Atlanta Braves should hire Marquis Grissom as boot camp instructor

A serious player from the Atlanta Braves’ past is still taking his baseball seriously — and training the next generation.

Longtime fans of Atlanta Braves baseball remember Marquis Grissom as the guy who secured the final out to win the 1995 World Series by ranging to left-center to corral an opposite-field fly ball off the bat of Carlos Baerga.

Grissom only spent two seasons with Atlanta — some kid named Andruw Jones started winning his Golden Glove awards — but had an excellent 17 season career with 6 different clubs that didn’t end until after the 2005 season.

He’ll turn 54 years old next month, but is obviously still very active in baseball pursuits.  In fact, he runs his own baseball camp in the South Atlanta area, and with that, he’s developing kids that are getting noticed.

The full story is told by Dave O’Brien in TheAthletic.  I’ll pause here to note that while it’s a subscription-only site, we quote often from their pages because of the great work they do — and this story is definitely enough to recommend the site by itself… everything re-told here comes from that link above.

Grissom used his site last year to fill the gap left for several players when their minor league seasons were shut down last year.  But this wasn’t for the faint of heart.  It was more like 5 days a week in the Georgia summer for 3½ months of work.

His program is putting the capital letters onto the term ‘Player Development’:

"“I had (Michael Harris) and my son and Lou Collier’s son, and I was out there actually trying to break them,” Grissom said. “I wanted to see how tough they were. I wanted to see what they had in them. Just because we don’t have baseball at the major-league level or minor-league level, or high school or college level, I wanted to see, what are you guys willing to put in?"

Yes — that’s the barely 20-year-old Michael Harris who is rocketing up the prospect charts as the next most-likely Top 100 outfielder the Braves have.

Turns out Grissom has been coaching him — and noticing that he’s “different” — since Harris was 15 years old.  Last Summer just took that up to a new level.

It worked, too.  Harris and the others all took everything Grisson dished out and embraced the program.  By all accounts, he’s all the better for it, too.

Atlanta Braves have themselves another phenom coming

Harris was then invited to participate in the Braves Alternative Training site camp.  From there, the education continued as he got to face near-MLB level pitching on an everyday basis.  That’s a far cry from the A-ball guys he likely would have seen during a “normal” 2020 season.

The crazy part?  Grissom says that Harris is “ready“… as is MLB ready:

"“This is just me talking, but I’ve been knowing the kid for the last six or seven years, and he’s ready,” Grissom said. “And when I say he’s ready, he’s ready. We’ve got three good outfielders, four good outfielders right now in Atlanta. But this kid is ready.”"

The team has certainly given him an opportunity to strut his stuff this month, too.  Before being reassigned a couple of days ago, Harris was put into nine Spring games, getting 11 plate appearances.

He hit .400 with a walk and a homer for a 1.255 OPS.  Mind you, he’s been 20 years old for a week.

There’s a chance that Harris might have gotten this-good/this-quick based on his own talent.  It’s more likely, though, that Grissom’s tutelage has accelerated that timeline by at least a year.

Grissom takes all kinds of players at his facility (a term which probably makes it sound more formal than it really is).

Given his results, though, the Atlanta Braves might just want to throw him some extra funds for upgrading a few things and then sending over their promising prospects for a mandatory “boot camp” experience.

Meanwhile… the possibility of a Harris / Pache / Acuna outfield as early as 2022 is starting to look like a real possibility:  a scary-good combination made more possible thanks to an old friend who still loves to teach the game.