Watching Bryce Harper, Who Is As Great As Advertised

If he keeps up his pace from the opening third of the season for the rest of the year, Bryce Harper will be the National League's MVP, officially, and unofficially the best player in baseball. This line of thinking requires some imaginative elasticity; Harper's numbers at the moment are the type that, in the years since the suspiciously bulked-up hinge of the 20th and 21st centuries, we have learned are sustainable only in bursts. He has 24 homers, a .465 on-base percentage, a league-leading .715 slugging percentage—the sort of numbers that leave you double-checking your understanding of the statistics. Least relevantly, but maybe most joyously in our three-true-outcomes age, he has a .339 batting average.

Baseball's gravitational laws suggest that all this will taper, with Harper eventually settling into a lower cruising altitude of excellence. The fun of watching Harper play right now, though, is that everything we see from him suggests that this won't happen, even can't. Every day is reason to hope for more, and a suggestion that we would not be crazy to expect it.

"When the guy is going that good, that hot, you're almost going to have to bounce it there. And maybe even then he could hit it out of the park." Braves manager Fredi Gonzalez said on a Saturday afternoon in early May after Harper had beaten Atlanta with a two-run walk-off homer, his hard uppercut swing turning a Cody Martin breaking ball at the knees—not a bad pitch—into an arcing blur. It was Harper's sixth home run in three games, and it had Gonzalez and everyone else thinking about Harper not in the context of the rest of Major League Baseball's players, but in that of the very parameters of the game.

If Harper's accomplishments on the field have historical precedent—Ted Williams, who similarly zoomed past precocity into league-leading excellence early in his career, has been cited heavily this season—his biography is wholly contemporary. At some point in recent years, the archetype of the era-defining sports hero shifted. The backwater wizard who rose from anonymity to renown has been replaced by the touted prodigy who surges to national fame at a young age and, against all odds and with some intermittent setbacks, somehow meets the hype. In the current formula, the ascendant player's central foe is not the skeptic or the holdout but rather the glare of his own celebrated promise. Expectations swell until meeting them takes a miracle. It all just keeps getting bigger.

Harper, who famously appeared on his first Sports Illustrated cover at 16, holding his follow-through against a background of desert mountains next to the words "Baseball's Chosen One," belongs squarely to this camp of prodigies. He's there with LeBron James, forever the best-case scenario, and Harper's teammate Stephen Strasburg, whose career of alternating brilliance, controversy, and tribulation is more in keeping with the norms of the contemporary phenom. This new of myth-making is crueler than any before, but it also produces heartier and more culturally resonant stars. The last century challenged you to make a name for yourself; this one gives the name, then tasks you with withstanding the noise about whether you've earned it.

And from the beginning, plenty of noise has attended Harper. In the eighth game of his career, with a reputation for boorishness already in tow, the 19-year-old Harper took a first-inning disciplinary beaning from Cole Hamels. Standing on third a couple batters later, when Hamels threw over to check on Jayson Werth at first, Harper darted for the plate, stealing home with a cleat-first slide. The play was an overture, predicting the timbre, degree, and daring of what was to come. This was 2012, and what followed were three seasons of explosive stretches and frustrating slumps, of injuries sustained crashing into outfield walls or stretching for bags, of swing adjustments and writings-off and ensuing reminders that he was only 19, 20, 21 years old.

Now, at 22, Harper seems to have achieved the self-possessed nirvana of the over-observed young athlete. His dizzying statistics bear this out, as does the newfound steadiness with which he plays. In years past, that six-homer barrage ending with the walk-off against Atlanta might have been followed by a corrective slump; now, it seems not exceptional but somehow characteristic. The overheated forecasting that had always surrounded Harper has given way to an uncomplicated sense of appreciation.

In the sixth inning of a mid-June game against the Tampa Bay Rays, Asdrubal Cabrera shot a single into right field and Harper picked it up. Then, as he planted to throw the ball back into the infield, his left leg crumbled. The injury looked worse than it was—it ended up being only a minor hamstring strain—but the tone of the response as Harper left the game spoke volumes about his current stature. Washington fans, who only last year watched a team that counted Harper as a somewhat peripheral contributor win 96 games and run away with the division, now feared a ruined season. Writers who had once spent entire columns tsk-ing him for some etiquette breach or other now expressed their earnest hopes that a potentially historic campaign would not be cut short.

Harper ended up missing only one game, and his return assuaged any lingering concerns. The second pitch of Harper's second at-bat on his afternoon back was a slider from Francisco Liriano, a pitch that is a kind of ghost story among the left-handed batters of the National League. This one, uncharacteristically, hung up a bit, and Harper covered it. His front leg lifted and planted; his bat jumped off his shoulder and whirled around his body and then back between his shoulder blades; he was a cartoon samurai slicing up his enemy and sheathing his sword all in one motion. Harper's swing has the curious affect of making his bat's circumference seem to increase at times, and this moment was one of those. The ball few out of National Park high and fast, dead to center.

Despite the best efforts of Harper and newly acquired ace Max Scherzer, the Nationals have so far failed to live up to the ample expectations. They currently lead the NL East by only three and a half games, and many of the players who paced them last year are mired in concurrent slumps. If their struggles have robbed us of the chance to watch the all-time squad many were predicting, though, they have also given Harper's ongoing heroics a certain pleasing urgency. His play has put him in the company of baseball immortals, but it has also had a very real and essential daily value.

It remains to be seen whether Harper can keep this up, if this start is aided by anomaly or if it is the new normal, if he'll end up posting a Ruthian OPS or merely a peak-Pujolsian one. It's not worth worrying about. Harper has already accomplished what may be the most difficult feat of his career. He has emerged from the tangled brambles of prognostication at last, and as what he was supposed to be. Bryce Harper is one of the best players in baseball, just as everyone expected.