Josh Harrison struggled out of the gate in 2015, but after the first month of the season – when arguably every regular Pirates position player struggled – he put together some solid months sandwiched by the time lost to his thumb injury.
I don’t particularly enjoy having to use .BABIP (batting average on balls in play) as reasoning for a hitter’s struggles. At the same time, it’s particular hard to ignore that Harrison’s .BABIP for his outlier month was a paltry .242.
It’s not as if Harrison wasn’t hitting the ball hard enough. Fangraphs lists his hard hit percentage for the month of April as 29.7 percent. The balls that were hit were simply not finding grass.
On the other end of the spectrum is Harrison’s lucky September/October, where 41.1 percent of his batted balls resulted in a hit. That’s an incredible number,