Bryce Harper

Bryce Harper (born October 16, 1992, Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S.) is a superstar Major League Baseball (MLB) player who has won a pair of National League (NL) Most Valuable Player (MVP) awards. Touted as the next big thing in baseball since he was 16 years old, Harper is one of the game’s most celebrated players of his generation.

Early life

Harper was born to Ron and Sheri Harper, a steelworker and a paralegal, respectively. He took an instant liking to baseball, playing T-ball when he was three years old against kids twice his age. His dad pitched sunflower seeds, bottle tops, and dried red beans to him to improve his hand-eye coordination as a hitter. Even before his 10th birthday, Harper was competing on travel teams, and over the next seven years he played in 80 to 130 games a year. Harper, who bats left-handed and throws right-handed, was a catcher and a pitcher as a youth, and he also played football and snowboarded. In 2009, when he was age 16, he hit a ball 502 feet (153 meters) at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida. It was the longest home run ever hit in the home ballpark of the Tampa Bay Rays.

That same year, when he was just a high-school sophomore, Sports Illustrated put Harper on its cover with the headline “Baseball’s Chosen One.” The lead-in to the article about him read “Baseball’s LeBron,” a reference to LeBron James, the transcendent star of the National Basketball Association. The story described the teenager’s prodigious achievements, including the home run at Tropicana Field and his hitting another ball that cleared the right-field fence of a Las Vegas high-school playing field before soaring over two trees, a second fence, two sidewalks, and five lanes of South Hollywood Boulevard. Harper said his role models were Pete Rose and Mickey Mantle, and he described his playing style to Sports Illustrated writer Tom Verducci, saying:

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I’m going to play against you the way Pete Rose did. I’m going to try to rip your head off. That’s just the way I am. Old school.

Harper said that he hoped to be in the major leagues by the time he was 18 or 19 years old. His career goals:

Be in the Hall of Fame, definitely. Play in Yankee Stadium. Play in the pinstripes. Be considered the greatest baseball player who ever lived. I can’t wait.

As a sophomore, he hit .626 and won Baseball America’s High School Player of the Year award. He then earned a general equivalency diploma so that he could enroll in junior college and thus be eligible for the 2010 MLB draft. In the interim, at the College of Southern Nevada, he had the opportunity to play in a wood-bat league. When the Washington Nationals drafted him with the number one overall pick in June 2010, many baseball observers viewed him as the best teenage slugging prospect since Mantle, who hit 536 home runs in an 18-year career with the New York Yankees.

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Young Washington Nationals star

Harper signed a $9.9 million contract with the Nationals in August 2010. Before he played in a minor league game, Baseball America named him the sport’s number one prospect. Harper, who switched to the outfield as a professional, played one full season in the minors, in 2011. The next season the “Nats” called him up after he had played just 21 games in the minors. When he made his major league debut at Dodger Stadium on April 28 at the age of 19 (making him the MLB’s the youngest player at the time), the local fans greeted him with a cascade of boos. Harper went 1-for-2, thrashing a double and lifting a sacrifice fly. That season he hit .270 with 22 homers, winning the NL Rookie of the Year award and helping the Nationals win a division title. It was the franchise’s first postseason appearance since relocating from Montreal in 2005. Harper struggled in the playoffs, going just 3-for-23 in a first-round loss to the St. Louis Cardinals, although he did hit a double, a triple, and a home run.

The next year, 2013, the buzz around Harper continued as he hit home runs in his first two at bats, becoming, at age 20, the youngest player to hit two home runs on opening day and prompting fans at Nationals Park to chant, “M-V-P!” Later that season fans voted him as a starter on the NL All-Star team. But a knee injury slowed him, and he did not improve much from his rookie season, hitting .274 with 20 homers. In 2014 he missed significant time for a thumb injury and hit .273 with just 13 homers, but he thrived in the playoffs, going 5-for-17 with a double and three homers as the Nationals lost to the San Francisco Giants in four games. In 2015 Harper finally had his coming-out season, hitting .330, with 42 home runs, and winning his first NL MVP award, as a unanimous choice. But the next season he slumped to .243 before rebounding in 2017 with a .319 average.

Going into the 2018 season, Harper’s last before he was eligible for free agency, speculation swirled regarding whether Harper would remain with the Nationals or move on to another team. He had a terrible first half of 2018, hitting just .214, but before the All-Star Game that year in Washington, D.C., he won the Home Run Derby in front of his fans, an emotional moment for him. He bounced back in the second half of the season and finished with a .249 average and 34 homers. It would be his last campaign in Washington.

A new career in Philadelphia

Near the end of the 2018 season, Washington offered Harper a $300 million contract for 10 years, but it included significant deferrals of money. In February 2019 Harper instead signed a record 13-year, $330 million contract with the division rival Philadelphia Phillies. Harper returned to Washington early in his first season as a Phillie, and his former fans booed him lustily. Before the game the mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, tweeted an image of Harper as Benedict Arnold, although she quickly deleted it. Harper smashed a home run into the second deck in center field, helping the Phillies to an 8–2 victory and a 4–0 record.

But the Nationals, even without Harper in their lineup, wound up winning their first World Series that year. During his seven seasons in Washington, the team was never able to advance past the division series. In his first season in Philadelphia, Harper continued his slugging prowess, hitting 35 home runs. Two years later, in 2021, he won his second NL MVP award, hitting .309, with 35 homers, and leading the league with a .615 slugging percentage. In the 2022 playoffs Harper hit five home runs in the first three rounds, helping the Phillies to a trip to the World Series, which they lost to the Houston Astros.

In November 2022 Harper underwent ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction (Tommy John surgery) to repair a ligament in his right elbow. Although the surgery has become increasingly common for baseball players, it remains a serious procedure that generally requires a lengthy period of recovery and rehabilitation. Harper astounded the baseball world by returning to the Phillies’ lineup at the beginning of May 2023, some two months ahead of schedule, though he moved from the outfield to first base (or designated hitter) to limit the need for him to throw. Playing in 126 regular-season games, he hit 21 home runs and batted .293. In Philadelphia’s three postseason series, he launched another five homers.