Harper’s impatience takes toll
Nationals star struggling lately to be selective
PHOENIX — Day after day before the Washington Nationals left on their seven-game road trip, then for a few afternoons during it, Bryce Harper took batting practice on the field an hour or so before his teammates.
Various players joined him for these sessions — Daniel Murphy one day, Matt Wieters the next, and so on — but nothing else changed. Harper, in his gray Vegas Golden Knights T-shirt and allblack Washington Nationals hat, swung hard and for the fences, sending baseball after baseball far out of whichever stadium hosted his practice sessions that day.
The man behind these sessions was hitting coach Kevin Long, who thought Harper needed a reminder of what it felt like to do damage on the most hittable pitches. He saw the 25year-old swinging at lesshittable pitches, a bad habit that need not derail him if pitchers were going to pitch around him anyway. Only Barry Bonds, in his record breaking 2004 season, walked more in March and April than Harper did this year. If Harper would just be patient, he would walk plenty, too. If pitchers came at him, he needed to make sure he punished them for it.
But early this season, Harper has not punished them enough, nor been patient enough — or perhaps just not been settled enough for anyone around the Nationals to feel completely comfortable with his performance.
“Enough,” of course, is relative here. He was doing “enough” to be tied for the major league lead in home runs with 13 entering Monday night. He was doing “enough” to rank in the top 20 in on-base-plus-slugging percentage.
Yet during a season many will spend trying to decide how much he is worth, Harper has not done enough to stave off conversations about the extent of his superstardom, nor provided much clarity about exactly what kind of player he is — and exactly what kind of player he will be.
More than anything this season, Harper has been inconsistent.
In March and April, he walked more than almost anyone in MLB history: 38 times in 29 games. In May, he has walked three times in 12 games, and his onbase percentage during this month is nearly 200 points lower than it was at the end of April.
Harper expressed frustration and began swinging at pitches he couldn’t annihilate.
“At 25, you want to hit the baseball,” Harper said.
Harper looked better for a few days, then slipped into an 0-for-19 slump that earned him his first day off all season and a bump to the second spot in the order. Harper went 5-for-18 during the team’s fourgame series at Arizona, with two doubles and a home run. He is hitting .236, and more than a third of his hits (13 of 33) are home runs. Five of his 11 hits in May are homers, a ratio uncharacteristic for Harper, who has earned a reputation as more of a complete hitter than an allor-nothing type.
Agent Scott Boras, the man with the honor — or, perhaps, the burden — of chasing what many expect will be the biggest contract in baseball history for one of the most talked-about talents in generations, sees a small sample size in Harper’s early ups and downs.
“What I go by is if a player is healthy. Is he hitting the ball hard?” Boras said last week while sitting a few rows behind home plate as Harper took batting practice at Petco Park. “Coming down here, man, the ball — wow, it’s just coming off his bat, and it’s loud. Obviously you have 100 at-bats, and sometimes you get eight more hits or eight less. But I just worry about how he’s hitting the ball. And he’s been hitting it really hard.”