Nats expected to take Harper with first pick
Almost until the bitter end, Nationals general manager Mike Rizzo held tight to his sport’s worst-kept secret: Barring any unforeseen circumstances, Washington will draft 17-year-old catcher Bryce Harper with the No. 1 overall pick in the Major League Baseball First-Year Player Draft on Monday night.
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The Nats have been here before. Just last season they chose right-handed pitcher Stephen Strasburg with the first overall pick. He was a generational talent, scouts said — a pitcher with a 100 mph fastball who could anchor a big league rotation for years.
The hosannas for the 6-foot-3, 205-pound Harper are equally over-the-top. He is a left-handed hitting catcher with as much raw power as any teenage phenom in baseball’s modern era. That puts him on par with recent greats like Ken Griffey, Jr., Alex Rodriguez and Chipper Jones. All three were No. 1 overall draft picks. All three were hitting prodigies who debuted in the major leagues at age 21 or younger.
“We started the season looking at six or seven players that had a realistic chance of being No. 1,” said Rizzo, who admitted Harper likely would be the choice while speaking Sunday with the team’s television network, MASN. “It quickly dwindled down to a couple. I had the guy in mind for quite a long time. It was to the point where he was going to have to lose the spot — and it still would have been hard for somebody else to gain the spot. That hasn’t happened.”
What has happened is Harper spent the spring destroying one of the country’s best junior college baseball leagues, the Scenic West Athletic Conference. In 66 games for the College of Southern Nevada, Harper hit .443 with 31 home runs and 98 RBI.
Of course, if Harper and his family followed the conventional baseball path, he wouldn’t have been at CSN in the first place. The Las Vegas resident skipped both his junior and senior years of high school, earning his GED instead. That allowed him to play one season for CSN, which in turn made him eligible for the 2010 draft. Finishing high school would have meant waiting until 2011. So can Harper make as quick an impact as Strasburg, who will debut in Washington on Tuesday?
“[Until Strasburg], I’ve never had that happen before in the 28 years I’ve been in professional baseball, so it’s a unique situation,” Rizzo said of a prospect rising from draft pick to the pro ranks in just 12 months. “So I don’t see it happening from this draft. But you never know.”
In all likelihood, Harper will need time to adjust. Remaining at catcher might add another year to his development track. Harper’s maturity also has been questioned. He was ejected from his final college game last week and got into several verbal sparring matches with opposing players this season.
“Bryce does things on the field sometimes where he acts like a 17-year-old. And there’s times when he acts like he’s 25, 26,” said Kris Kline, who has seen Harper play in person 20 times as Washington’s director of amateur scouting. “He’s got an edge about him. He’s a very confident kid. He hates to fail. I think every time he steps into the box he expects to get a hit, and that’s not going to happen. So he’s going to have to find a happy medium where he learns to separate the highs and lows of the game.”
