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Will a Better Bryce Harper Emerge in the Second Half?

Bryce Harper has significant value to the Washington Nationals franchise whether he is on the field or not. The merchandising of a star means that he makes money for the team even on the dl. But there are legitimate questions about Bryce Harper’s value as a marquee player that only will be answered later this summer when he returns from an unfortunate thumb injury. As good as Harper has been since being called up as a 19-year old, there are still skeptics that have found fertile ground in his performance over the last year. The question is whether Bryce Harper can be an MVP caliber player or will something always keep him from reaching that potential?

Conversely, there are those writers who will never see anything BUT the wunderkind. Those pundits who actually made Matt Williams responsible for Harper’s latest injury fall into that category and ironically it is their willingness to lay the blame elsewhere that will limit Harper’s trajectory far more than Matt Williams. The idea, for anyone who missed it, was the decision to bench Harper after he failed to run out a come-backer several weeks ago made Harper’s hustle an issue, which then resulted in him trying to stretch a double into a triple, which is the play where he was injured.

For a young man to reach maturity he must take responsibility for his actions. He is the one making the decisions on the field. When he decides to try for third, to reclaim the mantle of Charlie Hustle, no one else is involved. The fans thrill to the sight of Harper’s helmet flying off his head as he charges toward third base full out. As much as we thrill to that vision, it flies in the face of unwritten rules of the game, name the one that says, “Never make the second out at third base.” It is rule #5 of the unwritten rules of the game according to Baseball Digest.

Bryce Harper made his mark in Washington back in 2012 and any fan of the game appreciates what he did in his Rookie of the Year campaign. But since then the story of gargantuan possibility has been littered with disappointment. Harper’s numbers were staggering on April 29, 2013 when he first ran into the outfield wall in Atlanta. He was batting .356 and already had 9 home runs in the first month of the season and it appeared he would have the kind of season long foretold. But “the “Kid,” was undone in two collisions, the first with an outfield wall in Atlanta and the more well-documented one in Los Angeles.

No one would fault Harper for running into a wall in pursuit of a fly ball, but he showed considerable inexperience as an outfielder in playing the ball in Los Angeles. It was actually more than just inexperience. It was a frightening lack of awareness as he ran face-first into the scoreboard. Like Mickey Mantle’s incursion with a storm sewer drain left uncovered in the Yankee Stadium outfield grass, Harper has never been quite the same since that incident. He has yet to reach the same level of play as he exhibited prior to the injury, hitting fewer than three home runs per month and batting just over .270 after coming back from the disabled list in May 2013. They are not the numbers of legend or of the pre-wall Bryce Harper.

Mantle tore up his knee in that accident in 1951 and he played with pain in his legs from that day forward. Mantle’s pain management techniques might not be the best prescription for Bryce Harper, but it is instructive to know that Mantle battled pain every day of his career to become one of the greats of the game. During a career that spanned eighteen seasons, Mantle missed 255 games because of injury.1 It is a large number, but given the degenerative condition he battled, it is a miracle he played as many as he did. When Harper returns from thumb surgery later this summer he will have already missed over 100 days to injury in his first three seasons. At this pace he will likely beat his hero’s mark in this one area rather easily.

Hustle plays have their place in the game and I doubt Matt Williams will do much to dissuade Harper from attempting them. What one can hope is that as he matures, Harper will learn the right place for his high-energy impact performance. He does not have that rare outlier sense of the game that gives a player not only the ability to know when he needs to step it up, but the ability to do so. Harper’s triple came with the bases loaded and one out. It was a clutch play and the mature player would have stood triumphantly on second base smiling back at his three team mates going back into the dugout. Harper wanted more and it was not the sense of the game that motivated him but his own ego.

The Bryce Harper who refused to stop at second base had been missing during the early days of April 2014. There were fewer attempts to challenge outfielders, fewer bullet throws to nail runners advancing. There was only a single long ball for the month and the jumbotron was growing weary of replaying it. The young Bryce Harper has only one way to rouse himself from his slumbers. Summoning his inner Charlie Hustle, he began to sting the ball with more authority. It did not always work out the way he planned as when two nights prior to the injury he bunted with two strikes and a man on first base, his team trailing and no one out. It was a bone-head play and that is the crux of the issue.

The internal stimulants that drive the young Bryce Harper are quite different from those of other players. Ian Desmond puts a little pinch between his cheek and gum and gets his motor revved that way. He tried to quit during the first weeks of the season, but slumped and can now be seen with his favorite tobacco pooching out his lip just above his chin line. Quitting is not easy and maturity may not come without growing pains for Harper as well. Harper feeds off the kind of plays that have been his undoing so far. The real question is can he quit and still thrive. Is there only one kind of Bryce Harper? Can the player who injures himself needlessly amping himself to the next level play smart baseball and succeed?

The truth of the matter is that Harper was out at third had the third baseman, Amiristi, fielded the ball cleanly. Frankly it was nothing more than a hot dog play and it could have cost the Nationals even if Harper had not injured himself. But for a team that was already without its star third baseman, Ryan Zimmerman, and regular catcher, Wilson Ramos, could Washington really afford the kind of play that Harper the individual seemed to need so badly?

Like all baseball fans, I want Bryce Harper to succeed. I want the Harper memorabilia to fly off the shelves in Washington. Heck, I have a signed Harper game-day jersey and I want that sucker to be worth something. But I cannot find any blame for Harper’s woes in the conduct of Matt Williams, quite the contrary, he is exactly what Harper needs. If the young man needs quiet, patient prodding to get him to take responsibility, Williams is likely to man for the job.

Everyone in Washington wants the young Bryce Harper to grow into his man-sized talents, but more than that they want a winning baseball team. Harper can be part of that. His niche is a large one, but he still needs to read those old unwritten rules and live by them. What would “the Mick” do?

Mantle was the MVP in 1956 and 1957 because his team won the pennant. The biggest impediment to Mike Trout winning the MVP Award has been the failure of the Los Angeles Angels to win their division. Miguel Cabrera has been the heart and soul of a great Tiger team and if Bryce Harper wants to bring that trophy home some day, he needs to play within the demands of his team and respect the game. While he is out, it might do Harper well to read those unwritten rules. They apply to everyone almost all of the time. Hopefully when Harper comes back from the dl in July, he will have done some soul searching while watching the game from the dugout. It should help him put it all together and start playing like the MVP player he can be.

1 Leavy, Jane, The Last Boy. p. 113.