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Mar 11, 2024

Best player in baseball? Bryce Harper has to be on the short list

The moment mattered as much as the milestone. The scoreboard, the situation, the pitcher on the mound. Those are the things that define the great ones. Those are the things that Bryce Harper lives to

The moment mattered as much as the milestone. The scoreboard, the situation, the pitcher on the mound. Those are the things that define the great ones. Those are the things that Bryce Harper lives to obliterate. On Wednesday afternoon, they were the things that served to capture the player he has become.

Three hundred home runs?

It’s a nice threshold. Round numbers are nice. Aesthetically speaking, 300 is easier on the eye than 299. It is also easier to divide. Ten seasons times 30 home runs, 12 seasons times 25, 15 seasons times 20. All of those things equal 300. It’s not nothing. It just doesn’t tell you much about Harper’s place in history.

This is what does: bottom of the eighth, the Phillies down by a run, four outs away from having a five-game winning streak snapped, a home crowd waiting to bid adieu with a weeklong road trip looming. The tying run was on first. The go-ahead run was exactly who you’d want it to be.

“He certainly has a flair for the dramatic,” manager Rob Thomson said with a rueful smile after watching Harper blast career homer 300 to give the Phillies an 8-7 lead.

It didn’t matter that it came in vain. The Angels may have answered Harper’s two-run shot off Matt Moore in the bottom of the eighth with three runs in the top of the ninth off Craig Kimbrel. They may have stopped the momentum of the National League’s scorching-est team. But the Phillies can’t win ‘em all, and Harper can’t win ‘em all for them. What matters is that it feels like he can.

Expectation. That’s what separates the all-timers from the mortals. It’s the thing that puts Hall of Famers like Harper on a different plane. There are few tasks more difficult than to wake up facing the expectation of greatness and fall asleep having delivered.

“He was supposed to be this good at 16 years old or whatever it was,” said Trea Turner, who broke into the big leagues with Washington during Harper’s 2015 MVP season there. “He’s had the hype his whole life. That’s the most impressive part, not necessarily how good of a player he is, but dealing with all that pressure at such a young age and being able to do it year in and year out.”

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The irony of No. 300 is that it doesn’t tell you much about the player Harper has become. He began the day tied with Tim Salmon and Andrew McCutchen for 158th on baseball’s all-time list. He finished it six shy of tying Ruben Sierra, Richie Sexson, and Fred Lynn for 149th. With all due respect to all five of those players, they aren’t him.

It is a short list, the guys who are.

Two of them were sitting and watching from the visitors’ dugout on Wednesday afternoon. Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani would top a lot of people’s lists of the best players in the game. But Harper belongs right there with them. There is no tier above him. We may not have said that five years ago when he signed with the Phillies. Now, there is no doubt.

The numbers are closer than you might think. In fact, Harper’s .924 OPS since 2018 is now a single point higher than Ohtani’s .923 career mark. Besides Harper and Ohtani, the only players with a higher OPS in 2,800-plus plate appearances since 2018 are Juan Soto, Mookie Betts, and Freddie Freeman. Expand it out to 2,400 plate appearances and Aaron Judge and Trout belong.

Harper’s teammates know. Listen to the one who actually played alongside Trout and Ohtani. After the Angels traded Brandon Marsh to the Phillies last August, it didn’t take him long to place Harper on that level.

“He’s there,” the outfielder said. “Mount Rushmore.”

The consistency is the thing. Eight straight seasons of 400-plus plate appearances and an .800-plus OPS, one of only five players with that streak. He has done it while playing part of one season with a surgically repaired thumb, part of another with a surgically repaired elbow. Both times, he returned to the field as fast as any human body could have been expected. Possibly even faster.

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“I value playing every day. I value going in there and working and grinding each day, no matter how you are feeling, no matter what you are doing,” Harper said. “People don’t care about that. They just want to see you play as many games as you can each year. I take pride in that. I love playing this game and, like I said, I love playing it with ‘Phillies’ across my chest.”

He is playing it as consistently well as anybody has ever played it. His 10 home runs since July 24 are the equivalent of 54 over 162 games. During that stretch, he is hitting over .340 with an OPS of over 1.125 while averaging nearly 1.5 runs plus RBIs per game.

Again, though, it’s the moments that matter. From the eighth inning of last year’s NLCS clincher to the eighth inning of Wednesday’s brief rally, Harper has established himself as one of the primest of the game’s prime-time players. His walk-up music might as well be a ringtone. All he does is answer.

It’s funny to think of those days a decade ago when Phillies fans dreamed of Trout in red pinstripes. As good as the Angels superstar is, as close to home as he may be, would anybody want to rewrite history?