The VandySports 100: No. 88, Brian Harris

Shortstop Brian Harris is the No. 88 player on the countdown of the best we've covered at Vanderbilt.

Honors and awards: 2009 first team All-Southeastern Conference

2009 SEC All-Defensive team

2009 SEC Player of the Week (Week 10)

2010 team MVP

In the VU record book: Single-season walks: fifth (55, 2010)

NCAA record, most hit-by-pitches in a season (36, 2010)

Most runs scored in a game (Georgia, 2010)

Before VU: Led Nashville's Montgomery Bell Academy to a 2004 state title. Was an all-state football and baseball player in 2004 and started for four years in both. MBA won state titles in football in 2003 and 2004.

Freshman (2007): After redshirting in 2006, Harris played 29 games and started eight on a squad that ranked No. 1 most of the regular season. That team won the Southeastern Conference and the league tournament before bowing out to Michigan in the championship of the Nashville Regional. Played 10 SEC games, starting one and hitting .091/.231/.091 in league play.

Sophomore (2008): Played 42 games, starting 31, including 20 SEC games with 17 starts, for a team that advanced to the Tempe Regional. Seventeen starts came at third in replacing the injured Pedro Alvarez, with 14 coming at second. Hit .207/.329/.293 in regular-season league play. Had three hits and three runs vs. Xavier. Hit his first home run (vs. Lipscomb) and his first conference home run (Mississippi State).

Junior (2009): Played all 64 games, starting 63 and becoming the team's regular shortstop while winning All-SEC and All-SEC Defensive honors for a squad that fell in the finals of the Louisville Regional, in which he hit .286 with five runs scored. Hit .330/.430/.531 in league regular-season contests, and led the league by being hit with 21 pitches. Fielded .971 overall and .981 in the league. Had two hits, a home run and three RBIs in an SEC tournament game vs. Arkansas. Was 4-for-4 with a homer, two runs scored and two RBIs vs. Belmont.

Senior (2010): Hit .235/.431/.304 in SEC regular-season play for a team that came within a win of making the College World Series. Played in 65 of the team's 66 games, and started 64. Fielded .956 at short and .932 in SEC regular-season games. Led the team with a .489 on-base percentage. Reached base eight times in 10 tries in a regular-season game with Louisville. Went 2-for-4 with two walks and tied a school record with five runs scored vs. Georgia.

Post-VU: Harris played a season of Rookie ball and another between a pair of independent teams before calling it quits after 2011. He joined baseball as a volunteer assistant at Illinois-Chicago and is now in his third year as an assistant at Tulane.

Final thoughts, and why I ranked him where I did: Harris wasn't going to make a lot of highlight films. He came to VU without much fanfare and didn't have standout tools, but, he's the embodiment of how hard work and dedication to doing little things that don't get much fanfare contribute to success. Harris was hit by pitches a staggering 71 times--that's 8.7 percent of his career plate appearances!--and yet sat out just one game the last two years while starting all but three of them. He did all this while playing one of the two most demanding positions in the field, and playing it at a very high level.

Harris's career gets dinged slightly for context, but through no fault of his own. The two seasons in which he was a regular were the two highest-scoring seasons in baseball during coach Tim Corbin's tenure. Harris also benefitted from a rare five-year career, meaning that he racked up the peak of his accomplishments at times where most VU stars were already playing professionally. On the other hand, VU had All-Americans with Ryan Flaherty at short and Pedro Alvarez at third in his first two seasons, so most anybody wasn't going to crack the left side of the infield, anyway.

That context keeps Harris further down the list, but sporting a career.438 on-base percentage, playing well at a key defensive position for two years and being a part of four NCAA tournament teams makes him an easy pick for VandySports 100 honors.

* "RC/ARC-27" are how many runs a player "created" per 27 outs, according to a Bill James formula. The first is a player's raw total for that season, and the second is the same number adjusted to an average run-scoring environment from 2003-19.