Bryce Harper: Baseball's Third Best Prospect

I have a theory that baseball fans everywhere are missing out on one of the great stories of our time. It's one developing in sleepy Hagerstown, Maryland. I don't really know whether Hagerstown is sleepy or not, but I'm guessing it is.

As winter's top 100 prospect lists started trickling in, I was shocked and appalled to read that insiders actually felt that the identity of the game's best prospect was up for debate. Mike Trout had taken the Midwest League by storm in the first half of 2010, and writers and talent evaluators alike were smitten. Bryce Harper? The shine had dimmed. Would he even be picked #1 overall if he had come out in 2012 rather than Rice third baseman Anthony Rendon? The best in the business at Baseball America didn't think so. Some were calling baseball's LeBron the #3 prospect in the sport.

Let's take another look at that map.

As a freshman and sophomore, Harper was the best high school player in the country. That's never been done before.

Instead of putting up silly, unchallenged numbers as a high school junior, Harper, at 17, played Junior College ball in a wood bat league, and hit .443/.526/.987 with 31 homers and 98 rbi in 66 games. Just take a moment. Those numbers are stupid. We're not talking about Jim Brown playing Pee Wee football, we're talking about a 17 year old trying to hit a sphere being pitched at varying speeds with varying movement with a rounded piece of lumber.

Harper won the Golden Spikes Award given to the best collegiate baseball player in the country, a first for a JuCo player, but it's my impression that Harper was still totally undervalued. Around this time, Baseball America projected Harper as having 80 power, but saw him as about a .270 hitter.

.270 my arse.

Harper got selected 1(1) by the Nationals last June. Around this time the vultures started circling. Baseball aficionados/amateur psychologists wrote that Harper had an attitude problem. Plus, he puts too much eye black on his face. He's greedy in hiring Scott Boras as his agent, and will hold out for the most money he can get his greedy, non-high school finishing little hands on in order to break a signing bonus record, which he didn't, and possibly even exercise his leverage as a JuCo player and opt out of a future with the lowly Nats in order to be picked 1(1) again the following year by a team more to his liking, which he didn't. The vultures wrote like that too. No periods anywhere.

Harper did sign minutes before the deadline, which is now the norm for top draft picks, and didn't play professionally until the glitzy Arizona Fall League. Yes, that's a 17 year old just turning 18 (he was born last Thursday), playing his first games as a pro in a league reserved for top prospects who've usually made it to double-A. The Nats tried to ease the transition for Harper by doing something rather strange. They placed him on the AFL taxi-squad, which meant he could only play twice a week. There's nothing better for an everyday player's rythym than playing twice a week. It reminds me of when Willie Randolph would bench guys on hot streaks just to mix things up.

So baseball's Lebron had just turned 18. He's competing against top double-A prospects, and he's playing twice a week. He struggled, right? This is baseball, after all. We're not talking about basketball or football where the most gifted athlete will reign supreme just on the strength of his being the most gifted athlete. This is baseball. The sport that's more mental than physical. The sport where when guys get in their heads and start struggling they don't have a bad half a game or a bad game, like in basketball, they have a bad season. Harper hit .343/.410/.629 in the AFL.

But the industry just wasn't sure. It was a very small sample size.

Mike Trout had an incredible start to his 2010 campaign in the pitcher friendly Midwest League, but he slugged .434 in 200 abs in the California League, where I once hit 7 homers in a game. Trout is an outfielder with average power. Maybe a tick above average. And for all the talk about his 80 speed, in the California League he was 11 for 17 in stolen base attempts, and so far in 2011 has the same number of steals as one Bryce Harper. Putting Trout above Harper on a list feels like one of those things you wouldn't want to admit to 5 years down the road.

Jonathan Mayo, who doesn't so much have an opinion himself as report on the general consensus of scouts he talks to, which by the way is quite the niche Mayo has carved out for himself, put Harper #3 on his annual prospect list. Yikes.

Baseball America, of course, got it right, but there were those on staff who liked Trout best.

Harper, with flashbulbs popping during his spring abs like it was the kickoff of the Super Bowl, struck out in his first two plate appearances. He was overmatched. We're talking about an 18 year old with the weight of the world on his shoulders going up against, in some cases, seasoned professionals.

Yeah, not so much.

Harper made what we in the trade call "an adjustment," and finished his stint in Major League Spring Training with a line of .389/.450/.556. The numbers are even more impressive when you consider that he started 0 for 2 with 2 strikeouts, and again was used sporadically, getting one or two abs a game.

So even though Harper was probably one of the 8 best position players the Nats had they sent him to low-A Hagerstown. They wanted to build up Harper's confidence, and saw no reason to get that arbitration clock ticking any faster than it had to. Surely, we'd all see a letdown when the grind of bus trips and meals at Denny's and life as a minor leaguer took its toll on, to this point, the relatively sheltered Harper.

...

But surely...

...

Let the letdown commence.

...

I mean this guy has an attitude problem. He's greedy. It's good to be confident, but he's overconfident. By the way. Speaking of overconfidence. It's always helpful when sports writers tell us what kind of personality traits world class athletes need to embody in order to be successful. Because who knows better than some nebbish who sits on a couch all day watching sports and punching the keys on his laptop what it takes to be a world class athlete? Nobody, that's who.

So Harper struggles. For a week or so Harper struggles. Then he goes into beast mode. He turns his dial to 11. Baseball America was right, he doesn't get cheated. But he also squares the ball up. Like a lot. Through the first 26 games of the young season, Harper is hitting .368. His on base percentage is .466. His slugging percentage is .724.

This guy is totally overhyped!!!

Or he's been underhyped, and we're all in for a real, real treat.

So now we play the waiting game. When will Washington promote young Skywalker? I mean Harper. It would delight this fan to see a jump to double-A in the near future. I'm going to go out on a limb and say he will tear the cover off the ball at that level, and then a September call up would be within striking distance. That's quite the accelerated timetable. Remember Harper will be 13 years old this October.

Comps for Bryce Aron Harper, or BAH as I like to call him, have included Adam Dunn with more athleticism, and Larry Walker with more power. How about Josh Hamilton circa 2010 without the drug addiction, constant injuries, and talk of Jesus. Well, maybe a little talk of Jesus.

Baseball America sees 80 power and a .270 average. In his first full season of pro ball, Harper has 7 homers, an impressive number, but he's hitting .368. He uses the whole field. He has ridiculous power, but Harper is first and foremost a baseball player. That's why he dons the war paint. That's why he doesn't wear batting gloves. That why he used to sleep in his catching equipment.

Sports writer Bill Simmons has a theory about never betting the football team everyone is sure will cover the spread. The idea being if everyone is in the know, they aren't. And while this is an amusing way to look at the world, it's not exactly scientific. And I think this is what people were guilty of when they started finding flaws in Harper's game and makeup that just aren't there.

And while I may be accused of splitting hairs, which I'm surely doing, a lot of people get paid a lot of money to evaluate these things. Mike Trout is really, really good. He's just not as good as Harper.

The baseball intelligentsia tired of poor Harper before it even got to see him play. Heck, no one has really seen him play. That's why I'm renting a car and taking my wife on a road trip to Hagerstown. It's why fans all over the country are descending on Hagerstown, Maryland.

It's like in Field of Dreams when James Earl Jones says, "They'll come to Hagerstown, Ray."

That's what he says. Trust me.

A Little Night Music

My wife has been a really good sport lately. That's not what I meant. Hey...

Audrey humored me by staying up late this week to watch the Mets get swept by the Dodgers, and has taken a genuine interest in this round of the NBA Playoffs. I've managed to cure her of her initial allegiance to Los Angeles sports teams, and she's picked up her own idiosyncratic likes and dislikes along the way. She loves Max Scherzer and LeBron. She despises Carlos Beltran and Pau Gasol. And she likes to call Fernando Tatis, "TAY-tis."

If ever there was a week to get into NBA basketball, this would be it. To be honest, I haven't really followed the NBA that closely since the Knicks became a Minor League hockey team, and with the exception of the glitz and gloss of last year's Lakers/Celtics match up, I generally find professional basketball unwatchable. I know that NBA purists say that the Spurs aren't a boring team to watch, but the Spurs are boring. The Mavericks are boring. In fact, all teams in any sport from Texas are boring. Except for the Cowboys. And they're not from Texas, they're from America.

What I've seen of the last four games between the Cavs, Magic, Lakers, and Nuggets has been truly entertaining. The game has so much more flow and rhythm and pace when the refs aren't calling a foul every ten seconds (I was going to write, "when the Knicks aren't playing."). Here's an idea for the NBA, officiate regular season games the way you officiate playoff games. Why are there two sets of rules? Why can players flop in the regular season, but not in the playoffs? It makes no sense.

Also, four teams from each conference should make the playoffs. The regular season is too long, all the games are meaningless because the strongest teams make the playoffs no matter how poorly they play, and you always know who's going to win in the first round, anyway.

Last night, the league's most marketable player did something truly extraordinary, something the NBA really needed him to do (I'm sure Daniel Stern and the networks were really psyched at the prospect of a possible Magic/Nuggets Final. No wait, they weren't).

I was a little boy when Michael Jordan hung in the air, and hit "The Shot." I was still little when, after the shot, he turned and did that arm throwing fist pump celebration that still stands as the single coolest reaction an athlete has ever had to anything. It was one of the first basketball games I ever watched on television, and my imagination was completely captured. Jordan had branded me, in one form or another, a fan for life; not Kenny "Sky" Walker, not Trent Tucker, not even Patrick Ewing (By the way, it's a little weird to see Ewing on the Magic bench, and eerie to see him once again bested by greatness).

I wonder how many little boys and little girls were reeled in by what LeBron did last night, and whether my Audrey was among them. He may have even branded her a fan for life, and bought me hours upon hours of guilt-free sports viewing. Either way LeBron, I, and the good people at the Disney Corporation, thank you.