Bryce Harper: raising the bar, then clearing it

On the same MLB-TV show that announced Harper’s award, his 2013 season was already being compared to Trout’s numbers at 20, an MVP-worthy performance.

That’s not fair.

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Harper may accept it. Privately, he may even relish it as motivation. As often happens with Harper, he sometimes seems to have a better grasp on his place in the baseball scheme than others.

“Icing on the cake,” he called the award. As for his 2012 goals, “I didn’t reach ’em,” he said, then added that, “I want to win a World Series. I want to put that ring on my finger and give that to the town and city of D.C. They deserve that.

“We didn’t reach that. Nothing else really matters to me.”

Some won’t believe that. Perhaps no one is that team-centric. But Harper has always listed Pete Rose and George Brett as primary heroes. He knows the game. He realizes whom he’s picking. Rose wanted to pass Ty Cobb in hits and Brett wanted to hit .400, not .390. But both were famous within their own clubs as the epitome of “us first,” not “me first” players.

Asked to look back on his whole season, an open-ended question he could have taken in any direction, including back toward himself, Harper said: “It was a lot of fun with a great group of guys. They made it the way I wanted it. Play hard. Play the right way.”

What about being sent back to AAA to start the season? Harper talked about what he learned at Syracuse from Jason Michaels.

Jason Michaels? Yes, 36-year-old veteran, over 1,000 games in the majors, somebody who could teach you something. After all, Harper learned from Jayson Werth how to take a secondary lead from third base when a left-handed pitcher (such as Cole Hamels) makes a routine pick off throw to a left-handed first baseman. If you know that detail, added to a detail, on top of another detail, you might get a good enough jump to steal home on a guy who put you on base by drilling you with a pitch.

Right now, that really is Harper’s core level: baseball, baseball, could I have some more baseball please, sir. Who knows when or if that gets old, but it certainly hasn’t yet; and it’s the mostly likely path to the kind of rapid, almost breathtaking improvement that other off-the-charts talents have made in their early 20s. If you aren’t rocketing up now, you may never.

You can hear in Harper’s voice that he doesn’t entirely expect to be believed, like he’s watched the “Bull Durham” cliches 500 times too many, yet his play, so far, always seem to back up his words.

“I love [the game] with everything I got,” he said. “I’m going to play every day like it’s my last.”

Oh, don’t put it that way. Everyone wants another two or three thousand days of Bryce Harper. Winning rookie of the year at 19 is the first solid chapter of a truly special career. Many more will be needed — and demanded. From everything Harper’s shown so far, they will probably be provided.

For previous columns by Thomas Boswell, visit washingtonpost.com/
boswell.