So the Nats shocked no one by selecting junior-college catcher – or former catcher, I guess – Bryce Harper with the No. 1 pick in Monday’s First-Year Player draft. Add him to the stable of young sports talent in this city like Ryan Zimmerman, Stephen Strasburg, Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom, Mike Green, John Carlson, Brian Orakpo and – almost certainly – John Wall. Good times for D.C. sports fans, even if they had to pay some serious dues to acquire it all. Here is our main story on the Nats’ pick of Harper.
Now, Harper is the outlier of this group of athletes, obviously. Even with the team moving him from catcher to right field it would be stunning to see him at Nationals Park before Opening Day 2013. If he is here sooner that really does mean he’s a prodigy on par with Ken Griffey, Jr., Alex Rodriguez or Chipper Jones. Nats scouting director Kris Kline and assistant general manager/ vice president of player personnel Roy Clark threw out the names Larry Walker and J.D. Drew during Monday’s press conference as comparables. Harper will turn 20 six months before the 2013 season begins.
Recommended Stories
“Certainly whenever you pick [No. 1 overall] it better be an impactful day in franchise history,” Nats general manager Mike Rizzo said. “We thought we had a good start at it in 2009 – we think we had an impactful draft there. The years will tell us if we were right or wrong.”
So what makes Harper so good? Clark first remembered seeing him at an East Cobb (Ga.) baseball tournament three summers ago and saying to himself “Oh, my gosh. Who is this guy?” Then he found out it was a 15-year-old. “You could see he had the chance to be special,” Clark said.
It wasn’t just the raw power – though Harper has hit some legendary home runs as an amateur, including one well over 500 feet at Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay during a summer showcase. Yes, he did it with an aluminum bat. But no one else his age was pulling off feats like that, either. Kline has seen Harper in person 20 times – about 90 at-bats or so. He praised Harper’s ability to whip the bat through the strike zone and his ability to distinguish a ball he should let go from a strike he should go after. But his best characteristic? Harper’s ability to hit the ball – as a left-handed hitter – the opposite way towards left field.
“That tells me how advanced he is at this point,” Kline said.
Character was an issue for some big-league scouts. Harper was ejected from his final collegiate game for arguing balls and strikes and suspended for the next game. His College of Southern Nevada team lost without him and was eliminated. There were other verbal spats with opposing players, fans and coaches throughout the spring. Harper is a brash, confident kid who sports gobs of eye black on his face during games. But Clark has a longstanding relationship with Harper’s junior-college coach, Tim Chambers. He and Kline know the family – dad, Ron, and mom, Sheri – well at this point. The team even drafted older brother Bryan Harper in 2008, though they couldn’t come to terms and he went to school instead. Washington could still draft Bryan Harper, a left-handed pitcher and teammate of Bryce’s at CSN, at some point over the next two days. So the Nats see any Harper’s makeup, to use a scout’s term, as a non-issue.
“There are no concerns about this player’s makeup. We are sold on him, the family, the character of the player,” Rizzo said. “He acts like a 17 year old at times. I don’t want to tell you what I did at 17. So he’s mature beyond his years as far as his performance on the field, tools, development, and even social skills. This guy has had more hype and more publicity than most 25-years olds have had already. I think he’s handled it remarkably. Between the lines he goes 110 miles-per-hour all the time. He’s a baseball rat. I love the way he gets after it.”
Rizzo also noted that while Harper waited back at the team hotel as his team competed without him at the Junior College World Series last week – thanks to his suspension – his teammates smeared eye black on their own faces to honor him. That doesn’t jibe with some scouts who have labeled Harper a bad kid – one famously telling Baseball Prospectus’ Kevin Goldstein that he was “the anti-Joe Mauer.”
We’ll have plenty more draft coverage tomorrow when Round 2 starts at noon. And, oh, yeah – that Strasburg kid takes the hill tomorrow night, too, for the first time as a big leaguer. Washington, D.C., the center of the baseball universe – at least for a day or two. At the beginning of this decade who would have thought that would ever happen?
