Phillies: Lifting Bryce Harper after HBP the prudent move

The Emergence of a… T-R-A-T-I-O-R?

This year’s model isn’t exactly without questions, either. The Phillies made some off-season acquisitions that looked impressive enough going in . . . until they didn’t, necessarily.

As my colleague Rick Soisson notices only too vividly, the deeper spring gets the more Phillies fans fear the team made an off-season mistake ignoring starting pitching not named Zack Wheeler. Nobody among Zach Eflin, Vince Velasquez, Nick Pivetta, and Ranger Suarez has shown lower than a 1.57 walks/hits per inning pitched (WHIP) rate through the end of Tuesday’s play. Jake Arrieta may be healthy again but it’s not unreasonable to ask just how much he has left in the proverbial tank, too.

Behind Wheeler and Aaron Nola, the Phillies rotation simply doesn’t look like enough to strike fear into the hearts of National League East hitters. Not even with J.T. Realmuto the main man behind the plate to guide them. Last year’s Phillies pitchers showed a 4.62 earned run average when throwing to Realmuto, which was fifteen points above the lifetime ERA throwing to the six-year veteran.

There’s no question that the Phillies need Harper in one piece. Yes, his first Philadelphia season gave Washington Nationals fans their fodder for crowing that the Nats finally won the pennant and the World Series without him—except for one tiny detail: It actually would have been easier to do it with him.

Put aside all the dollar debates and consider the final performance papers. Who replaced Harper in right field for the Nats? A fellow named Adam Eaton. You have to like the guy, he wouldn’t harm the proverbial fly, and boy did he come up big during that insane-in-the-brain seven-run first inning in Game Four of the Nats’ National League Championship Series sweep.

Then you realize Harper, who focused himself a lot more defensively in right field last year, cutting down his periodic route and read problems, was worth nine defensive runs saved above the league average in 2019 while Eaton was worth . . . one. I’d like to know what those Nats fans who stood up in Nationals Park for Harper’s “homecoming” last April and misspelled a certain word for which they wore individually-lettered T-shirts—they spelled it T-R-A-T-I-O-R-!—think about that now.

That was quite a “homecoming” for Harper, anyway. Facing Max Scherzer for the third time in the game, after a pair of strikeouts earlier, Harper tore a one-out double to right. Facing reliever Matt Grace in the sixth, Harper shot a single up the pipe to send home a sixth Phillies run. Then, facing Jeremy Hellickson with one on and one out in the eighth, Harper caught hold of a down-and-in four-seam fastball and drove it into the second deck, performing a flip out of the box that made his bat resemble an old-time airplane propeller.

“You hit the ball that far,” said Mike Rizzo, the Nats’ general manager who’d seen more than his fair share of Harper bombs, “do whatever the hell you want.”