In depth breakdown of Bryce Harper’s shocking tell-all interview
Bryce Harper revealed many never before heard details about his free agency process, his desire to grow the game through the Olympics, and his view of his infamous Hunter Strickland brawl.
Baseball fans have been dying for some great baseball content, as it should be the middle of the 2020 regular season. And boy did we get it.
Bryce Harper hopped on Starting 9’s podcast for about two hours to talk about a range of topics that we will be diving into today from the Hunter Strickland fight, his desire to play for Team USA in the Olympics, and an in-depth thought process through his free agency before signing a 13-year deal with the Philadelphia Phillies.
After listening to the full two hours and taking pages and pages of notes, here are the most important things that stood out during the interview. For Harper’s full thoughts on his free agency go to page three (for why things didn’t work out in Washington), page four (for his other offers from the Dodgers, Astros, and Giants), and page five (for why the Phillies won the bidding).
Some quotes are edited for clarity.
Hunter Strickland has Bryce Harper’s respect
Bryce Harper was very willing to get into what exactly went down in his famous fight with Hunter Strickland. In terms of Harper’s opinion on brawls, he has no problem with it: “If you’re gonna do it then do it.”
“I have no problem with Hunter Strickland…I was standing in the dugout talking with J-Dub [Jayson Werth] and I said ‘If he hits me, I’m going.’ He was like ‘He’s not gonna hit you,” Harper explained. “I said ‘You better be on the top step because I’m going’ and I think that was the mentality Strick had too.”
Harper even poked a little fun at himself for his helmet throw that went viral. “I guess I got so mad at Joe Panik I threw my helmet at Joe Panik,” he joked.
Strickland held a grudge against Harper for something he did three years earlier in 2014 when Harper absolutely owned him in the postseason. But as Harper pointed out in the interview, Strickland got a ring out of it and Harper didn’t.
But at least Harper won the fight.
Harper is absolutely in on playing in the Olympics
If Major League Baseball wants any help with growing the game, they need to talk to Bryce Harper. Harper emphatically explained the biggest reason why baseball isn’t successfully growing the game and it is safe to say he is ready to play in the Olympics if that possibility arises.
“They [MLB] have to do the Olympics every four years. You want to grow the game? You really want to take it to different countries and places, you put the baseball back into the Olympics, but let the big league players play.”
Harper further expressed his frustration that major leaguers don’t get to play in the world’s biggest sporting event.
“It’s such a travesty for me…the 2020 Olympics in Japan, in Tokyo, and you’re not sending big league guys? Are you kidding me? You wanna grow the game as much as possible and you’re not gonna let us play in the Olympics because you don’t want to cut out on money for a two week period? Like okay, that’s dumb.” He continued, “You have [Shohei] Ohtani going back and playing for Japan facing Mike Trout. Just imagine that… You know damn well Ohtani’s gonna try to punch him out and Trout hopefully goes deep 900 feet in the Tokyo Dome.”
Harper is 100% right when it comes to MLB missing out on a huge opportunity to grow the game. The World Baseball Classic is fine and all, but it doesn’t get much national attention and it just simply isn’t the Olympics.
People might not think it’s smart to send the league’s best players to the Olympics because they would be right in the middle of the regular season, but Harper believes that wouldn’t be a problem.
“Shut down the season for 2 weeks, go to a 142-game schedule every four years and that’s it,” he said.
Sure, the league will lose some revenue from two fewer weeks of the season every four years, but if you have to sacrifice money for bringing more attention to the game, which seems like Rob Manfred’s biggest goal, then the league should gladly do that.
Bryce (wrongly) left the Nationals due to deferrals
Bryce Harper’s free agency was arguably the most anticipated free-agent period in Major League history, and it certainly helped Manny Machado was also on the market.
And boy did Bryce have some options. Let’s start with the Washington Nationals.
Harper said numerous times throughout this interview that he wanted to return to D.C. and at times believed it was going to happen but the deferrals in his contract really kicked that notion in the butt.
The first offer Harper received was not what he wanted. “It had $90 million in dropback money so it was like you’re gonna get paid until you’re 80 years old and I was like ‘I don’t want that’,” Harper recalled.
During the season he also was almost traded to the Houston Astros and would have been surprisingly all on board–if Washington would have actually talked to him about it.
“I didn’t know it until after the fact but they had a handshake deal with Houston at the time,” he said. “I wish they would’ve come up to me and talk to me about it because if they would’ve [talked to me], I would’ve been like ‘Guys look what just happened with Aroldis Chapman. They just got Gleyber Torres…Why not do that? We’re out of it, we have no chance, I will come out and say whatever you guys wanna [do to] make the organization look good. I don’t care…I’m totally for that.'”
Obviously that trade didn’t ever materialize and Harper would play his last game in a Nationals uniform in Colorado at the end of the 2018 regular season.
But that doesn’t mean Harper didn’t believe he was going back.
“I sat there with my wife and said ‘babe, we’re going back, I’m going back to D.C. if they offer me anything close [to my market value],” Harper remembers saying.
But Harper didn’t want deferred money and “wanted them to understand that.”
“If they would’ve deferred a little bit of it in the first three or four years I would’ve been fine because that means we can go out and get a [Patrick] Corbin and we’re good.”
“I got back an offer man and it hurt.,” Harper stated.
Harper is totally wrong here when it comes to the deferred money. It doesn’t make sense that he was willing to accept deferrals for the first three or four seasons of his new contract in order to let GM Mike Rizzo and the Lerner’s be able to build a winning team around him but then wasn’t willing to do it for the rest of his contract.
If he would have been on board with doing it the first four years then why not the last six or so years of his contract so that the Nationals would have been able to sign Patrick Corbin to the long term deal that he eventually got and retain both Stephen Strasburg and Anthony Rendon while saving up for Juan Soto‘s big payday.
If he wants to win that bad like I know he does, then taking that deal may have been smarter in terms of getting a championship (and likely multiple) rather than signing a bigger deal with Philadelphia with fewer deferrals and nowhere near the talent that Washington had in place.
Harper called 2019 Nats World Series, nearly took a one year deal with Astros, got a last-minute offer from Dodgers
Once Patrick Corbin was signed by the Washington Nationals “out of nowhere”, Harper and his camp turned the page.
“I remember sitting in the Aria Hotel after I got that offer from the Nationals and then two weeks later they signed Corbin out of nowhere and I said to Scott [Boras] ‘They’re gonna win the World Series.’ They looked at me dead in the eye and they go ‘No chance’ and I go ‘I promise you right now they’re gonna win the World Series.'”
The Chicago White Sox had a meeting with Harper and he was impressed about their up-and-coming group of guys along with getting the opportunity to hit in front of Jose Abreu but nothing gained traction there.
He had a meeting with the San Francisco Giants and he also was impressed but his one fear “with San Fran was that all their guys are kind of done.”
That was when Philadelphia came into the mix. “Philly came in, I wasn’t very excited. I told them flat out ‘I’ve beat your guys’ a– for the last couple of years’… I remember walking away from that meeting saying I don’t know.”
After a second meeting with the Phillies, the Los Angeles Dodgers abruptly swept in with an offer at the last second. “It was a four-year offer with super high AAV with opt-outs,” Harper recalls.
But a high priority on his wish list was he didn’t want to have opt-outs because he believed it was important to show the city he was going to play for that he was committed.
As I mentioned earlier Houston nearly traded for Harper in 2018, and they gave him an enticing offer in free agency: “a one year offer early with stupid [money] and I was like ‘Why not?'”
Harper is happy he didn’t take that Astros deal especially after what has transpired.
The Working Class City
I certainly didn’t see Bryce Harper leaving Washington for a hated division rival in the Philadelphia Phillies but to Harper, it was a match made in heaven because it reminded him of his family.
“I understand what they’re going through because my dad did it every damn day,” Harper said when referring to the Philadelphia working-class citizens. Harper’s father worked from 2 a.m. to 12 p.m. in Las Vegas as a union ironworker tying rebar before coaching Bryce in the afternoons.
“That’s what fuels me going out there every single day. I wanna play 158-162 [games] because those fans work through their whole week to buy a ticket for a Saturday day game or Saturday night game and if I’m not playing that’s a slap in the face to them…They are the working-class city.”
If there was a city that displayed Bryce Harper’s level of intensity and love for sports, it would be the city of Philadelphia.
During the interview, he said his dad told him a story about how in the first week Harper was in a Philadelphia, someone came up to his dad, Ron, and said that if Bryce ever needs anything then just come to the streets.
That was when Harper knew he made the right choice for him and his family.
Harper’s situation right now might not be as fruitful as the Nationals current situation is and that is why I disagree with his decision to leave Washington, especially when they still had Max Scherzer, Stephen Strasburg, and Anthony Rendon in the prime of their careers.
But former World Series champion manager Joe Girardi was a great hire for them and he is the right guy to lead a club that has a lot of potential, especially a few years down the road when prospects like Spencer Howard and Alec Bohm have arrived in the City of Brotherly Love.
Phillies 2020 x-factors on and off the field. dark. Next
As always let me know what you think about Harper’s brawl with Strickland, his opinion on the Olympics, and of course his off-season before he netted the $330 million contract from John Middleton.