Grading the first month of a 13-year mega-contract is essentially akin to evaluating a football team on their performance on the first three plays of the game. It’s such a small sample size of production, but it still counts, and who isn’t interested in breaking down the performance of the face of the sport after one month?
A quick look at Bryce Harper’s year-to-date stats per Baseball Reference:
Harper’s six home runs and 20 runs batted in put him on pace for 34/112; that would tie last year’s home run total and represent a new personal-best in RBIs. His .240 batting average is a career-worst, but his league-leading 23 walks gives him a still-impressive .388 on-base percentage. His 129 adjusted OPS is below his career mark, but still 29 percent better than league average when adjusted to ballpark.
Perhaps the biggest concern for Harper is a scarily high strikeout rate; he’s whiffed 38 times already in just 29 games, which puts him on track for 212 strikeouts. Last year, Giancarlo Stanton struck out 211. Yoan Moncada led all of baseball with 217. In fact, if Harper does reach 211, it would tie for the sixth-highest total in a season in MLB history.
Tuesday night’s 0-for-4 performance with two strikeouts earned Harper his first boos of the season, although he took it well and said he would have booed himself too.
We know Harper is a three-true outcome player, meaning he’s going to account for a home run/walk/strikeout on a great majority of his plate appearances. It seems he’s swinging for the fences more than ever this year. To date, his three-true outcome percentage of 51.9 is the highest he’s posted in his career, topping last year’s 47.9 rate.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of Harper’s game is that he’s struggled so much against fastballs. Per Brooks Baseball, he’s hitting only .196 against fourseam fastballs, and pitchers are now throwing him more fastballs than ever before.
Per Matt Breen of Philly.com, Harper is slugging just .263 against pitches thrown 95 MPH or faster, this after having slugged .714 against such pitches a year ago. Those are alarming numbers, although admittedly, it is early in Harper’s tenure with the team, and there’s plenty of time to turn it around.
From a sabermetric standpoint, Harper also doesn’t rate particularly well.
Some guys are WAR guys – look no further than Mike Trout or Mookie Betts as do-all players who shine in center field, run the bases well, and hit like MVP candidates. Harper doesn’t play a premium defensive position, and in fact, rates as a subpar defensive player in right field. He’s an average baserunner and average at avoiding double plays. Baseball Reference penalizes him greatly for his high strikeout total – if you can’t put the ball in play, you’re not helping your team – and thus has him at just 0.2 WAR for the year so far.
Of the 227 position players with at least 75 plate appearances this season, Harper rates just 152nd in WAR, putting him among the bottom third of all players. Then again, WAR doesn’t factor in a player’s impact on his teammates, and there’s no way the Phillies lineup hasn’t improved significantly with the addition of Harper in the No.3 hole.
Rhys Hoskins has performed better in the cleanup spot. Jean Segura is hitting .329 near the top of the lineup. On paper, it’s the best lineup we’ve seen in Philadelphia since the 2008-2011 glory days. As a team, this year’s Phillies are currently 16-13 and a game up over the New York Mets for first place in the NL East.
The offense has slid as of late, scoring three or fewer runs in eight of the last 13 games, but they’ve still been an above-average offense for the year. In April, the average ballclub batted .245 with 38 home runs, and a .742 adjusted OPS while scoring 4.63 runs per game. The Phillies batted .243 with 38 home runs, a .758 adjusted OPS, and 5.03 runs per game. The point in signing Harper was to improve the offense and win ballgames, and that’s what has happened so far.
Could Harper be more consistently productive? Absolutely. He ended the month 12 for his last 64 (.188) with 23 strikeouts and that even included a five-hit performance in there. Harper has been even worse over the final nine games, going just 3-of-28 (.107) with 12 strikeouts. Six times already this season he’s gone hitless with multiple strikeouts.
Then again, Harper’s struggles as of late are a microcosm for the Phillies’ offense as a whole. While the team averaged 6.19 runs per game through April 16, they’ve been at just 3.62 runs per game since then. It’s been an up-and-down month for Harper, a notoriously streaky hitter throughout his career. If he’s faltering as much as he is and still registers as on pace for 34 home runs and 112 RBIs for a first-place Phillies team, it’s a good sign.
Grade: B-
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