![]() And if you hit a homer and pimp it? He doesn’t care. Jose Fernandez will strike you out and stare you down into the dugout and pump his fist. If that’s Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom or Manny Machado or Joc Pederson or Andrew McCutchen or Yasiel Puig - there’s so many guys in the game now who are so much fun. I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair. You can’t do what people in other sports do. “It’s a tired sport, because you can’t express yourself. But that’s not what Harper wants to talk about now. Harper has admitted fault in going to reporters instead of speaking to Papelbon directly (“If I had a problem with Pap, I should have gone up to Pap,” he says), and both men say it didn’t last beyond that day. It started when Orioles third baseman Manny Machado hit a home run against the Nationals last September and reacted with too much excitement, so Jonathan Papelbon drilled him the next time Machado came to bat, which caused Harper to suggest to reporters that baseball’s code is “tired,” which led to Papelbon berating and then choking Harper four days later after the closer found his teammate’s hustle lacking - a Rube Goldberg display of baseball’s grim underside. As Nationals first baseman Ryan Zimmerman says, “We’re uniformed personnel.”Īnd then there’s the larger obstacle: the game’s stern code. The baseball player, on the other hand, is interviewed at his locker, often shirtless and sporting a hat head that can ruin even Harper’s unique follicle landscaping. Everyone knows about Russell Westbrook’s unique couture because he’s wearing it in an interview room. There are impediments endemic to the sport. Football and basketball have such good fashion.” “Endorsements, fashion - it’s something baseball doesn’t see,” he says. Is this a prodigy’s natural urge to innovate or a sign of youthful hubris? “I don’t know much about Bryce,” says his new manager, Dusty Baker, “but I know he’s one of the hippest kids around.” Harper wants to elevate his sport’s profile through his play, through his fashion, through the charisma of his personality, maybe even through the fascination with the size of the first free agent contract ($400 million? $500 million?) that he’ll sign shortly after his 26th birthday. He wants to change the perception of baseball players, to become a single-name icon like LeBron and Beckham and Cam. It’s really good, and you should read the whole thing, but there’s one section that stands out the part where the story shifts from the view of Harper as a person or a player, and to his view of baseball needs to evolve. Over at ESPN today, they published a feature on Bryce Harper.
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