![]() ![]() Harper and Trout were to be one of those rare occasions. On the rare occasions when that happens, we get the privilege of watching them grow up together. People love to compare two great players and sometimes we get lucky in baseball and the universe gives us two players worthy of comparison at a young age. ![]() But often those streaks end up back where they came - namely, a respite from the player’s usual output, but not representative of anything greater than a short postponement of typical production. Sometimes players who do that have been named Bryce Harper. Sometimes those line drives even go out of the park. Batters get hot and hit line drives around the park for reasons past our understanding. Harper has had his hot streaks before, but they weren’t typically this controlled. ![]() When you put it all together, it looks like what you’d picture it would look like if someone were to make a leap in approach, in power, in how to attack a pitcher, and in understanding of the strike zone all at once. It’s quite a combination when you put it all together. I’m going to posit that this is because he’s swinging at better pitches for him to hit. But when he does swing, he hits more of the pitches at which he swings, and he’s hitting them harder on average. Harper is walking 21.6% of the time compared to 9.6% last season - and, despite taking more pitches, Harper is striking out less than last season as well. This has led to a huge jump in walks (a point Boswell makes as well). He’s swinging less at pitches in the zone and at pitches out of the zone than in previous seasons. Despite seeing far fewer pitches in the strike zone (40 percent) than the average hitter (48 percent), he’s not necessarily leaping at the strikes he does get. The other part of Harper’s success is his selectivity at the plate. He’s hitting the outside pitches, but he’s pulling the heck out of them. You’ve probably heard people talking about how hitters should learn to “go the other way” on outside pitches as a means to handle getting pitched that way. There’s a reason pitchers typically stay away from hitters with power: because it’s very difficult to pull a ball on the outside part of the plate. Some have been high, some low, but all have been right around the edge of the plate and almost all of them have ended up over the right-field wall. The strange thing is that, other than how Harper’s slugging percentage over the last two weeks begins with a “2”, most of his homers during this streak have come on outside pitches that he’s pulled. Which, that’s where the ball goes when a left-handed hitter pulls it. More specifically, he is crushing the ball to right field. I spent some time going over his heat maps and you will be further shocked to learn he’s crushing the ball. 959 OPS - or, if you prefer meaningful numbers, a 164 wRC+ - over the past four seasons, so let’s all take what the kids call a chill pill. It takes true talent to OPS almost 2.000 in a 12 game span.īut all this isn’t nearly enough to make up for three seasons where his chief rival was essentially the MVP (remember the dust thing?). Harper’s slash line is silly now, but if the statistical revolution in baseball has taught us anything, it’s to beware of small sample sizes. The reality is some times players string hits together and put up super-human slash lines. Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post outlines some more of these mini-hot streaks here. From July 19 through August 2 of the same season, he hit. But maybe we shouldn’t be quite so sure about it because he’s kinda done this before.Ĭonsider: from April 17 through April 27 of 2013, Harper hit. And we should be excited about what he’s done. We’re all up in arms, screaming on talk radio, slamming our fat little fingers into the keys, all in excitement over Harper’s coming of age. So this thing is back on, right? The match-up of the century that turned out as one-sided as the tortoise versus the hare, as Tyson versus Spinks, as boxing versus human decency, is, it turns out, not over after all. You have to scroll down and scroll down and scroll down all… the… way… to… seventh before you find Trout languishing with just 2.0 WAR. Harper’s binge has put him at 3.1 WAR on the season, 0.5 WAR ahead of second place Dee Gordon which is a weird thing to write, but whatever. These are silly things done by a silly man who flaunts the realities of baseball before mashing them like a child playing with insects on a sidewalk. ![]() Yes, his slugging percentage starts with a number before the decimal. Yes, his home run-to-strikeout ratio is 2:1. On that Wednesday, Harper went 3-for-5 with three home runs. ![]()
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