Everything about the 2025 season of Michael Harris II was a study in extreme contrasts. His output were terribly offensive, then sparkling and then back to terrible. He underestimates his XWOBA en masse in four of the six calendar months of the season; Only four players who have received the full suite of 600+ PAs this season, endorse it more than Harris. And yet he finally finished in the Top 40 in MLB in RBI … Despite negative WPA and RE24, and the fact that his WRC+ of 97 went empty with the bases to 66 with men on the base.
On 26 September Harris hit his 20th Homer and gave him one of the 510 20-Homer, 20-stagnuted basic seasons that have been registered so far. 510 is not that impressive in a vacuum, but what makes it even less remarkable is that, given the recent rule changes of MLB around stolen bases (not to mention the relative juiciness of the ball from 2015), the rarity of a 20-20 season is, well, not very rare nowadays nowadays. Too white: 2025 contained 24 out of 510 20-20 seasons in history (almost five percent); There were 18 last year and 19 years before. As you can see below, the 2025 count is not only an obvious peak, but much of the recent history prior to the stolen basic changes had nine or ten 20-20 seasons.
Was Harris ’20 -20 campaign the worst, straight, straight, from the 501? No. But the fact that he managed a 20-20 campaign with a WRC+ in the 80s and younger than 2 Fwar makes it a bit fun to think about all the other bad 20-20 seasons. So here we go.
Six 20-20 campaigns in history have finished exactly on 20-20, Including Harris’s. Amazingly enough, Randy Arozarena did it twice in one way or another-in 2021, and then in 2024. Nolan Jones managed it last year, which means that in each of the last three seasons there has been a just qualifying campaign in each of the last three seasons, and in four of the last five. Andrew Benintendi succeeded in 2017, and then Toby Harrah had the earliest season in 1979.
Make it difficult for yourself
You need hits and/or walks to set yourself up to steal bases. O’Neil Cruz ended 2025 with a season of 20-38, but still a .200/.298/.378 Slash line. His season from 2025 seemed a lot posted by Harris on the season, only with more steals and a higher Xwoba, but a similar non-oppressed. While the average of Cruz .200 is the lowest for a season of 20-20, Harris has the lowest OBP ever for one of those seasons, with .268. Cruz somehow succeeded in just one .378 slugging, which is again the worst figure among the 501 seasons we are looking at; Harris clocks in with the lowest Woba on .289.
Although XWOBA has existed alone since 2015, almost a quarter of all 20-20 seasons have happened since the availability of StatCast data. Tim Anderson’s 2018 takes the cake here – he only had one .272 XWOBA (.294 Woba) in his season. In the meantime, the 2021 of Arozarena is perhaps the double piddliest in terms of root, because he had a .300 xwoba only one .350 Woba and just an insert with exactly 20 gayers and steals each.
If there is nothing else, the changes to the rules help to illustrate why it is important to adjust almost all statistics for the competition context. To that end, we have to emphasize the 1993 season of Ruben Sierra (22-25), in which he only had a 79 WRC+ only 20-20 season ever of which WRC+ was not completed to at least 80. Sierra ended that season 15 ends below the average. But wait, it’s getting stranger.
We did not have good defensive statistics in 1993, so if you look at defensive value on Fangraphs/etc. For those years it is with retroactive effect that player value is assigned on the basis of total zone-like Play-by-Play data. In one way or another, Sierra has picked up an insane -25 zone runs that season, which means that it was worth -2.6 fwar in combination with his 79 WRC+that year. Again, it is great to look at everything that has been infected in total, but yes, that was … not a good 20-20 season.
Not satisfied with accusing the total zone and/or Ruben Sierra? In 2018, Ian Desmond (22-20) managed an 82 WRC+ on Coors Field while he played horrible defense at first base; His -0.4 Fwar is the lowest overall for everyone whose fwar is informed by defensive statistics from the statcast era.
Ken Williams has the first 30-30 season of MLB, which he got with St. Louis Browns in 1922. But … he was not at all judgmental running. To get to 20 stealing in 1921, he had to be thrown away 17 times. Even the following year he got 30 steals while he was thrown away 20 times.
Of the 510 20-20 seasons, 42 have a negative WSB, ie, the player lost more value that was thrown away than he won with successful Steals. Williams’ campaign from 1921 let him give three more runs away to stolen basic value than he won; Only in 1979 he and Bobby Bonds surpassed more than two runs of value lost in this respect. Amazingly enough stable bonds that year 34 bases, but were thrown away 23 times.
Helped (or not) by the universe
Fangraphs only follows HR/FB back to 2002, which covers slightly less than half of all 20-20 seasons. Sorting on HR/FB is actually a bit boring – the nine highest HR/FB seasons all ended with at least 36 homers.
But then there is Tommy Pham’s 2017, in which he ended with 23 homers (and 25 steals) … and a 27 percent HR/FB. Leaguewide HR/FB was 14 percent that year; It is sufficient to say that if Pham ran HR/FB speed, he would not end up in the area of a 20-20 season anywhere.
On the other hand, Jimmy Rollins went 21-31 in 2009, despite an eight percent HR/FB (who honestly was not that far below the ten percent competition average in 2009). In fact, it is in fact impossible to run a season of 20-20 with a terrible HR/FB-Slechts three seasons in history (for which we have data) have an HR/FB under 9.5 percent, and no 20-20 season has had more than 21 homers with an HR/FB under 10 percent. Amusing enough, Jimmy Rollins had the last ‘considerably above 20 Homers’ season in this respect in 2007, that he went 30-41 with HR/FB about a percentage higher than the League average. In short, if you want to get 20-20, you can’t really be destroyed by HR/FB; You just don’t get there when that happens.
Fangraphs follows WPA that goes back to the 1970s; 43 out of 451 seasons have negative WPA and 31 have negative RE24. I don’t know how Randy Arozarena keeps jobs here, but he had the worst season of WPA, with a -2.24 Mark (that is more than four direct WPA-based losses in total) despite the 20-20 season. Tim Anderson’s 2018 is the only other season with a WPA marking worse than -2.00.
Harris clocks in with the worst RE24 among all these seasons – the RE24 from Fangraphs has had some kidding lately, so I am not sure if that is a definitive measure.
Baseball reference has CWPA, which WPA has been adapted for opportunities to win a championship. Although Harris had a low WPA, his CWPA was hardly negative. I did not check CWPA of 20-20 season each, but I thought Corey Hart went 20-23 in 2008 for a 90-win Brewers team that hardly made the play-offs (through a match over the Mets). Hart only had a 95 WRC+ and -1.33 WPA, which received a stunningly high -3.8% CWPA during the season. It would require an archeology to find out what exactly happened there, but just look at his game book, he had three terrible intra-division games in terms of WPA in the last ten days of playing alone, so it is probably.
Worst coupling score for a season of 20-20? Yes, it is Arozarenas 2024 again.
In conclusion, I do not know how Randy Arozarena managed to have several 20-20 seasons with a lot of different measures from “Boy, this was not a good 20-20 season”, but he did. So, although Harris certainly had a remarkably only 20-20 season, at least he is not Arozarena. Or Corey Hart. Or Ruben Sierra.
Maybe he will go 30-30 next year, and then we don’t have to bother with an article about the worst 30-30 seasons, because I think it is comparable to have a only 30-30 season.
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