This Tuesday afternoon offseason hitting session is off-the-record — observation is welcome; description is not — but it’s no betrayal of confidence to report that Harper goes about his work with forensic vigor. He trains with his father, Ron, and the two move about the cage in silence. There’s an easy, liquid flow from drill to drill, a choreography of blood, with Ron pushing a double-decker shopping cart full of baseballs from station to station and musician Chris Stapleton’s voice carrying that same kind of brutal grace through a tiny speaker behind home plate.
The sound of these baseballs hitting the 34-inch, 32-ounce Marucci bat is what I imagine lightning sounds like when it splits an oak. Inside this warehouse, where four-time National League batting champion Bill Madlock is one cage over employing a career’s worth of expertise to teach a couple of overindulged 10-year-olds to keep their weight back, it sounds like an entire forest is falling, one tree at a time.
BRYCE HARPER IS the rare prodigy who appears destined to fulfill his promise. Baseball’s culture — uniquely unkind to prodigies — is built on earning dues, bus rides, failure, grinding, surviving and then lording that over the guys who arrive after you. It’s kind of like the military, with Danville and Gwinnett instead of Forts Bragg and Hood.
Harper was different. He was 13 the first time he remembers every person in a stadium turning as one and saying, “That’s Bryce Harper.” He was in Alabama, at a tournament called Rocket City, and he spent the weekend going 12-for-12 with 11 homers. All along, he’s been the kid whose childhood prowess reads like a series of clerical errors. He hit a 570-foot homer as a freshman at Las Vegas High, threw 96 off the mound as a 16-year-old, hit .569 his sophomore year, then got his GED to jump directly to junior college to be drafted ahead of his class.
Prodigies, whether their instrument is a piano or a 34-inch Marucci, share a trait Boston College psychology chair Ellen Winner has dubbed “the rage to master.” It’s not so much anger as persistence. “You can’t tear them away,” says Winner, author of Gifted Children: Myths and Realities. “They’re single-minded. They just want to get better and better.”
Harper played 120 to 140 games a year as a preteen and hit nearly every day with his dad, an upright, puglike man who spent decades swinging 300-pound bundles of rebar high above the Vegas Strip. “He’d get up at 2, at work by 4, work ’til 2 in the blazing heat and then walk in the door and say, ‘OK, let’s get the hittin’ in,'” Bryce says. “He was never too tired.”
Bryce also played football through his freshman year (a broken wrist took care of that), basketball through middle school (he was the offensively challenged lane enforcer) and spent a month each year on the beach in California with his family. His only regret, he says, is not leaving high school after his first year, since he felt his rage had mastered prep baseball and his brother, Bryan (a pitcher in the Nats’ system), had graduated.
“I can’t remember a time when Bryce didn’t have big calluses on his hands from hitting,” says Tanner Chauncey, a friend and teammate of Harper’s since elementary school and a baseball player at BYU. “He was working when the rest of us weren’t.”
Harper was 19 when he was called up to the Nationals less than a month into the 2012 season, two years after being drafted No. 1, and he wondered why it took so long. The sheer velocity of his play his first three years in the league — running into walls late in blowouts, flailing at pitches out of the zone, barking at umpires who were determined to test the brash phenom — was born of his quest to fulfill expectations. His, ours, you name it.
It’s tempting to call last year’s MVP season — he led the NL in WAR, homers, runs, slugging percentage and OBP — a victory lap. But Harper won’t admit to anything that might be construed, even accidentally, as complacency or satisfaction. So let’s call it validation — validation for every silent workout, every eyebrow-raising decision intended to accelerate him toward becoming the youngest unanimous MVP in baseball history.
More than anything, last season’s success can be attributed to patience. It followed three years of injuries and uninspiring production that birthed a new theme: He was overhyped and overrated, all before he turned 22. But last year he quieted the noise and looked inward. On April 24, he stopped taking batting practice on the field, removing the temptation to acquire bad habits while impressing fans. “You don’t want to be a 5 o’clock guy,” he says. “You want to be a 7:05 guy.” Former manager Matt Williams would tell him, “Most great hitters can figure on getting one pitch an at-bat, and they can’t miss it. You’re going to get half a pitch.” Still, there were times during Harper’s 124-walk season when Williams would chide Harper by asking, “Are you going to swing the bat today?” Thirty-two times in big league history a player has scored four runs in a game with zero hits. Harper did it twice in a three-week period.
“Last year he started grasping who Bryce Harper is,” says Nats shortstop Danny Espinosa. “Rather than trying to create something more, to live up to someone else’s idea of who he should be, he just grasped who Bryce was and ran with it.”
Everything comes back to that swing. Civilizations have been founded on less. How far can that swing take Bryce Harper?
Because here’s the thing about prodigies: A shocking number of them either quit doing whatever made them prodigious or grow to despise it. (In the first chapter of his autobiography, Andre Agassi says he hates tennis.) Once the precociousness wanes and the ranks of violinists or pianists or computer hackers grow, the rage to master subsides and needs to be replaced — consciously or not — by another pursuit.
“A huge problem with prodigies comes when they get near adult level,” Winner says. “If they’re going to remain celebrated and famous, they have to do something new, and there seems to be a limit to innovation in athletics. I don’t know: Can you change baseball?”
Funny she should ask; we’re about to find out.
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