Bryce Harper Has a New, Lower Gear
According to this weekend’s ESPN Sunday Night Telecast, Bryce Harper has, in recent years, often performed his pregame routine and taken batting practice indoors, in the bowels of major-league ballparks, much to the disappointment of ballhawks across America. But Harper revealed himself over the weekend in St. Louis, taking BP on the field, and any time a star like Harper deviates from a routine, it raises curiosity. During the broadcast, ESPN’s Jessica Mendoza related how she’d asked Harper about the change. He said he wanted to hit some batting practice home runs, wanted to see the ball travel.
Perhaps he wanted to see how an adjustment, something akin to an R&D prototype, would work outside a lab setting, outside of an indoor batting cage.
When I think about Harper’s swing, I think about the violence of it. The leg kick, the force compelling his back foot — his left foot — to rise from the ground. Former Nationals beat writer Adam Kilgore wrote an excellent multimedia piece about Harper’s swing for The Washington Post several years ago.
From that piece:
[Nationals video coordinator Rick] Schu scanned through video and found film of Harper hitting. He arranged clips of Harper and Ruth side-by-side on the monitor and stopped at the moment each hitter’s bat connected with a pitch. In each still picture, he saw a stiff front leg, an uncoiling torso and a back foot lifting off the ground. “Wow,” he thought. “That’s identical.” …
“The full thing is God-given,” Harper said. “I don’t know how I got my swing or what I did. I know I worked every single day. I know I did as much as I could with my dad. But I never really looked at anything mechanical. There was nothing really like, ‘Oh, put your hands here.’ It was, ‘Where are you comfortable? You’re comfortable here, hit from there.’ ”
What’s interesting, at least to this author, is that Harper is willing to tinker with a gift that allowed him to reach the majors at 19. What’s perhaps troubling for the opposition is that he continues to look for ways to improve despite already possessing an NL MVP on his resume and returning close to that form thus far in 2017. He’s still just 24 — he won’t turn 25 until October — and is four months younger than Aaron Judge. His youth suggests he’s still learning himself and the game. And on the ESPN telecast, Harper debuted an apparent decision to trade power for control — or at least explore it. It’s not a swing I recall him taking — at least not regularly — a swing seemingly executed at 80% effort.
Against the hard-throwing Carlos Martinez, Harper shelved his signature leg kick. To commence his swing, he slightly raised his right foot but not completely from the ground, and took a much less explosive movement. He seemed to consciously trade power for control.
Consider Harper’s first swing of the evening:
