Now, what is broken in baseball can be fixed, and plenty of players would love to be broken like Harper is broken. The six weeks since the Cubs series have made him human after a National League MVP season and start to 2016 in which he looked like some evolved baseball-whacking automaton.

Before the four games in Chicago, Harper was hitting .266/.372/.649. Over the four-game series at Wrigley, Harper managed to raise his on-base percentage 60 points. In 19 plate appearances, Chicago walked him 13 times, including six in the series’ final game. Since then, Harper’s line: .246/.383/.373 in 36 games.

It’s a bad stretch, no doubt, and for the time being has cooled the talk of Bryce Harper, $500 million man, though those talks might’ve been a bit overheated in the first place. One glance at the landscape of big-money contracts shows a veritable wasteland polluted with oodles of dollars tied to underperformance. Part of that is the reality of free-agent deals expected to look like a mess by the end. Some of it is shocking underperformance, similar to …

1. Bryce Harper spending the last month and a half looking like a modern-day Dave Magadan. Behind the triple slash, according to FanGraphs, is a line-drive rate down about 50 percent from last season and a soft-hit ball rate of 21.8 percent – almost double last season. Harper isn’t hitting the ball well, and since the walk festival in Chicago, pitchers have approached him differently.

It’s not that they’re walking him demonstrably more. They aren’t. (His walk rate pre-Chicago: 15 percent. His walk rate post-Chicago: 18.1 percent.) For example, in the season’s first month, Harper was destroying down-and-in strikes, slugging 1.556 off them. Since the Cubs series ended, Harper is hitless in that zone, with pitchers throwing half as many pitches to that location.

These zones are comprised of small samples, mind you, easily changed over the course of a couple games. Still, with pitchers not going inside on Harper, they’ve increased their amount of pitches in the bottom two zone, on the outside corner and further outside, to around 48 percent of what Harper is facing.

Changes necessitate adjustment. Harper hasn’t adjusted properly. He is great, so he will, which is what …

2. Giancarlo Stanton keeps telling himself as his slump reaches unsightly proportions. It started the same weekend as Harper faced the Cubs, and since then Stanton is hitting .158/.242/.246 with 50 strikeouts in 114 at-bats. Pitchers across baseball this season are hitting .133/.162/.171 with a lower strikeout rate than Stanton’s.

View photos Giancarlo Stanton has not lived up to his $325 million contract (Getty Images) More

His line for the season is .211/.314/.421, and the two-time NL slugging champ, whose .606 slugging percentage last season ranked behind only Harper’s, is getting outslugged by three teammates (Marcell Ozuna, Christian Yelich and Derek Dietrich), with a fourth, Martin Prado, mere thousands of a point behind.

All of this is material not just because Stanton is Stanton but because of Nov. 19, 2014, when Stanton signed the largest contract in professional sports history. The Miami Marlins guaranteed him $325 million in a 13-year deal that runs through 2027. This is the second year of that deal. Chances are it will last only four more years, as Stanton rights himself and opts out, but if this is something more fundamental – something, gulp, that doesn’t abate – this will make the seven years remaining on …

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