Another road game meant another crowd to jeer Bryce Harper, this time in Colorado. Parents with young children in tow shouted at him and his team. Such is the perverse respect, with its unspoken lining of fear, that fans weaponize against the best player on the best team in the nervousness of the last inning of a one-run game.
Harper disappointed them. He led his team to victory. It felt so good and so overwhelming in the face of hostility that he broke down and cried.
He was 11 years old.
“There was a runner on second from the guy that was trying to close it out and they brought me in to pitch,” Harper says. “I got like a pop-up and a punchout and a groundout or something. I remember crying after the game because the pressure and the emotion was so high that it kind of all came out. The parents and everybody were screaming and yelling.
“The crying might sound bad, but it wasn’t bad. It was just the release of the emotion of playing. I’m really thankful that I had those opportunities to go through those moments.
“I go back a lot now to when I was younger, and I feel like those moments got me ready for these types of moments now. I loved growing up and playing in those situations.”
Twenty years later, Harper, 31, never has taken an unscrutinized at bat. Never has he enjoyed the luxury of anonymity. Never has he known the usual latitude of making youthful mistakes out of the spotlight. Never has he played baseball without the other team and most spectators knowing exactly who he was and the greatness of which he was capable.
From being the first preteen superstar hired gun at the birth of the travel ball era, to the cover of Sports Illustrated at 16, to the youngest unanimous MVP at 22, to the most expensive free agent in history at 26, Harper has lived his entire baseball life in the crucible of fame. Living nonstop in the pressure of this ecosystem, he swears, is what he loves best about baseball.
But the Cubs were three years into an eight-year, $184 million commitment to Jason Heyward, another lefty-hitting right fielder. Harper and his agent, Scott Boras, also found a roadblock with the Yankees. New York had traded for Giancarlo Stanton, a power-hitting outfielder, 12 months earlier. Boras told the Yankees Harper would be happy to play first base. New York GM Brian Cashman said the team didn’t think Harper could play first base and that the roster was loaded with seven outfielders, the likes of which included Miguel Andujar, Clint Frazier and Brett Gardner. The Yankees passed. A left-handed power vacuum in the Bronx would remain until Cashman traded for Juan Soto last winter.
Asked to explain such a well of confidence, Harper says, “I feel like there are certain situations that you’re sitting there, and they don’t want to make a bad pitch, [so] they hang a curveball. And there are times where they do make good pitches, and I get out. But I really want to be in those situations because it gives me that chance, that moment, that opportunity. And it’s just fun. The more pressure in the situation or the later in the game it is, the more I really, really enjoy it—especially late in the year.”
Days shorten. Nights cool. Tensions rise. The season of Harper dawns. And the stakes only are getting higher. This fall the Phillies’ first baseman will play in his seventh postseason in his 13 years in the big leagues. His accomplishments already evoke those of the all-time greats. His combination of power, patience and speed is so elite that he is only the third player to reach 300 home runs, 1,000 walks and 100 stolen bases through age 31. (The others are Mickey Mantle and Barry Bonds.)
After making his debut at age 19, Harper played seven years with the Nationals, including an MVP season in 2015 when at 22 he displaced Babe Ruth as the youngest player (by three years) to hit more than 40 homers and draw more than 120 walks in the same season.
As good as Harper was in Washington, he has been even better statistically in his six years with the Phillies. What best defines him, though, are the things that thrill him most: the biggest games and the biggest moments. His career slugging percentage in the postseason is .613, almost 100 points higher than his regular season mark of .521. Among the 200 players with at least 150 postseason plate appearances, only four have slugged better than Harper: Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Nelson Cruz and George Brett. “It’s weird, because the bigger the moment, the more chill he is,” says Phillies hitting coach Kevin Long. “The more it becomes, O.K., I was built for this. I’ve been in pressure situations my whole life. And [the game] really slows down for him.”
Says Phillies senior advisor Larry Bowa, the former shortstop and Yankees coach, “He reminds me a lot of [Derek] Jeter, though Jeet wasn’t the power hitter this guy is. If he fails in the ninth inning, he wants to be up there tomorrow in the ninth inning. He don’t give a s---. I mean, he cares about coming through, but he doesn’t back off the moment. If the game’s on the line in the World Series, he wants to be the guy up there. That’s hard to do. And it’s not whistling past the graveyard, either. He wants to be there. He really does.”
Harper’s teams in Washington and Philadelphia are 26–23 in the postseason but have never won the last game. In the 2022 World Series, the Phillies took two of the first three games against the Astros before Houston won three straight. Last year Philadelphia was one win away from returning to the World Series but lost Games 6 and 7 of the NLCS to Arizona. This season may be Harper’s best chance.
“Since a very young age,” Harper says, “I’ve always said the same three things. I want to be the best I can be. I want to win championships. And I want to be one of the greatest of all time.
“It’s always kind of been that way, right? But I’m satisfied with where I am. Happy. I’m so happy to be a Philadelphia Phillie. I’m so happy to be here and be part of this organization. I’m satisfied with where I am. It’s just … those three things? I’ll never be satisfied on those.”
What is pressure? Pressure is a measure of consequence. Pressure is the specter of failure tiptoeing on your consciousness like cat feet on the prowl. It is facing Padres reliever Robert Suarez in the eighth inning of 2022 NLCS Game 5 with your team down 3–2. Harper turned to Long with a gleam in his eye and said, “Well, let’s give them something to remember.”
Says Long, “I was like, Whoa!”
Suarez had thrown Harper nine straight fastballs in the series until, with the count 1-and-2, he suddenly dropped an exquisite changeup over the plate that sunk a sliver below the strike zone. Harper didn’t budge.
“I have no idea how he took that changeup with two strikes,” Bowa says. “It was nasty. He sat on it like he knew. If you’re the pitcher and you throw a bastard pitch like that and you don’t get a reaction? You gotta say, ‘What the f---, are you serious? How am I going to get this guy out?’ And once they went to the heater, I knew it.”
With the next pitch, Suarez threw a 98.9-mph fastball on the outside edge. Harper sent it the other way into the left-field seats for the pennant-winning home run.
“He puts together that at bat and you’re like, Wow, ” says Long, who has coached four teams into the World Series. “He wasn’t trying too hard. He was just focused. Completely focused and calm. Then he’s just kind of calmly running around the bases.”
The homer came in the midst of an 11-game playoff stretch—nine of which were Phillies wins—where Harper hit .455 with five homers. “Even when he was on that run in the playoffs, he would just come to the cages and there was this confidence about him,” Long adds. “There wasn’t an edginess at all, which I see a lot from great players in those big games. They’re not at ease. You can tell. You know they’re a little antsy. They get a little uptight. Bryce is none of that. He’s got that mindset of, I want these at bats. I was built for these at bats.”
What is pressure? Pressure, if you are a Phillies player, is listening to sports talk radio the afternoon after a 5–0 loss to the last-place Marlins that had fans at Citizens Bank Park booing their team. So dark is the mood in the city, the WIP hosts designate this day, Aug. 14, as Phillies Therapy Day. Pull up a couch and vent.
And yet there is Harper behind the wheel of his 2010 FJ Cruiser with 130,000 miles on the odometer, driving to the ballpark and choosing to listen to sports talk radio, just as he does on every commute. “The only thing that he does that I wouldn’t do if I were him is listen to those radio shows,” Bowa says. “But I’m sure that’s nothing to him. He’s been in the spotlight for so long—if anybody can handle it, it’s him.”
For 30 minutes until he crosses the Walt Whitman Bridge and steers the FJ into his spot at the Bank, Harper listens to the WIP hosts and callers try to make sense of what’s gone wrong with the Phillies, whose losing streak had stretched to four.
The general sense is somebody needs to step up and snap the team out of this funk. Everybody’s got an opinion.
“I don’t think Bryce is that kind of guy.”
“Well, guess what? You need to be that guy.”
“When you’re the face of the franchise, when you’re the star of the team, unfortunately this gets pinned on you.”
“It’s like they’re all trying to hit seven-run home runs.”
Harper says he is entertained by it.
“I don’t get agitated,” Harper says. “I want to take in the realness of that. The fans, they’re serious when they talk about it. Obviously, at the same time, I don’t listen to it for the ‘Hey, let’s kill the Phillies’ or ‘Kill Bryce’ or whatever. I listen to it for all sports, and I think that’s a well-known thing that I do—listen to it so I can figure out what’s going on with all the teams. Because I’ll do it in the offseason, too. I’ll throw it up on my phone.
“We’re getting booed off the field against Miami, and it’s real. And that’s why I love playing here because they care so much about our team. They care about what we do, how we do it and what each guy’s doing. I think they care so much to a fault, where it’s just like, ‘Gosh, man, we want them to win so bad.’ Just like us. We walk in here wanting to win every single day. I respect that so much. And over the years of playing here, you learn and you see why they care so much.
“I think they find when they do that kind of stuff that it makes us play harder. And obviously, I think it does that.” Says Phillies owner John Middleton, “Most of the time it’s great, but sometimes talk radio in Philadelphia is a tough thing. The point being, it doesn’t bother him. He wants to be locked into the Sixers, Eagles and everything that’s going on. It’s hard to make some people believe this, but he’s exceeded all our expectations.”
Harper was a free agent after the 2018 season, which he calls “a tough year for me.” He hit .249 for the Nationals but still led the NL in walks, was second in times on base and ranked in the top eight in homers (34) and RBIs (100). The kid who grew up with a poster of Mickey Mantle on his bedroom wall was fascinated with being a Yankee. He also liked the idea of playing at Wrigley Field for the Cubs. “I really liked that ballpark,” he says, “because the gaps were small.”
But the Cubs were three years into an eight-year, $184 million commitment to Jason Heyward, another lefty-hitting right fielder. Harper and his agent, Scott Boras, also found a roadblock with the Yankees. New York had traded for Giancarlo Stanton, a power-hitting outfielder, 12 months
Asked if he thought he would be a Yankee, Harper says, “If Stanton wasn’t there, yeah. I think if [late owner George Steinbrenner] was there, I would’ve been. Because I wanted to be. But, at that time, though, I didn’t really fit. I didn’t fit their mold. They didn’t want me to play first base. And I’m at this moment now where I’m glad I didn’t go there.”
Late that winter, Middleton met twice with Harper near his Las Vegas home, the second time at a dinner their wives attended. “It was all about Bryce evaluating me and me evaluating Bryce,” Middleton says. “He wanted to know, was I a person who cared to win? And would I persist? And I was looking for the same thing. I mean, the first thing you have to look for is, If I hand this guy hundreds of millions of dollars, what’s he going to do with it? How does that change him? His work habits? His focus? His priorities in life?”
The other part of the calculus was how would he hold up against the 50,000-watt demands of Philly sports fans.
“Even among East Coast teams,” Middleton says, “and I’m including Boston and New York, this is a particularly demanding place. That’s what you look for: Can they handle the pressure?”
Middleton was blown away. By the time he got back to Philadelphia, he told club president Andy MacPhail and general manager Matt Klentak, “We’ve got to sign him.” And Middleton was not interested in quibbling over the terms.
“You know it’s going to be over 300 [million],” Middleton says he told his top executives. “So, let’s not screw around at 250 or 275 or even 300. It’s going to be more than three, so let’s just go.
“And by the way, if you’re over three, you know 325 is the record. And you know there’s not a lot of difference between 320 and 330, but it puts you over the 325 and psychologically it’s good for the player and it’s good for the player to know, ‘We think you’re worth this. We think you’re worth having the highest value contract in the history of North America.’”
Harper signed for $330 million over 13 years, with none of the opt-outs or options Boras loves to sprinkle atop his deals. Harper insisted on such simplicity. He wanted a long-term home with none of the where-will-he-end-up drama that followed him every day in Washington. He found that home. He will turn 39 years old when the contract ends. And then he wants to keep playing.
“I want to play until I’m 42,” he says. “That’s the number. Because I feel like I’m getting better as I’ve gotten older. And I’m not saying I wasn’t as good, but I feel like the focus that I put into it, on and off the field, food-wise, workout-wise, how I’m doing it—that has helped me on a day-to-day basis.”
From the coffee he drinks to the food he eats to the 15-minute cage routine before every game, Harper has a detailed plan to make it happen. He is happier and, yes, better than he was in Washington.
“I’m a way different person and player now than I ever was in D.C.,” Harper says. “I hated that version of myself.”
Because?
“It just wasn’t … I don’t know.”
You were just a little too rough around the edges as a player?
“No, I don’t think that. I just … I feel like being here is just, it’s different. Yeah. It’s just different. It’s just the right environment.”
At the crest of the Walt Whitman Bridge, Harper’s FJ Cruiser is 150 feet above the Delaware River. The radio may be tuned to sports talk, but it is moments like this, at the apex of his journey and a fresh night of wearing the Phillies uniform ahead of him, that the words of Whitman himself provide the soundtrack to his life:
Oh, to be alive in such an age, when miracles are everywhere, and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy, of greater marvels yet to be.
Harper has the most encyclopedic baseball mind since Pete Rose, who supposedly could calculate his updated batting average by the time he reached first base with a single. Harper knows baseball history better than many sportswriters. He can run through his biggest snubs of the Hall of Fame, starting with Dale Murphy, with appropriate statistics. The day after the 5–0 loss to the Marlins, he joked to Bowa about needing some of Bowa’s 1980 Phillies teammates “to come back and get us going.” Then, Bowa says, “He proceeded to rattle off our whole f---ing lineup.”
The Colorado story begets another. The next year he is playing in the semifinal of a 12-and-under tournament in Chino Hills, Calif. His travel team is losing, 2–1, in the fifth inning of the standard six-inning youth game. The stands are packed, including the two other semifinal teams. As usual, everybody is rooting against Harper and his team.
“We’re one of the best teams in the country,” he says. “The other teams are all hoping we lose because nobody likes us, which is fine. So I go up there and there’s an open bag at first base; a guy on second. They brought in a lefty. Twelve years old and they bring a lefty in!”
First pitch: home run. Dead center.
“And the place, it just went silent,” he says. “My team, we were going nuts. But those are the moments that I remember. I loved it. Those are the moments that I absolutely just really enjoyed. You get pressure from the fans and media and people and whatever, but I enjoyed it so much that now those are the moments that I really, really just love.”
As a minor leaguer, Harper brought major league attention to places such as Hagerstown, Md., Harrisburg, Pa., and Syracuse. “It was like Elvis and the Beatles were put together everywhere he went,” says Washington general manager Mike Rizzo, who has been in professional baseball for 43 years. “It was crazy. We had to hire more security everywhere he played. And every at bat was scrutinized. He’d go 0-for-3 in a minor league game and people were saying, ‘He’s overrated. What happened to him?’ And then he’d go 4-for-4, and they were anointing him the next Ted Williams.
“There is no question about it: the brighter the lights, the bigger the situation, the better he played. I don’t throw that around lightly. I mean, there’s maybe two or three players in my career that I could say that about. He’s one of them.” With Washington, a young Harper swung the bat the way a young Tiger Woods swung a golf club: violently. So violently it made you wonder how their bodies could withstand the torque over the time. Harper would coil into his backside with his hips and torso as if spring-loading, then unleash all that stored energy with so much forward momentum his back foot would leave the ground as his head and front shoulder jerked upward. Long, who also coached him with the Nats in 2018, called it “catapulting” into the baseball. Sometimes he swung so hard, the helmet flew off his head.
“Back in the day, it was more of this gifted athlete and hitter who thought, ‘I could go up there and pretty much do whatever I want,’ ” Long says. “He’ll tell me now, ‘Back in the day I never had to think about it. I could do a high leg kick. I could do a toe-tap. I could get my foot down early. I could spread out. It didn’t matter. I was going to hit a bullet somewhere.’”
Long believes Harper has become a better hitter because “he understands his swing and his mechanics at a high level.” Harper has reduced his swings to two primary versions: a modified leg kick and a toe-tap. Occasionally, when he puts a premium on not striking out, he spreads his legs and goes into two-strike battle mode.
“I mean, I still swing hard,” Harper says, “but I swing really hard on the first couple pitches. And after that, I kind of tone it down. I want to be able to swing hard, but I take my chances early.”
The improvisation of his youth has given way to precision and routine as a veteran. Before every game Harper works through the same sequence of drills in the batting cage. He begins with a series of tee work with one-hand swings, a short bat, a heavy bat and a net bisecting the plate and moves to drills in which Long flips balls to him very slowly and then from extreme right and left angles. Throughout the sequence, Harper hits with a bag in front of his back leg, a reminder not to catapult but to drive his back knee through the baseball while remaining more grounded.
Says Harper, “It gets me down through the baseball as best as possible. I don’t want to get too down on the ball, obviously. The bag drill just keeps everything in line.”
Then it’s time to hit against the pitching machine. In order, he dials up very slow curveballs, nasty sliders and inside cutters before ending on fastballs.
“I want everything kind of coming in towards me,” he says, “so I really have to fight through the baseball.”
Only then is he good to go. Most hitters love to put on a show during batting practice on the field against 55-mph cookies from coaches. Harper has rarely hit on the field since 2014. He prefers his prep work to be difficult. Every drill is designed to make him work. There are no cookies. “I’m very routine-oriented,” he says. “So it kind of scares me when I don’t do my routine. I want everything to be hard in the cage. Obviously, I don’t want to make myself angry. There’s enough frustration in baseball. But I want to work at it because when I get out to the field, I want that to be real.” Harper’s swing is brutish more than it is beautiful.
Befitting Philly, it’s more Joe Frazier than Muhammad Ali. He complains to Long about the aesthetics of his stroke. “I hate the way my swing looks,” Harper will say.
“I think that’s funny because you have one of the nicest swings around,” Long says. “Give me a guy on our team whose swing you like.”
“Alec Bohm,” responds Harper. “That’s what I want my son’s swing to look like.”
Says Long, in explaining Harper’s self-criticism, “He sees the violence in his own swing. I mean, that’s his gift—the violence. I guess he looks at it like it’s not fluid. It’s a lot less violent than it used to be.”
From a technical aspect, there are three properties of his swing that make Harper an outlier even among the best hitters. First, Harper is so quick getting his swing off that he destroys fastballs, a skill he says dates back to when he was a kid and would hit against the fastest pitching machine while standing several feet in front of the plate. Over the past 10 seasons, only Soto and Judge have higher slugging percentages against fastballs than Harper’s .620.
Second, he keeps his eyes on the baseball longer than most hitters, which is important for someone who still has some upward movement with his head.
“That in essence is what Harp’s really good at,” Long says. “He focuses on the baseball. He’ll say at times, ‘I’m just not seeing the ball. I need to see it better.’ That’s not really a mechanical thing. That’s more or less him concentrating on the baseball. He does have some tilt to his swing. The barrel does work a little bit uphill, which is fine because he’s learned to work within his scheme.”
Third, and this is the hidden genius of Harper, he keeps his hands and the barrel of his bat on an inside path to the ball. “It’s one of his biggest strengths,” Long says. “He’s able to take a pitch on the inside corner and hammer it out to center, which only a few hitters can do. You rarely see him yank a ball foul.”
It was a hitting connoisseur’s observation, something never noticed by the untrained eye. It is the residue of those thousands of swings in his difficult cage drills. Harper has worked so hard and so long at taking his barrel to the ball on a quick, inside path that he almost never hits a ball with what a golfer would call draw spin, getting around a pitch or in front of it so much that it hooks.
This is the amazing truth of what “almost never” means: Harper had seen almost 2,000 pitches this year by late August. Only once did he yank a foul in the air: a full-count, down-and-in cutter from Padres pitcher Randy Vásquez.
The Phillies sent seven players to the All-Star Game in Texas this year. The day before the game, a clubhouse attendant placed bottles of water in each of the Phillies players’ lockers. Each one looked a little bit different. “What’s up with that?” another NL player asked. Flown in from Philadelphia along with the players’ equipment, the bottles contained hydrogen water, enhanced with vitamins and minerals specifically tailored for the nutritional needs of each Phillies All-Star. Harper installed a hydrogen water system in his house. He brought the idea and many other of his nutritional beliefs into the Philadelphia clubhouse. Three years ago, Harper and his wife, Kayla, overhauled their diet upon meeting a doctor of holistic medicine in
Utah. They and their three children—son Krew, 5, and daughters Brooklyn, 3, and 5-month-old Kamryn—plan a family dinner every night around eating clean.
No seed oils. Everything organic and farm-raised. The fish is wild-caught. Harper didn’t stop there. He turned his attention to the food selection in the Phillies’ clubhouse. The still water is mountain spring water. The beef, poultry, fruit and vegetables are from organic Amish farms in Lancaster, Pa. The coffee is single-origin organic coffee made in a special machine the Phillies take with them on the road.
“If you go to a store and buy coffee, it’s made from mold and pesticide,” he says. “So, when you drink coffee, it absolutely destroys the inside of your gut and the lining of your gut. If you drink organic-based, single-origin coffee, it has no pesticides and it’s actually good for you.
“Gut health is really, really big. The gut controls your mind and your body. So when your gut’s bad, your mind’s bad, your body’s bad. But when the gut’s healthy, it takes over everything. It heals your body from the inside out.
“I’m to a T what I do every day. And it’s to a fault because I’m overboard. But that’s how I am. It makes it challenging on the road, but I’ve found my spots. And when I don’t find my spots, then I go grocery shopping, and I ask the visiting clubhouse person to prepare my meals. If they will, then great. If they don’t, then I’ve got to figure it out.
“Anything that’s going to help me get to that point to feeling good every day, I want to be there. I mean, it’s the Tom Brady method, right? Like, you saw Tom do it forever. And I want to be on that program.”
The game has evolved. When Harper won the first of his two MVPs, in 2015, he saw 55% fastballs (not including cutters). This year he sees 43%. In that time the average breaking pitch he’s seen went up 201 revolutions per minute. By mid-August, 53 pitchers this year had hit 100 mph, a 43% increase from the same point in 2015. The major league batting average has been .245 or worse four times in the past five years; it was that low only twice in the previous 100 seasons.
Harper has evolved. Amid this pitching-rich environment he has become a better, more astute and, yes, a happier hitter. From his diet to his cage routine to his sports talk listening habit, Harper exudes a level of care that may be more powerful than even his swing.
“If I had to pick a single word off the top of my head, [care is] probably as good a word as I could come up with,” Middleton says. “He cares about everything. And he’s sincere. Genuine. Those are the other words I’d use to describe him.” He cares mostly about bringing a championship to Philadelphia, which last had a World Series winner in 2008. Maybe, Long says, he bears too much of that burden.
“He feels it,” Long says. “He doesn’t need to feel it as much as he does, but he does. He takes all that to heart. I always tell him, ‘Just be the best version of Bryce Harper you can be today. Just remember, when you put on that jersey and the opposing pitcher sees Harper on the back, that is intimidating in itself.’ Nobody can tell if he’s hot or cold. They’re still scared to death to throw a fastball.
“We want to be the last team standing. He wants to win a world championship more than anything. When you can put world champion beside Bryce Harper’s name … man, I just got goose bumps saying that. And I know it would do the same for him. He understands history.”
What is pressure? It is the most sinister breed of enemy: an enemy that can be felt but not seen. As Joseph Conrad wrote in Lord Jim, “How does one kill fear, I wonder? How do you shoot a specter through the heart, slash off his spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?” For Harper, the answer lies in a baseball lifetime of welcoming the specter, of now grabbing it by the throat every chance he gets in Philadelphia.
“Being part of this club the last five years and being able to see the change that this club has seen, there’s nothing like it,” he says. “And I think that’s the big thing when players watch us in the postseason. They see that and they want to come here and play.
“Before, in my conversations with a lot of the free agents they’re like, ‘Man, I don’t know if I want to play there. The fan base in the city ….’ And I’m like, ‘I get it. But there’s nothing like it, I promise you. It’ll bring out the best in you.’
“And if it doesn’t? I’m sorry. Then that’s on you. I know for a fact that if you come here, and you want to be in Philly, this city, this town, will bring out the best in you as a player. And if you win here? People have seen what that does. But we haven’t got to that point yet.”
Body and soul, Harper is right where he wants to be, especially with another go-round looming with the specter that is October baseball. He lives 10 miles from Whitman’s Camden, N.J., home. He knows that to be alive in such an age, as the Good Gray Poet knew, is to breathe the air of greater marvels yet to be.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Bryce Harper Has Been Preparing to Be a Philadelphia Star His Whole Life.
