Thursday is Mike Trout’s 23rd birthday, an occasion to heap plaudits on the Angels phenom now acclaimed — about two years late, but hey — as the best baseball player on the planet.
Bryce Harper owns a career .268 average, .350 on-base and .461 slugging (in other words, Roger Maris). He has 45 homers and 30 steals in less than two full seasons’ worth of games. He doesn’t turn 22 until the middle of October. Yet as the Nationals outfielder endures injuries and slumps in a lost 2014 campaign, public opinion has declined to the point that “Bryce Harper to the minors?” is a reasonable radio talking point in the nation’s capital.
“I don’t think it’s stupid,” Nationals manager Matt Williams said when he fielded the question Wednesday morning on 106.7 The Fan. “Generally, if you have young players, that’s what you do. But this guy is a special young player. We all know that. It’s different. I think he works hard every day. He’s the first one in the ballpark, generally, to get his day going. He’s grinding. We’re doing everything we can to get a good feel going in there and help him with his confidence and all that. It’s not easy, by any stretch. But I don’t know if it’s a good idea at this point to do that.”
Notice he didn’t say: “Clown question, bro.”
Later Wednesday, Williams covered up for his tepid Harper endorsement by throwing a fit for the benefit of reporters.
“It [ticks] me off to even think about that somebody would take a comment I make on the radio and infer that I’m thinking one way or the other,” Williams said, according to the Washington Post. “It’s not fair to the kid. It’s not fair to the rest of the guys in that clubhouse to even think about sending Bryce Harper to the minor leagues, or to cause a stir. It’s unacceptable. It won’t happen. Is that good enough for you?”
The Washington Post story notes how two major injuries — a bruised knee in 2013 that required offseason surgery and a torn thumb ligament this April — required Harper to fiddle with the whippy swing that made him the No. 1 pick of the 2010 draft and immediately successful when he arrived in the bigs in 2012.
Harper has a .250 average, three homers, 57 strikeouts and one benching for not running out a groundball in 53 games this season. Rather than seeing it as a product of growing pains, and physical pain, it’s become a source of friction in the organization.
It adds up to Harper’s situation being a bona fide headache for a first-place team with a comfortable division lead and a 21-year-old generational talent batting sixth.
There’s a lot of middle ground between Syracuse and being the National League’s answer to Trout’s uninterrupted brilliance. Some folks in Washington seem to be having a hard time seeing that.