ANALYSIS/OPINION
This is how the season began for Bryce Harper.
“Make baseball fun again,” read the hat he wore while talking to reporters after hitting a home run on Opening Day for the Washington Nationals.
He had declared in ESPN the Magazine that “baseball is a tired sport, because you can’t express yourself. You can’t do what people in other sports do. I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair.”
Then he had to go out and play the rest of the season. That wasn’t much fun.
Harper may have been hurt for much of the season. After starting right where he left off with his MVP season last year with nine home runs and 24 RBI for the month of April, he struggled for much of the rest of the year.
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His cumulative season power totals are hardly embarrassing — 24 home runs, 86 RBI — but the home runs are nearly half of what he had hit the year before (43). His batting average, though, was embarrassingly low — .243, almost 100 points below what he had hit in 2015.
I would suspect at some point we will find out that Harper was hampered by physical problems, and his performance will wind up looking impressive given whatever injuries he was dealing with. If not, then the Minister of Fun may have to shelve his campaign to change the game. But I do believe that his 2015 MVP season is more indicative of the player Harper will be throughout his career.
What had nothing to do with injuries, though, was his play in Game 5 of the National League Division Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers — a game that his team lost 4-3 to end their season.
Was the showdown between Harper and Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Julio Urias in the fifth inning of Game 5 exciting? You know, the one where the pickoff leader of the league threw over twice to first after Harper had reached on a walk and then, on the third attempt, did indeed pick Harper off?
Was Harper running with flair two innings later when, with Jayson Werth on third, Harper stole second? The steal took the bat out of the hands of Washington’s best hitter, Daniel Murphy, who, now with first base open, was then intentionally walked to load the bases with two outs. The inning ended with Anthony Rendon striking out.
Those were two disappointing moments in that game because they show that after five years in the league, Bryce Harper (he turned 24 Sunday) is still not ready to become the leader of this team. A leader does not make those kind of arguably selfish mistakes in his team’s most important game of the year.
There was no talk about how boring the game was last week. No talk of flair or excitement.
“It didn’t happen for us,” he told reporters after the game. “You’ve got to take the good with the bad I thought we played a great game. I thought we played a great five games. We just weren’t able to get the job done.”
Well, at least Harambe had his moment in the sun again. Harper honored the late gorilla — killed after a three-year-old had fallen into the gorilla’s enclosure at the Cincinnati Zoo — with an “RIP Harambe” decal at the end of his bat handle.
So now we move on to 2017. For those of you marking time, that means we are two years away from Harper’s pending free agency, which of course means that during the off season and throughout next year, the talk will be about whether or not the Nationals can sign Harper to a contract extension — like they did for their other bookend young superstar this year, Stephen Strasburg.
Remarkably — and this is a testament to Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo’s ability to build this team with deep talent — none of the three trips Washington has made to the postseason in the past five years came in a year where the two back-to-back No. 1 draft picks carried the load for their team.
In 2012 Harper was a rookie, and while a driving force in their first NL East division title once he arrived in late April on his way to being named NL Rookie of the Year, it was hardly Bryce Harper’s team. And while Strasburg, coming back from Tommy John surgery, went 15-6 that year, he struggled near the end before he was shut down in early September and shelved for the postseason.
In 2014, Strasburg led the league in strikeouts with 242 and threw 215 innings while posting a 14-11 record with a 3.14 ERA. But Harper missed much of the season with injuries, and, in 100 games, hit 13 home runs and drove in 32 runs while batting .273.
They failed to click again this year. Strasburg got off to a Cy Young-type season, starting 12-0, but again struggled with injuries and finished the season on the disabled list with a partially torn tendon in his right arm.
The last we heard, he had “discomfort” after a brief throwing session.
Strasburg isn’t going anywhere, as he signed a seven-year, $175 million contract extension in May.
But there are serious doubts the Nats can also lock-up Harper, Scott Boras’ other Nationals superstar client. If Harper is the MVP player we saw in 2015, he will become the highest paid free agent in the history of the game.
Unless Mike Rizzo and the Lerner family can come up with a historic number for Bryce Harper to stay, the Nationals have two more years for the Strasburg-Harper duo to fulfill the championship expectations that came when both were introduced as the team’s No. 1 picks.
That is, if Mike Rizzo is the one making the decisions. We’ve heard nothing since the report surfaced during the division series that the Arizona Diamondbacks — the team where Rizzo once ran their minor league system — has asked permission from the Nationals to talk to Rizzo about becoming their team president.
If that happens, nobody in Washington is having fun.
• Thom Loverro hosts his weekly podcast “Cigars & Curveballs” Wednesdays available on iTunes and Google Play.
• Thom Loverro can be reached at tloverro@washingtontimes.com.
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