Aug 5, 2017 9 min read

Wild Things outfielder James Harris says one of his father’s favorite sayings is, “It doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down. What’s important is how many times you get back up.”

Baseball and life have knocked down Harris, a former first-round draft pick of the Tamp Bay Rays, several times, literally and figuratively.

Much of what you need to know about Harris is that each time he has been knocked down – either by a still undiagnosed medical condition or being released by a major league organization – he has gotten back up and is continuing to play baseball, hoping to one day reach the major leagues, a place his career was supposed to be on the fast track to by now.

Harris, who will turn 24 years old Monday, was a standout high school athlete in Oakland, Calif. He was an all-city basketball player but his best sport was baseball. He played at Oakland Tech, the same high school that produced Hall of Fame outfielder Rickey Henderson, who holds several major league records including career stolen bases and runs.

“My high school basketball coach told me that I had junior college, NAIA and Division II coaches asking about me, but he told each of them all that they should move on, that I was going to play baseball,” Harris explained.

That’s because Harris was rated among the top hitters available for baseball’s 2011 first-year player draft. ESPN’s Keith Law had Harris ranked as the No. 67 overall prospect in that draft. At Harris’ first high school baseball game of his senior year, there were 60 scouts in attendance.

“I was being told I would get picked, maybe second round, maybe third round,” Harris recalled. “The scouts liked my tools. My speed was a big factor. They liked my upside, my potential.”

When draft day rolled around in June of 2011, Harris was surrounded by family and watched the first round on television. That year, the Tampa Bay Rays had a record 10 first-round draft picks, the result of losing players off the major league roster to other teams in free agency.

With the final pick of the first round, the 60th overall, Tampa Bay selected Harris, the kid with the potential.

“My father had been getting phone calls during the draft and knew I was going to be picked in the first round. He didn’t tell anybody that was going to happen. When I heard my name, I jumped up and screamed and there he was, standing there recording me,” Harris recalled. “I started running down the street screaming and the neighbors were wondering what’s going on. We had explain to them what just happened.”

Harris signed with Tampa Bay and received a reported $490,000 bonus. The Pittsburgh Pirates, who had selected pitcher Gerrit Cole with the first overall pick in that draft, also had the pick after Harris was selected, the first pick of the second round. The Pirates used that pick to draft Josh Bell, also a high school outfielder, and gave him a $5 million signing bonus to get him out of his commitment to attend the University of Texas.

Harris’ professional career got off to a slow start. It took him three years and about 400 at-bats before making an impact in the Rays’ farm system. In that third year of pro ball, Harris batted .258 and stole 16 bases as a 19-year-old in the New York-Penn League, the league that now includes the West Virginia Black Bears.

“Remember, I was only 17 years old when I signed,” Harris is quick to point out. “I came from a high school league where I was seeing fastballs thrown at 83 and 84 mph to seeing fastballs in the 90s in the minor leagues. I had to develop the skill part of the game. Athleticism could carry me only so far.”

That athleticism and potential led Harris to the Class A Midwest League in 2014 and he was still only 20 years old when the season began, making him one of the youngest players in the league. He batted .230 but did hit seven home runs in 70 games for Bowling Green. Those, however, are not the kind of numbers expected from somebody with the label of first-round draft pick.

Harris was released by Tampa Bay during spring training in 2015.

“I just didn’t progress as fast as they and I thought I would. There also was a change at the top in Tampa Bay’s farm system, which didn’t help me, but that’s not an excuse,” Harris said. “I was my own worst enemy in that I put too much pressure on myself. I started to try to do things that weren’t natural to me. You can’t do that. There’s a sense of maturity that you need to have and that’s part of it. You have to do the things you do well, and knowing that comes with experience. I was trying to do too much.”

Only a few weeks after being released, Harris’ hometown Oakland Athletics came calling with an offer. They signed the right-handed hitting outfielder and that seemed to revitalize his career. Harris was sent back to the Midwest League, where he improved his batting average and was assigned last year to Stockton in the Class A California League. He made the all-star game and batted .303 with seven home runs and 21 stolen bases. He even earned a promotion and finished the season at Class AA Midland.

Harris went to spring training this year expecting to be back at Midland and possibly earn a late-season promotion to Class AAA Nashville. He arrived early for spring training in Mesa, Ariz., to work out with other players at the A’s minor-league camp. That’s when Harris was knocked down, literally, by a still-undiagnosed ailment.

“It was about three or four days before camp started and I was with some players working out on one of the fields,” Harris recalled. “We were running the bases and I rounded second base and went to third. I was running at about only 70 percent, so it wasn’t an all-out sprint. I got to third base and started to feel dizzy and light-headed.”

Harris then blacked out for “five or six seconds.” He fell to the ground. Players and coaches helped him get back to his feet and into a dugout.

“The training staff thought it was just dehydration,” Harris said. “But it wasn’t a hot day by Arizona standards and I was well-conditioned, in the best shape of my life.”

Harris was kept off the field until the Athletics’ medical staff could run a series of tests, which showed nothing wrong with the outfielder. He returned to spring training and played in two minor-league games. Before the third, Harris was running sprints.

“After running one, I bent over to pick up my glove and I started to feel the same symptoms I had before,” he said. “I got dizzy and stumbled and fell. I remember waking up in a different spot than where I had been when I tried to pick up my glove. I was told that I was out for four or five seconds.”

It was back to the doctors, who ran a battery of tests including some on Harris’ heart. A loop recorder – an electrocardiographic monitoring device used for diagnosis of patients with recurrent unexplained episodes of palpitations – was planted in Harris’ chest and remains there today.

“The tests showed nothing wrong and eventually I was cleared to play, but I had missed all of camp,” Harris said. “Then I had about a month off.”

Instead of being assigned to Midland, Harris began the year back in Class A at Stockton. Because of the medical issues, he didn’t make his season debut until late May.

Harris admits he was disappointed about his assignment.

“I had nothing left to prove in Class A,” he said. “But I felt great. I was having no physical problems. The problem was that I was going through what was really my spring training while playing against guys who were in midseason form.”

The results were not what Harris or the Athletics expected. He was batting only .244 after 21 games and for the second time in his career, Harris was given his release June 18. He returned home and waited for a phone call from anybody who was willing to offer him a job playing baseball. The only team that called was the Wild Things.

Harris signed with Washington just before the Frontier League all-star break in July, thus becoming the first former first-round draft pick to sign with the Wild Things. He is only the 10th former first-rounder to play in the Frontier League but one of those, pitcher Josh Smoker, who played for Rockford in 2014, is currently in the major leagues with the New York Mets.

“You can only control what you can control, so I’m glad I was given a chance to play here,” Harris said. “My job is to show what I can do. This is a place where you can show your talent.”

Since arriving in Washington, Harris has been batting in the leadoff spot and played all three outfield positions.

“He brings a lot of experience, confidence and a bit of energy,” Washington manager Gregg Langbehn said. “He has lengthened our lineup. We’ve been swinging the bats better and our run production has gone up since James has been in the lineup, though that’s not all because of him.”

Harris is batting only .240 but has three home runs and nine stolen bases in 19 games with the Wild Things, who hope that he can be a difference-maker as they attempt a playoff push over the final month of the season. Langbehn says that Harris’ batting average is deceiving.

“He really has been swinging the bat well,” Langbehn said. “An example of that was a game in Southern Illinois (a 1-0 loss). In James’ first three at-bats, he hit three line drives and each was caught either at the wall or on the warning track. And they weren’t fly balls, they were line drives. He had almost 1,200 feet of line drives in three at-bats and had nothing to show for it. I had never seen that happen before. He couldn’t have hit those balls any better and had nothing to show for them. All we could do was laugh about it.”