If Bryce Harper is who everyone believes he should be, including himself, it is not absurd for the Washington Nationals to bring him up from the minors and give him his first brush with the majors at age 19.
Harper has been groomed for this moment from the womb. He prepped for early delivery since early in high school. He was drafted to be The Man. Yes, he is still only a teenager, but if he can handle big-league pitching then he should be on the roster. There is a lot of hand-wringing over the Nationals’ decision to bring Harper to the big club from their AAA Syracuse farm club.
Here’s the thing, though. Due to the Nationals’ surpisingly solid start, they have shown they don’t desperately need Harper. They (And who would have thought this in spring training when the team made the decision to send him to the minors to start the year?) are doing well without him. They don’t need Harper to step into the lineup and be a savior as some may have thought as recently as two months ago.
Many stars broke into the majors at a young age and succeded. Many other players broke into the majors at a young age and didn’t. Were they ruined by being exposed to a steady diet of too-fast fastballs or were they never going to make it big anyway? We don’t know. In recent decades there has been more concern attached to the bruising of a young pitcher’s ego than a position player’s if they strike out in their first chance in the majors.
Major League scouts and team officials are still haunted by the 1970s case of David Clyde, the heralded southpaw who pretty much stepped right out of a high school classroom to throw for the Texas Rangers in front of a sold-out crowd, but barely had any career at all after that (18-33). Except for their ages, David Clyde and Bryce Harper are apples and oranges, maybe from the same fruit farm, but that’s it.
Clyde was a regular high school kid with talent, not any more sophisticated than other teenagers of his generation. Harper was identified as a prodigy long ago and has manipulated his entire life to set himself up for early success in the majors. He left high school and earned a GED instead of sticking around with his class and playing ball there. He played a year of junior college ball at the College of Southern Nevada, making him eligible for the draft a bit earlier than he would have been
The Nationals were able to draft Harper from a position of weakness–their poor National League record. But the patience Washington has shown in assembling young talent appears to be paying off right now. It was planned for Harper to spend more time in upstate New York, but injuries forced the big club to look around for another out-fielder. They already had one in their system with the potential to be better than anyone else out there.
So bringing up Harper now means he can play, not sit on the bench, but he is also surrounded by way more talent in 2012 than he would have been in 2010. The Nationals don’t need him to hit .300 with 30 home runs. They would like him to hit .275 with 15 home runs. The odds are no different that Harper could pull a muscle roaming a Major League outfield instead of a minor league outfield, or that he will get hit by a pitch and break a wrist at one level or the other.
The big danger surrounding this move is supposed to be if Harper hits .152 for a few weeks and must return to Syracuse for a while. That will be informative, at the least. I don’t think it will destroy his ego and wreck his prospects for good. After all, Albert Pujols and Adam Dunn are still taking swings in the majors and right now it wouldn’t take much for Harper to out-hit their averages.
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