Jay Harry wasn’t exactly a headline return when the Blue Jays sent Trevor Richards to the Twins at the 2024 deadline. He was a sixth-round pick out of Penn State, signed well under slot, and came with the kind of prospect profile that barely registers outside draft rooms and team lists.
Baseball America had him 426th among draft-eligible players that year and never really circled back. FanGraphs was even colder after the trade, ranking him the 87th-best prospect moved at the deadline and pegging his ceiling as “a utility guy for a weak Double-A team.”
That sounded fair at the time. Harry’s OPS last season, split between A+ and AA, opened with a five, and the early pro version of his game was built almost entirely on contact without much impact.
Now? The numbers look a lot different.
Harry is hitting .327/.368/.591 between New Hampshire and Buffalo, production that puts him among the best 40 or so hitters in the upper minors this season. For a player who was once easy to overlook, that’s a serious jump.
The foundation of his game is still the same in some ways. In college, Harry was a pure contact hitter, trying to slap line drives through the infield.
That carried into his first pro season, when he struck out just 6.8% of the time in A ball but didn’t do much damage. His contact rate was 85% that year, then fell to 76% in the Twins organization in 2024 and 71% after the trade to Toronto.
At the same time, the power started to show up a little, climbing from 1 home run in 129 plate appearances in his draft season to 12 in 448 in 2024.
Then came a strange step back. Last year, Harry got his contact rate back to 77%, but most of the power disappeared.
In 2026, the contact rate is still 77%, and this time the pop has returned in a big way. Even allowing for the usual caveat with New Hampshire and left-handed hitters, that explanation doesn’t fully hold here.
He was poor in that same park last season, and he’s been even better since moving to Buffalo.
The swing itself hasn’t been transformed so much as nudged around. Video shows a few small adjustments over the last three seasons: a very upright setup with almost no hand load and the bat starting upright in 2024, a deeper load and more angle in 2025, then a return in 2026 to something closer to the earlier look.
He’s upright again, with his hands starting out front and a path to the ball that’s extremely short. Those are meaningful details, but not the kind that suggest a wholesale rebuild.
A couple of other shifts stand out more. Harry is swinging a ton.
He’s always been aggressive, but his 59.5% swing rate this season is among the highest in the league and would rank in the top five in the majors. That has crushed his walk rate, though his strikeout rate hasn’t really moved much.
He’s also pulling the ball far less often, down to 39% from an extreme 55-56% over the previous two seasons. Usually that would point to less power, since hitters tend to do the most damage to the pull side.
Harry has gone the other way. Since reaching Buffalo, he’s posted a 90.0 mph average exit velocity and a 41% hard-hit rate, both above average.
His max exit velocity is 107.2, though, which is well below average. With only 68 batted ball events in the register, that number could move, but the scouting reports about limited raw power still seem to fit.
He’s not overpowering the ball; he’s squeezing as much as he can out of what he has.
It’s a confusing profile. His swing decisions look worse, but his contact hasn’t suffered.
He’s pulling the ball less, but hitting for more power. The simplest read is that he’s settled back into what feels natural: ultra-aggressive on pitches inside, pulling when the pitch and his swing line up, but not forcing everything toward the pull side.
He’s trusting the swing that feels right and betting on his strength to do the rest.
That doesn’t make the breakout easy to buy wholesale. Without a clear mechanical reason for the jump, skepticism makes sense.
But the results matter, especially this close to the majors. Jay Harry probably isn’t about to storm into the big leagues, but this season makes it a lot easier to picture him getting there at all, which is a huge change from where he was three months ago.
He can move around the diamond, mostly shortstop in the minors, though not as an everyday big league defender there. He puts the bat on the ball, and when he does, there’s a chance something happens.
That’s not nothing. At the very least, he doesn’t look out of place in a Double-A lineup.
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