We can answer that questions quickly: Bryce Harper is twenty-six years old. Or twenty-six and a hundred and twenty-five days, if you want to be exact.
It is this fact - Harper’s age - that most projections about what his future are based on. Bryce Harper is a very young player who has done a helluva lot as a major league player. He hit the majors as at twenty and posted one of the very best seasons any twenty-year old has ever had. At twenty-two, Harper had one of the best seasons anyone has had, winning a unanimous MVP award. He is sitting on a career wRC+ of 140, and an OPS+ of 139.
What can we expect that player to produce, going forward?
We can reasonably expect the peak seasons of a Hall-of-Fame career. Starting from the basis of Bryce Harper’s current age, we can project that the team that signs him will enjoy a run of great years from one of the best players in the game.
What happens, though, if we turn that question inside out? What if, instead of starting with Harper’s age and drawing an inference about performance, we start with his performance, and extrapolate from that performance how old he is? What if we asked how old Harper is by what he’s done? What would that show us?
It would show us something…different.
Bryce Harper was a very good player when he reached the majors in 2012. He was very good in 2013. After a step back in 2014, he was historically great in 2015, winning the NL MVP and posting the best hitting campaign the senior circuit had seen since Barry Bonds.
And then Harper was kind of lousy in 2016. A part of that lousiness was luck (Harper’s BABIP went from .369 to .264), and part of it was injuries, but he wasn’t a great player in 2016.
He was pretty good in 2017, at least as a hitter. He was slightly less productive in 2018, though he put up a decent line by traditional metrics (34 homers, 103 runs scored and 100 RBI).
That’s an annual breakdown. Looked at holistically, Harper has obviously changed as a player.
Bryce Harper used to be a good baserunner, but he’s more neutral these days: he seems to have lost something of his young speed. As a defensive player, Harper looked good in his rookie year, but the general consensus has had him fluctuating between ‘slight negative corner OF’ and ‘The Anti-Jason Heyward’ in recent years. I watched a few Nationals games last year, and I can safely say that the eye test matches the numbers. He had poor routes to flyball last year, didn’t throw great, and dropped his share of easy ones.
Harper didn’t walk much as a younger player, but he’s developed one of the sharpest batting eyes in the game, last year pacing the league in free passes. When he swings the bat, Harper is missing more pitches than he did as a younger player. Last season saw Harper post his highest strikeout percentage since 2014. His isolated power has dropped since his MVP year.
He’s slower, and a worse defender. He draws a lot more walks but has less power, and he’s missing more of the pitches that he’s offering at.
That is a typical pattern, of course. But it is not the typical pattern for a player as young as Bryce Harper is.
Looking at it a bit differently, Harper’s Baseball-Reference WAR, by year, goes as follows:
|
Age
|
bWAR
|
|
20
|
5.2
|
|
21
|
3.7
|
|
22
|
1.1
|
|
23
|
10.1
|
|
24
|
1.5
|
|
25
|
4.7
|
|
26
|
1.3
|
That’s a summary of what we talked about. Very good as a young player. Exceptionally good as a twenty-three-year-old. A little up-and-down since.
So I tried to find someone who had a similar career arc to Harper. It wasn’t easy, for a reason that you can predict without too much difficulty. Very few players have ever wrapped dud seasons around a monster campaign. It’s just not something that happens…greatness usually carries over. If a player has a historically great season, they will typically be very good in the years around that season.
But I did manage to find a couple parallels. Harper’s seasonal WAR looks a little like the seasonal WAR totals of Fred Lynn:
|
Harper
|
Fred Lynn
|
|
5.2
|
7.4
|
|
3.7
|
4.5
|
|
1.1
|
1.5
|
|
10.0
|
4.4
|
|
1.5
|
8.9
|
|
4.7
|
4.7
|
|
1.3
|
0.1
|
Both players were great rookies, who had good follow-up seasons. Both saw a decline in their third season before posting MVP-level seasons…Harper won the MVP, while Lynn finished fourth. They had identical positive seasons in their sixth year. They dropped off in year seven.
It ain’t a perfect parallel, but it’s as close as you’re going to get. It’s a good pairing.
Except that Fred Lynn was two and a half years older than Bryce Harper. Fred Lynn was twenty-three when he won the 1975 Rookie-of-the-Year and AL MVP. Harper parallels Lynn, but Harper is younger than Freddie Lynn.
Another comparable…not as good, but the next-closest parallel I could find…is Matt Kemp.
|
Harper
|
Matt Kemp
|
|
5.2
|
3.9
|
|
3.7
|
4.9
|
|
1.1
|
-1.1
|
|
10.0
|
8.0
|
|
1.5
|
2.8
|
|
4.7
|
0.6
|
|
1.3
|
1.3
|
This is nice because the big seasons align. Kemp lost a close MVP vote to Ryan Braun in 2011, and then posted another tolerable year before falling off a cliff. Harper is a better player than Kemp…I’m not trying to say they’re the same…but their season-by-season ups and down parallel decently.
Except Kemp was three years old than Harper. Kemp was twenty-six when he had his big year. Harper was twenty-three.
So where does that put Harper’s age? If you had to guess how old Bryce Harper was by his track record, how old would you guess him to be? If you factored in all of that other stuff…the decline of speed and the shoddy defense, the uptick in walks and the uptick in swings-and-misses….how old would you imagine Bryce Harper to be?
You’d guess him to be twenty-nine or thirty years old.
He had a 5.2 WAR in his first year. That’s not something you’d expect a twenty- or twenty-one year old to pull off, but it’s believable for someone who is twenty-two or twenty-three. He had his best year at twenty-six or twenty-seven. He was banged up a year later, but still had something in the tank at twenty-eight or twenty-nine. We’re looking at a player entering his thirties.
* * *
Is this a fair evaluation of Bryce Harper?
Of course not. It’s just a reversal of how most of us have been talking about Harper.
Everyone who is projecting Harper’s future is projecting that future from the vantage of a twenty-six-year-old player, because that’s how old Harper really is. That’s certainly a more relevant data point than the freaky pattern of his annual WAR tallies, or the progression and regression of various skill sets. Harper is probably going to win a bunch of MVP’s, making this article look foolish in retrospect.
But…I want to mention two more thing about Harper, which might make an alternative conclusion a little more convincing.
The first is that Bryce Harper has done everything in his career early. He was playing college ball at seventeen. He was being groomed to be a major league player long before that. Bryce Harper was probably working to be a major leaguer while he was in middle school.
That’s wonderful. I have no problem with a young person dedicating himself to a dream, and I don’t want this to read as a knock about parents who push their kids in sports. If everyone’s on board, that’s a great thing to do, to make a commitment like that.
But I am willing to bet that Bryce Harper, at seventeen or twenty or twenty-six, has put more collective hours into working on baseball than just about anyone else in the world. It does not seem like a leap to assume that such a high level of effort has likely taken some toll on his body.
Bryce Harper seems to be aging faster than you’d expect for a twenty-six-year-old: it does not seem implausible to attribute some of that decline to the extreme effort and dedication he put in as an amateur player. He is not older than anyone else, but he’s put in more hours than any other twenty-six-year-old.
And - second point here - what position ages a player more than any other? What position on the diamond exacts the most brutal cost on the body? What position tends to age a player more than any other?
Catcher. Being a catcher takes an enormous toll on a player. The daily act of crouching and bouncing up, the barrage of foul tips and semi-concussions, the grind of communicating between pitcher and coach while keeping an eye on baserunners is a massive challenge of body and mind. Catchers have shorter careers than players at any other position on the diamond. It's very hard to be a catcher.
What position did Bryce Harper play as an amateur player?
He was a catcher. For his entire amateur career, Bryce Harper was a backstop.
* * *
I didn’t want to post this until Harper had signed a megadeal with some team. I like Bryce Harper: he is a terrific player and an entertaining personality, and as someone who stands with organized labor, I root for baseball players in all of their contract negotiations with owners. I hope Harper gets a massive contract from someone, and I hope that he wins a couple MVP awards for whatever fan base gets to have him in their uniform next year. I wouldn't want this article to be used against him in his negotiations, and I have every confidence that no one gives a damn what I think, anyway.
So I’ll say this: I am extremely wary of the many projections anticipating that Bryce Harper will play at an All-Star level over most of the next decade. He is young enough, on paper, to justify taking a gamble on a long-term contract, but I think that there are red flags in his record that strongly suggest that Harper’s body has more years on it than his birth certificate allows. He’s twenty-six, going on thirty. I’d be wary of this one.
David Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. He welcomes comments and questions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com. You can follow him on Twitter at DavidFlemingJ1.