Now that Bryce Harper has won the All-Star Game Home Run Derby while rocking the best sporting headband this side of Richie Tenenbaum, it’s time to ask the inevitable question: should the Nationals consider trading him?
Let’s start with the standings. The Nationals, heavy favorites to win the NL Central at the start, of the season are currently at 48-48, trailing the upstart Phillies and Braves by five games. They are very much in contention in the division: Atlanta and Philadelphia are young teams ahead of their win curves, and Washington’s run differential…a handy metric to understand a team’s underlying level of talent…suggests that the Nationals are every bit as good as their rivals for the division. Washington is in in the race, but they’re trailing two teams.
Given that, the Nationals should be focused on winning: this division is still very much in their grasp, and it would be foolish to punt on the season at the mid-point.
And Bryce Harper certainly helps the Nationals win baseball games. Even in a down season, Bryce Harper is a very talented baseball player. He is hitting .214 this season, which is terrible. His defense has been poor: our site calculates his defense in the outfield at -13 runs saved. That said, Harper does two things that are very valuable: he gets on base a good amount, and he hits dingers. He is a useful player, even if he’s not quite a useful as he’s been in the past.
This is an aside: has any major league player in history had as mercurial a career as Bryce Harper?
Bryce Harper, as a nineteen-year old rookie, hit 22 homeruns and stole 16 bases. He was a legitimate major league hitter that year, posting a Weighted Runs Created Plus (wRC+) of 121. Baseball-Reference calculated his WAR at 5.2, while FanGraphs credits him with a more conservative 4.4.
A teenager posting a four-win season is exceptionally rare. How rare?
|
Rank
|
Year
|
Player
|
fWAR
|
|
1
|
2012
|
Bryce Harper
|
4.4
|
|
2
|
1928
|
Mel Ott
|
4.1
|
|
3
|
1989
|
Ken Griffey Jr.
|
2.5
|
|
4
|
1884
|
Joe Quinn
|
2.4
|
|
t-5
|
1936
|
Buddy Lewis
|
1.9
|
|
t-5
|
1879
|
John Ward
|
1.9
|
Very rare. Most nineteen-year-olds in the majors have accomplished something just being in the major leagues. Bryce Harper was one of the rare teenagers who played like a star.
I think the sabermetic community has received flack on how much attention we’ve given to Bryce Harper, a player who has enjoyed exactly one MVP-level season in seven years. I think the table above helps explain it. Bryce Harper was as hyped as any hitting prospect ever, and when he arrived in the majors, he was better than anyone had ever been as a teenager. We had high expectations, and he exceeded those expectations comfortably.
And then…he’s been all over the map. He won a unanimous MVP as a twenty-two-year-old, pacing the league in runs scored, homers, slugging, and on-base percentage. He followed that with a .243 batting average in 2016. He had a season when he attempted 31 stolen bases, and then followed it with a season with six attempts. He’s had seasons when he’s rated as a positive defensive outfielder, and he’s had seasons (like this one) when he rates like someone who should be playing first base.
At his best, Harper is an elite player. But he is so frequently something other than his best that his future is more difficult to project than just about any good player in the game. Which is not any kind of reason to trade him. Even a not-at-his-best Harper is a valuable hitter to have in the middle of the lineup.
So why am I writing this article?
Because there are some justifications for why the Nationals should at least consider moving Harper. Let’s count them down.
1. They have an interested buyer.
The wide belief is that the Yankees will wind up signing Bryce Harper in the offseason. The Yankees have always made sense as the landing spot for Harper: he is the most famous player in the game today, and he has cultivated that fame: he seems particularly drawn to the bright lights. The Yankees have baseball’s biggest stage, and they have the money to pay him what he wants. And with the team bubbling with young talent, they have a clear incentive to do so.
The Yankees will be targeting Harper in the offseason, but they need help now. They’re playing great baseball, but they’re trailing their division by 4.5 games, against a team that is playing exceptionally well. The Yankees production at first base and left field hasn’t been great, and Harper could comfortably slot in as a top-of-the-order bat who splits playing time in those slots.
The Yankees aren’t going to be happy playing a one-and-done game as the Wild Card: they want to win the AL East, and Harper is a player could help them chase down the Red Sox. And whatever package the Yankees have to offer will be balanced out by not having to give up a compensation pick to the Nationals if they sign Harper to a long-term deal in the offseason.
2. The Nationals have plenty outfielders.
Absent Harper, the Nationals can pencil in an outfield of Juan Soto, Michael Taylor, and Adam Eaton. That isn’t a bad outfield: whatever loss they get on the offensive side of things is covered at least slightly by having Taylor and Eaton playing defensive positions where they are comfortable. They will lose something in the outfield, but considering how terrible Harper’s been defensively this year, they won’t be losing as much as you’d think.
3. Trading Harper gets them players who can help the Nationals now.
The Nationals, going into 2019, are still a very good team. They have Scherzer and Strasburg and Turner and Eaton and Soto. They have the brilliant Victor Robles waiting in the wings. If their path to contention looks to be tougher in 2019, they’re certainly not out of contention. Absent Harper and Anthony Rendon, Washington could still wind up the team to beat in the NL East next year.
If the Nationals trade Harper now, they will get prospects or players who have the chance to help their team in that immediate future. If they wait to collect a compensation pick, they will be getting a player who cannot be expected to help the team for at least three years. Considering the talent that the Nationals will have going into 2019, it makes more sense to cash in two-and-a-half months of Harper for years of major-league-ready player seasons.
4. Those Pesky Intangibles.
This is the most out-on-a-tree-branch part of the article, and I’ll forgive you if you want to skip this.
It is my belief that the Nationals, as a team, have underperformed to their talents. This is a team that has spent the better part of the last five years competing in a wasteland of a division. The Phillies have been in an extensive rebuild, paying the price for trying to stretch a championship team past their breaking point. And while the Braves snuck a division title in 2013, they’ve had consecutive seasons of 79, 67, 66, and 72 wins coming into this year. Miami could have been contenders, but Jose Fernandez died before the team could get on its feet, and the ownership group traded off the core of Stanton, Gordon, Yelich, and Ozuna. Only the Mets have been decent challengers recently, but they’re hollow rivals: you’d have to work hard to convince me that the 2015 NL champion Mets were really a better team than the 2015 Nationals.
The Nationals have won four division titles, which no one is going to fault. But they’ve won at least three of those division titles with no serious competition, and they’ve been washed out of every playoff series they’ve reached in the first round. They have been a favorite to be the NL representatives in the World Series for five years, and they haven’t come close to getting there.
We can’t blame that on Bryce Harper: he is one player on the team, and it is ridiculous to hold him accountable for the failures of this franchise to do more with what they have.
That said, the Nationals are his team as much as they are anyone player’s team, and the track record of that team isn’t great. Do you really expect the Nationals to chase down the Phillies and Braves this year? Do you think they’re the kind of team that is going to roar back and take control of this division, or are they going to lay down and wait it out until next year?
My sense, having followed them for years, is that this is a team that cannot fight. My sense is that the Nationals are a team that has no core identity that they can rally around, no purpose or cause that unites their individual parts. They are a very good baseball team, but they are utterly complacent. They win when it is easy, and when the winning gets hard they fold like a house of cards.
Think about it: the Nats have been one of the dynastic teams of the last half-decade: isn’t it tellingthat the most memorable moment of their run wasn’t some grand homerun or a scrum celebration on the mound, but a dugout fight in which Jonathan Papelbon tried to strangle Bryce Harper for not running out a groundball? That is the standout memory I have of this team, and I’d bet that is the memory that most of you have. Doesn’t that tell us something about the soul of this team?
Bryce Harper, fair or not, is the center of this team, and I think that the very best thing for the Nationals to do is to cut out the center and see what fills the void. The Nationals should let Harper go smash dingers with Stanton and Sanchez and Judge: he is already halfway out the door already, and there is no point in running out a team whose central player is counting down his days.
When it comes to sports, I am not a fan of waiting for things to happen. I think passivity is a marker of uncertainty, a marker of a lack of leadership. Good teams anticipate changes and make accommodations for those changes before they happen. The Nationals know that Bryce Harper isn’t going to be on their team in three months: it makes little sense to let him watch the clock wind down.
Cut out the center and see who fills the void.
* * *
What we still don’t understand about sports…what sabermetrics hasn’t made significant inroads in…is the question of what makes a team work. That is a different question, I think, then what makes a team good.
You can see this easiest in basketball, because the teams are smaller, and because all the plays on the court happen collaboratively. The Boston Celtics lost their two best players during the year, but the remaining guys on the squad played well as a team, and they managed to push Lebron James and the Cavs to the limit. The Celtics weren’t, objectively, a good team…but they were a team that worked: for some reason, the individuals were able to play effectively as a collective.
This is harder to see in baseball, because the scale of a season and a team is larger, and the dynamics of play are individualized: you’re all alone in the batter’s box, after all. I wouldn’t make a generalization about a team’s capacity to ‘work’ effectively after a few months, and I’d be reluctant to make any generalizations about a season of play.
With the Nationals, however, I think there is a long enough record of rostered players and full-season outcomes to conclude that they haven’t ever been a team that has really worked. They’ve been a great team, of course, but they haven’t ever shown a capacity to function successfully under pressure. Over the course of a long season, against soft competition, they win the games they’re supposed to win. But when competition comes they can’t find the will to win. They have always caved, and I think it is reasonable to anticipate that the 2018 version of the Nationals will do exactly what they’ve always done: falter when the road gets too steep.
Trading Bryce Harper would be a drastic step, and I am 99% sure that the Nationals won’t do it. But I am at least 98% sure that they’d be a better team without Harper than with him. I think that if the Nationals trade Harper, the team will get their act together enough to make a second-half run at the Phillies and Braves. If they keep him, they’re resigning themselves to counting down the hours, and they’re going to lose pace with the division.
David Fleming is a writer living in western Virginia. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.