Doesn't matter if you're uh just wanting for a summer vacation, if you're retired and have all the time in the world to travel. It's a parent and a child doing a summer vacation for bonding. Listen, they have three different trips this year. Florida in May, the Midwest in June, or the Northeast in July. Each of these games leave from Atlanta. You get three star hotel accommodations every night with breakfast every morning. You've got the deluxe motor coach with Wi-Fi, a bathroom, electrical outlets, all that good stuff. but you're going to at least two Braves games plus multiple other games from other teams on the route. There's fun um there's fun little side trips in this whole thing. The Bulldurham filming locations or the Louisville Slugger Museum or for Florida a beach day, things like that as well. Meet and greets with former MLB players, uh souvenir baseball and other giveaways, a welcome dinner, daily prizes and games, all that kind of fun stuff. If you want more information or to put out a small deposit to reserve your space, grandlam-getaways.com is where you go to do it. Again, that's grandlam-getaways.com. Okay, we were relentlessly positive about Michael Harris. We were relentlessly positive about Bryce Elder. Let's be relentlessly positive about Joey Wentz for a minute because his overall stats last year were bad. There's no getting around that. On the season, and reme remember he played for three different teams on the season. Joey Wentz put up a 470 ERA with Atlanta. He had a I'm sorry, he he put up a 560 RA. Sorry. With Atlanta, he had a 492, but that came with a 343 field and independent pitching. Okay, so right there immediately, a little bit of bad luck on his part, and we'll get into all of that, but like what happened with Joey Wentz? Because when he got to Atlanta, he was really good. those first seven starts that he made for the Braves after he was picked up. It I think people sometimes kind of I guess seven appearances I'm sorry he p he threw three innings in relief and then from there went into the rotation. First seven appearances 260 erra. He didn't allow a run until his third appearance and it was like eight or nine innings into his tenure as back with the Braves. Like you have to remember he he he was originally an Atlanta Brave first round 40th overall pick in 2016 out of high school. It's easy to look at the 260 ERA and then see he had a 767 in the second in the last seven starts and say like, hey, this was a fluke. There's a couple things about that seven game stretch to start his Braves tenure last year that kind of make you feel like this may this was legitimately like that this was legitimate. Okay. 260 RA 314 fib. So field and independent pitching 314. He overperformed a little bit but not by a ton. Half a run is respectable, right? He had ground balls. He was close to 50% on a ground ball rate. Like he was just getting tons of ground balls. His strikeout to walk ratio 14.3%. And strikeout to walk ratio is like surprisingly a highly reliable and predictive measure for future pitching success. It kind of blows my mind here, but that is a remarkably predictable stat. It correlates really well with future performance. And last year in that stretch, 2.6 six strikeouts for every walk. And again, the percentage 14.3%. Perfectly respectable, right? He held opposing batters to a 175 average. Now, some of that was helped by a 216 batting average on balls in play, right? And that's something like that is kind of an explanation for why his FIP was a 314, but his RA was a 260. Okay. He stranded 70s something percent of runners that got on. Really good numbers. Like you're happy with this. The rest of the year he was pretty bad. And they're the Braves made some adjustments and things like that. We'll get to that in a minute. The back half again 767 erra. The number is awful. But there's a couple things under the hood that make you realize that he wasn't nearly as bad as that erra. The first is a sample size, 35 innings, right? And I'm not saying that this sample size doesn't matter and the first half sample size does matter. I'm saying when you have smaller sample sizes, it's easier to have drastic over or under performances because this stuff hasn't had time to normalize yet. His erra 767. His field and independent pitching was a 378. A lot lot closer to something that you would be perfectly happy with. And remember how his batting average in balls in play was so good in that first sevename stretch a 216. In that second sevengame stretch it was a 443. And league average is in the is in I believe it's in the high twos like 290 292 or something like that is average. So he significantly or he he he pretty decently out like overproduced on Babip in the first stretch and then he terribly underproduced on Babett in the second stretch 292 to a 443. And there's a couple things here I think that came up with this. One of the first ones is some of the changes that he made when he first got to Atlanta. The Braves kind of they scrapped his change up almost completely and they kind of scrapped his cutter as well, which hurts me to admit that they really leaned heavily into the slider and the curveball. And matter of fact, he threw in that very first very first appearance, he threw more sliders than forcing fast balls. It's a very brave style adjustment to make. Remember how you got Pierce Johnson from Colorado and they had him throw a lot more curve balls? They've got Tyler Kinley from Colorado. Had him throw a lot more sliders. Same idea. They had him They had Doby Wentz lean into that slider early and it worked in the back half. I think some of that came to fatigue. You could see his fastball velocity drop. You could see his locations get a little looser because of it. And you have to remember like Wentz hadn't been a starter since September 2023. And they tried to ease him in from a pitch count perspective, right? Like they they didn't ask him to go out there immediately and start throwing 90 or 100 pitches, but he got there pretty quickly. By the fourth appearance for Atlanta, he was throwing 95 pitches in a game. when right before Atlanta acquired him, he had thrown 20 in the last in the most recent appearance that he had made. It's still was a full inning. It took him a full It was 20 pitches for one inning because he gave up a home run and two total hits, but his pitch count with Atlanta 50 59 81 95 90 like they jumped right into it. And he wasn't getting additional rest either. like he would a lot of these starts were on regular rest and I the fatigue really got to him. The fastball velocity dipped to just under like n just around 92 miles an hour. They did get him some additional rest late and it ticked up just a little bit like it it kind of returned a little bit from a velocity perspective late in September but his locations drifted up. his ground ball rate dropped to like 34 35%. And a lot of those lost ground balls became line drives. And I think that's one of the main reasons he significantly like got destroyed on Babbot because line drives are by far the most productive type of batted ball you can have. Last season, fly balls had a 261 average and a 805 slug. Ground balls had a 249 average and a 272 slug. Line drives had a 628 average and an 870 slug. If you were curious, pop-ups had a 0.013 batting average. There's four types of batted ball. But so I think that there's a like there's a really easy explanation for what happened to Wentz. And even with all of those lost locations, even with all of that fatigue and everything, in those final seven starts, he still had a field and independent pitching of 378. He was still a sub fours pitcher from the inputs, but seemingly everything that could have broken against him broke against him. And so if that's the guy that one you're going to use to make a spot start in the first week of the season because you've got 13 games in 13 days and then two, he's going to be one of your key uh swing man out of the pin, you can do a lot worse than Joey Wentz. I'm not saying Joey WZ is the savior and your rotation is fixed, but I'm saying there is a legitimate reason to think that he can be better than he was in those final seven starts. And here's the really cool thing. If this works out, and I'm hopeful that it will. If this works out, Joey Wentz isn't a free agent until 2030. He's making the league minimum this year and he'll first be arbitration eligible in 2027. So you've got four years of control over Joey Wentz. So the Braves have every incentive to try and figure this out. Jeremy Hefner has every incentive to try and figure this out. And thankfully they have the knowledge to hopefully figure this out. You can't optimize a pitch mix to help against fatigue and things like that. But reportedly, Joey Wentz has been working all winter on conditioning and workload so that if he needs to make spot starts, if he needs to throw 110 innings or whatever, he can do it. And with the changes we saw them make last year, with hopefully more changes that a new pitching coach and a new player development group are able to make, Joey Wentz could be the best swingman in baseball. And something like that is incredibly valuable when you've got three more years of control of him after this. This has been Braves today for Friday, February 27th. Thank you for letting me be relentlessly positive for a day. We'll get back to a normal show on Monday. But in the meantime, do me a favor. Please like the video. Please subscribe both here and on the newsletter at bravestoday.com. And we'll see you next time on Braves Today. [music] >> [music]

Host Lindsay Crosby takes a “relentlessly positive” look at why Michael Harris, Bryce Elder, and Joey Wentz could be poised for strong seasons for the Braves. For Harris, the focus is on fixing his biggest flaw—chase rate and an extremely low 2.5% walk rate in 2025—while noting early spring signs of longer counts, two walks, and hard contact, plus how sinkers have especially hurt him. Crosby then highlights Elder’s durability and late-season improvement, including increased fastball velocity and biomechanics work to streamline his delivery, pointing to a stretch where most starts were quality despite a few blowups. Finally, he explains why Wentz’s Braves results may have been better than his ERA, citing strong early outings, major BABIP swings, pitch-mix changes, fatigue effects, and his value as a controllable swingman through 2030. 01:14 Michael Harris Big Leap 13:58 Bryce Elder Bounceback Case 24:27 Joey Wentz Under the Hood Subscribe to Braves Today on audio wherever you get your podcasts Join our NEW Discord: https://discord.gg/wksQqVNEpX Follow the show on Twitter: @braves_today Follow Lindsay on Twitter: @CrosbyBaseball Read our written work: bravestoday.substack.com Send us questions: contact@bravestoday.com Get 10% off at Chinook Seedery with promo code "Braves" Get 20% off at NCase Cards with promo code "BravesToday" Rocker Chicks by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/