Kuzul

Back in late January, in the midst of this most brutal winter, a love affair with baseball came full circle. I walked into the Holiday Inn in Arlington, Va., and attended my first meeting as a member of the Society for American Baseball Research, or SABR, known for its fanatical devotees and pioneering statistical methods.

I was 13 years old when the owner of the Washington Senators, the perennially cash-strapped Bob Short, broke my heart and moved the team to Arlington, Texas, in 1971. It was only recently that I figured out that the loss of my boyhood heroes—as consistently lousy as they were—triggered a 34-year estrangement from the game I love.

In the years after the Senators left, I would follow baseball casually, sometimes a little more so, but never with the fervor or bright-light energy of my youth. My vintage baseball cards sat dormant in my parents’ attic; for three decades, I seldom mentioned the team and heroes of my youth.

More than ever, I felt a close kinship with the fans of Brooklyn, Seattle, Milwaukee and those other cities whose teams were wrenched from them and turned into faded memories and dog-eared pages of old game programs.

I wonder: Are there others like me?

As anyone who has lived in Washington for a while knows, the Senators in the 1960s were a dreadful lot, with a two-bit carny owner whose shenanigans included one-size-fits-all pantyhose night, inflated crowd numbers and monumentally bad trades.

His Senators were so cheap that at one batting helmet night promotion in August 1969, during a game with the similarly star-crossed Seattle Pilots, my friend Bob Krieger cracked his helmet while pounding it on the concrete steps in the left-field seats at RFK Stadium—but despite a mountain of leftover souvenir helmets, the Senators refused to give a crying 11-year-old a replacement.

In the pre-YouTube world of our youth, such deeds went unnoticed and unpunished.

It’s funny how none of that mattered to us. We loved the Senators unconditionally—for three decades, my mother preserved the “Youth in the Stands” T-shirt I had gotten that same summer, with the team’s dandy U.S. Capitol logo and a gigantic, circular Schaefer Beer advertisement adjacent to it on the front of the shirt.

Every day in the summer, my friends and I gathered at our neighborhood ball field to play pickup baseball games in Clinton, Md., a sleepy Washington suburb that was also the home of talented Senators lefty reliever Darold Knowles. One summer, I printed imaginary game programs for our imaginary team, the “Suburban Senators,” complete with our photos and ginned-up batting stats, earned run averages and inflated bios.

My brother, John, only slightly less in love with the Senators than I, took a wood-burning pen and customized the bat he’d gotten on Bat Day at RFK that summer. He wrote: “John Moniz model, good for 1,000 hits.”

On trips around the country with our family in the 1960s, I badgered my parents to take us to any major league ballpark that was close to any vacation locale. And by close I mean several hundred miles. Going to Gettysburg: How about a side trip to Philadelphia to see the Phillies? And so on, and so on, until the painful divorce from baseball arrived in the fall of 1971, and I stopped asking.

I’m not sure I ever cried or expressed to anyone how deeply traumatizing the loss had become. Instead, I just drifted away from baseball, burying the wound somewhere deep in my sports-fan soul. The final act of separation came when my brother and I defiled our red plastic Senators batting helmets, cutting off the bills to turn them into jammer’s helmets for the local roller derby team, the Baltimore Washington Cats.

When Washington was awarded the Montreal Expos and Major League Baseball moved the team here in 2005, I was elated while keenly appreciating the loss experienced by our Canadian neighbors in a way that only someone who has lost a beloved team can understand. I didn’t think about it at the time, but regaining a baseball club, even one that had become an underfunded, big league ward of the state, unleashed a tidal wave of pent-up interest.

I devoured the writing and theories of Bill James, the baseball stat guru and father of modern statistical analysis. I read no fewer than 50 baseball biographies, including the magnificent Leigh Montville opus on the life of Ted Williams, the last Senators manager.

I became the GM of a 12-member season-ticket group, which now shares two different seat plans, and I routinely make a March pilgrimage to Florida’s Space Coast to see the Nationals before they head north for the season.

My Youth in the Stands T-shirt is now framed, hanging in the den. My 1970 baseball cards are sheathed in plastic and given as gifts to relatives, friends and favored colleagues. My brother’s customized Bat Day bat resides on my back porch, next to my Ted Williams Moxie cola billboard.

Last year, I found the box score from my first major league game posted online. It was Sept. 15, 1968, the Senators against the New York Yankees. My mom took my brother and me and we sat in the distant reaches of right field to see Mickey Mantle in his last season.

What lingers in the imagination, though, is that first glimpse of the emerald green outfield, a whiff of cigar smoke and the first, best unrequited love.

Dave Moniz is the media adviser for the U.S. Air Force and a former reporter for USA Today and Knight Ridder newspapers.

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It was recently reported by the Washington Post that Nationals catcher Wilson Ramos is likely headed for surgery on his left hand that could keep him out for four to eight weeks. That leaves current backup Jose Lobaton in line to get the majority of the action behind the dish, with Jhonatan Solano likely in line to become the team’s new backup. 

As indicated by the fact that Ramos hit fourth (ahead of All-Star Bryce Harper and Silver Slugger Ian Desmond) on Monday, the Nationals clearly expected him to be a big contributor in the lineup. But suddenly, whoever starts at catcher will be an obvious candidate to bat eighth each game, and the depth in Washington’s lineup takes a significant hit. 

However, the Nationals shouldn’t panic. A lineup featuring the likes of Harper, Desmond, Denard Span, Ryan Zimmerman, Jayson Werth, Anthony Rendon and Adam LaRoche is still plenty talented enough to score enough runs to win ballgames. And at this stage of the season—the Nationals have yet to play their second game—it’s unlikely that Washington will be able to acquire a catcher who presents a significant upgrade over the team’s in-house options without vastly overpaying. 

And to be fair, Lobaton hasn’t yet had a chance to show what he can do. He hit just under .250 (.249) in 277 at-bats with the Tampa Bay Rays last season, so based on his track record, he’s not a total liability offensively and deserves a shot to prove he’s worthy of the starting job. Considering Washington gave up Nathan Karns, their former Minor League Pitcher of the Year, to get Lobaton, they obviously think somewhat highly of him. 

Worst case, Lobaton struggles for a week or two and the Nationals go out and acquire a catcher. If the team loses enough games in that span that they’re in a significant hole in the standings, there are more serious issues at hand than Jose Lobaton being the starting catcher anyway, so why not give him a shot? 

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When Bryce Harper was a prospect, we heard all about how he might one day blossom into one of the elite power hitters in baseball, if not the elite power hitter in baseball.

That hasn’t happened yet. But heading into 2014, the 21-year-old Washington Nationals star is certainly looking the part.

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the image that took the Internet by storm last week:

As Nats outfielder Denard Span put it to the Washington Post: “He looks like Brian Urlacher out there playing left field.”

Now, we really shouldn’t lose sight of how Harper has proven himself to be a legitimately well-rounded player. Besides which, a lot of the weight Harper has on now will be coming off as the year goes along. 

Even still, Harper’s elite power potential has always been his calling card. And as of now, I’ll be damned if he doesn’t have the look of a guy on a mission to turn that potential into reality this year by going out there and blasting 35 or 40 bombs. 

At the back of my mind, however, is a thought…

If Harper does indeed boost his power numbers to elite levels this year, is he doomed to also suffer an increase in strikeouts? Thus becoming, you know, a stereotypical power hitter?

I’d call this more of a nagging concern than a serious concern. Strikeouts don’t have the same kind of stigma that they used to, for one, and it is possible to be a high-strikeout guy and a hugely productive hitter. Look at Chris Davis. Or Giancarlo Stanton. Or Ryan Howard back in the day. 

But this is still a discussion worth having because we know strikeouts can hold hitters back. More strikeouts means fewer balls in play, and any hitter putting fewer balls in play is going to have a harder time hitting for average. 

To give you an idea: Of the 24 qualified batters who hit .300 last year, FanGraphs can show that only two (Chris Johnson and Paul Goldschmidt) struck out more than the league average for hitters (19.3 percent). 

The good news is that Harper’s not already a high-strikeout guy. According to FanGraphs, his K% dropped from 20.1 in 2012 to 18.9 last year, a figure better than the league average for hitters.

It’s clear enough from looking at Harper’s plate discipline data that it’s no fluke that he doesn’t have a strikeout problem:

Harper got slightly better at everything, from being more aggressive inside the zone than out to also being better at making contact both in and out of the zone.

This is all encouraging stuff, as it goes to show that Harper’s not just some brute with a vicious swing. He has a remarkably measured approach at the plate for a player his age. He doesn’t fit the description of a guy who’s bound to start striking out a lot.

But at the same time, Harper’s past is only so predictive. It applies to the hitter he’s been, not the hitter he might be in 2014. If he combines added strength, experience and, hopefully, good health, he’s going to be a much more consistent and, indeed, much more dangerous power source.

And that, most likely, would result in him being pitched differently. It’s hard to imagine pitchers being more cautious about going inside the strike zone given that Harper already boasts an alarmingly low 38.0 career Zone%, but there could very well be a change in the diet of pitchers Harper is fed.

If we look into his past for clues, what we find is…Yeah, maybe.

As I’ve noted in a past article, there was a stretch where Harper did look like he had come into his own as a hitter: over the last 49 games of 2012 (including the postseason) and the first 25 games of 2013.

In that 74-game stretch, Hot Harper slashed .320/.382/.665 with 22 home runs. That’s compared to Not-Hot Harper’s .248/.335/.363 slash line in 188 other games.

Here’s where I decided to go all Sherlock Holmes on some data from Brooks Baseball and found this:

Not too much is clear here, but one does notice that Hot Harper saw fewer four-seam fastballs, more changeups and more curveballs. About what you’d expect for a hot hitter, and a sign that, yeah, Harper was being pitched slightly different when he was at his hottest.

Obviously, these changes couldn’t keep Hot Harper from demolishing the ball. That’s in part because he handled the increase in sinkers by hitting them to the tune of a .351 ISO, and the increase in changeups by hitting them to the tune of a .306 ISO.

But the increase in curveballs? Not so much. Hot Harper whiffed on 42.7 percent of the curves he swung at and hit the them to the tune of a .205 average and .114 ISO.

The majority of those were righty curveballs, a pitch I noted in the aforementioned article as one that’s been a particular pain in Harper’s back. Even Hot Harper couldn’t hit them well, whiffing on 38.1 percent of the ones he swung at. He hit just .235 with a .147 ISO on the ones he hit.

Righty curveballs aren’t the only pitch Harper has tended to struggle with. Sliders from lefty pitchers also give Harper fits, and Hot Harper didn’t solve that problem either. He hit only hit .250 with one extra-base hit against lefty sliders, whiffing on 52.2 of the ones he swung at.

Pitchers are smart. So are pitching coaches. The hotter Harper gets in 2014, the more willing they’re going to be to devise more cautious game plans and dig deeper into the scouting reports for anything they can use.

Based on his whole case history and what happened even when he was at his hottest, the safe bet is that Harper will start being fed a more steady diet of breaking balls if he does end up turning his power to 11 in 2014. This alone could keep him from advancing forward in the strikeout department.

But there’s another thing that has to be noted: When Harper was at his best, he coincidentally wasn’t facing much left-handed pitching.

It’s like this:

If Harper does become an elite power hitter in 2014, he’s presumably not going to get to feast on as much right-handed pitching as Hot Harper did. If the numbers don’t level out on their own, they’ll surely get a boost from managers being more proactive in using their best lefty relievers against Harper.

Having to face more left-handed pitching is yet another thing that could block Harper from keeping his strikeouts down. As do most lefty hitters, Harper just doesn’t see lefties as well as he sees righties.

Via FanGraphs:

So the potential for more matchups against left-handed pitchers? Yeah, not quite ideal.

And this brings us, I suppose, to the bottom line.

Based on both his natural talent and his impressive physical prowess, I do think it’s possible that Harper can bloom into a 35-40 home run guy in 2014. But based on the things we just looked at, I think it’s probable that the trade-off for more power would indeed be more strikeouts. Harper has proven enough in the plate-discipline department, but one is skeptical about what will happen if he faces an increased diet of breaking stuff and matchups against lefty pitchers.

The bright side is that it’s all relative. Since Harper’s a relatively low-strikeout guy now, him becoming a high-strikeout guy would very likely entail his K% going slightly over 20 percent rather than closer to 30 percent with the Pedro Alvarezes and Adam Dunns of the world. Though strikeouts could well become a bigger part of Harper’s game, it’s hard to see them becoming a problem to a point where they’re totally ruining his other numbers.

And if those other numbers are there…Well, we’re probably not even going to notice the strikeouts.

Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise/linked.

If you want to talk baseball, hit me up on Twitter.

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With spring training well underway throughout Major League Baseball, the evaluative process is already in the works for the Washington Nationals, as they look to put the best 25-man product on the field that they can.

Baseball’s first month can set the tone for the entire season. As such, manager Matt Williams must be sure he produces an optimal roster to compete in the competitive National League East.

The slides to follow will break down what figures to be the 25 men the Nats will start the season with.

All stats courtesy of baseball-reference.com.

Begin Slideshow

Aside from those that will eventually add free agents Nelson Cruz, Stephen Drew, Ubaldo Jimenez and Ervin Santana, teams are done adding impact players, and we now have a pretty good idea of the core talent that each will head into the 162-game season with.

Based on this, we can now make a well-educated guess on which teams are the World Series favorites. If it were only that simple.

At this time last year, Bleacher Report’s Doug Mead posted his World Series odds for all 30 teams with the Toronto Blue Jays, Washington Nationals, San Francisco Giants and Los Angeles Angels the top four most likely to win it all, in that order. 

While it would be hard to find much of an argument with those odds at the time, none of those four teams even made the playoffs while the team with 13th-best odds, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the team with the 16th-best odds, the Boston Red Sox, were the finalists. 

This is why they play the 162-game schedule. Baseball is unpredictable, and all 30 teams have a fighting chance to make the playoffs.

It’s still fun, however, to look at the teams’ projected rosters and play out the season in our heads. When I did that, here were the four mostly likely World Series matchups I came up with. 

Begin Slideshow

With nearly a decade gone since the Montreal Expos relocated and granted D.C. and its metropolitan area residents the gift of a professional baseball team for the third time in Major League Baseball history, the Washington Nationals have long-buried the ineptitude of their geographical predecessors.

From the “First in war, first in peace, last in the American League” slogan lovingly placed upon the Washington Senators by their fans, to the maladroitness that embodied the last-place Nationals teams in four of their first five seasons, Washington baseball has come a long way and no longer has the mindset of succumbing to mediocrity.

The list to follow will discuss the critical moments and decisions that transformed Washington baseball from a laughing stock into a serious contender. 

Begin Slideshow

Allow me to tell you about one thing I’m not sure of and two things I am sure of.

The thing I’m not sure of: whether Bryce Harper will be my pick for the 2014 National League MVP. It’s still early for such things.

As for the two things I am sure of:

1. I did last year.
2. Harper certainly has MVP potential.

In 2012, the young Washington Nationals slugger won NL Rookie of the Year on the strength of a .270/.340/.477 line and 22 homers in 139 games. All at the tender age of 19. Harper actually got better at the plate in 2013, batting .274/.368/.486 with 20 home runs in 118 games. With an rWAR of 9.0, he’s one of the all-time great WAR heroes through the age of 20.

So yeah, it’s kinda scary that we can look at Harper and say with a straight face, “Hmmm…when do you think his breakout is coming?” He’s already accomplished a lot, but, well, people like you and I tend to expect more from a guy who appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a 16-year-old.

Perhaps Harper’s big, MVP-sized breakout will come this year. If it does, it will be because several things happened.

Thing 1: He Stayed Healthy

Remember when Harper came out of the 2012 All-Star break and managed just a .501 OPS over 32 games? It looked then like the league was figuring him out. 

But then this happened:

*That includes the 2012 postseason.

Around the middle of August in 2012, something clicked. Harper was on a tear down the stretch in 2012 and didn’t let up at the outset of 2013. He had been built up as a future superstar, and it looked like the superstar had arrived.

I put the cutoff for 2013 at 25 games, however, because it was in Harper’s 26th game that he crashed into an outfield fence in Atlanta. Shortly after that, this happened at Dodger Stadium:

Harper was dinged up after the first collision. He was dinged up even more after the second collision, eventually going on the disabled list in late May with a bad left knee.

That was pretty much the end of what once looked like a possible MVP season. Harper managed a modest .789 OPS after he returned from the DL in July, and by September he admitted that he had been playing hurt the whole time.

Harper eventually went in for knee surgery after the season was over. And judging from what he had to say at NatsFest, what he went through in 2013 forced him to put things in perspective. According to Sarah Kogod of The Washington Post, Harper’s looking to be a “little bit smarter” in 2014.

“I don’t want to run into another wall,” he said. “That killed me for the whole season. Having 15 stitches and having my knee all messed up and things like that, I don’t wanna do.”

I’ll take a wild guess and say that Harper is partially motivated by the fact that being hurt sucks. But I’m also guessing that he can see just as clearly as the rest of us how dangerous he was getting to be. Before his injuries intervened, his talent was leading the way.

Assuming that talent is still in there somewhere, it stands to reason that good health alone could be a huge factor in Harper putting up big numbers in 2014. But if he ends up with MVP-caliber numbers, it will probably be because he improved in other areas as well.

Such as…

Thing 2: He Showed Off Even More Opposite-Field Power

Harper has pull power and power up the middle taken care of. According to FanGraphs, 34 of his 42 career homers have either gone out to right field or center field.

But don’t sleep on Harper’s opposite-field power. Eight homers the other way is pretty good for a guy who’s only through his age-20 season, and what’s there is already on the right track.

Here are the splits:

It’s good that Harper hit more balls in the air the other way. It’s even better that he wasn’t wasting his time with those, as his HR/FB rate to left field also rose. In the end, these dingers were a major contribution to a much-improved .247 Isolated Power to the opposite field.

It’s not a fluke that this happened. Oppo power is one of those things that tends to come with experience, but increased strength also helps. We know that Harper had that in 2013, as he reported to spring training 20 pounds heavier than his playing weight in 2012.

Another year, same old story. Harper said in early January, via Anna McDonald of ESPN.com, that he was looking to come into spring training at around 240 or 245 pounds. He would lose a lot of that weight throughout the season but would still likely end up bigger than he had been in 2013.

More weight can only help Harper’s power, and one of the telltale signs that it did would be even more power the other way in 2014.

Another thing to watch is…

Thing 3: He Mastered Right-Handed Curveballs

Harper owns a .905 OPS over 734 plate appearances against right-handed pitchers. He’s not exactly out of his depth against them.

A big reason why is because he handles pretty much everything righties can throw at him. Per Brooks Baseball, it’s like this:

Those are some impressive numbers. I like the cutter numbers in particular, though I can’t say they surprise me given what we know about Ron Harper’s cutter per this tweet from Adam Kilgore of The Washington Post.

But maybe you noticed the key omission from that table: Where are the curveballs?

Yeah…about that. I figure it’s best to just show you this:

Harper hasn’t been completely baffled by right-handed curveballs but hasn’t quite figured them out yet either. It’s particularly discouraging that the progress he made in 2013 wasn’t worth all that much. He made more contact against righty hooks, but not good contact. That’s a pretty high ground-ball rate.

Now, sure, one thing about the 2013 data is that it’s heavily influenced by Harper’s nearly year-long struggle with injuries. In his first 25 games, he had three hits against righty curveballs and was generally looking better against them than he had been in 2012. Had he stayed healthy, who knows?

All the same, I’m guessing the book on Harper for righties recommends curveballs when appropriate. He should expect righties to be comfortable going to their hooks until he proves he can hit them.

If he does, then he’ll have right-handers pretty well covered. But if he’s going to be truly unstoppable…

Thing 4: He Hit Lefties

It’s hard enough for a lefty-hitting veteran with 10 years of experience to hit left-handed pitching. We really shouldn’t be surprised that Harper, a 21-year-old with two years of experience, hasn’t mastered lefty pitching.

The good news, however, is that this is yet another area where Harper made some strides in 2013:

You can look at that average and that ISO and say that Harper regressed against lefties last year. But it’s a good sign that his on-base percentage against them went up, and it’s also good that his walks went up and his strikeouts went down. If we make things simple, that says he was seeing lefties better.

Where it gets even better is that Harper actually managed most lefty pitches pretty well. According to Brooks Baseball, he hit .307 with a .160 ISO against the hard stuff. He was passable against curves with a .214 average and .143 ISO. He hit only .154 with no extra-base hits against offspeed pitches, but that’s not too big of a concern given that lefty pitchers don’t throw many changeups to lefty hitters.

Against sliders, however…well, you better take a look at this:

If we take a look at Brooks Baseball, we can see that these sliders tended to end up in the same place in 2013. About where you’d expect: low and away.

TexasLeaguers.com can show that Harper often obliged by swinging the bat:

This is yet another area where it’s hard to begrudge the guy. Any lefty hurler with a good slider knows he can make the lefty hitter at the plate look silly if he spins one away from him. Harper’s no different.

But still, he needs to be better than he’s been at picking these sliders up and laying off them. Easier said than done, to be sure, but he ought to have a pretty good idea when they’re coming in 2014. Like with the righty curveballs, he should know from experience what the book on him must say.

All in all, I’d say that Harper’s chances of having an MVP-caliber season will be good enough if he just manages to stay healthy in 2014. I mean, shoot, we all saw what he was doing before he got hurt. He had turned into a monster.

But if Harper stays healthy and hits for more oppo power and solves righty curveballs and handles lefties better, he’ll be a lot worse than a monster.

He’ll be a destroyer of worlds. 

Note: Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com unless otherwise noted/linked.

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Recent speculation indicates that the Washington Nationals are interested in acquiring Oakland Athletics closer Grant Balfour, according to Ken Rosenthal of Fox Sports. 

The 36-year-old relief pitcher is coming off of his first All-Star appearance and recorded a career-best 38 saves in 2013.

Balfour would likely provide a closing alternative to Rafael Soriano, who recorded 43 saves for the Nats in 2013 and is entering the final year of his contract. Soriano, whose 43 saves ranked in the top five among MLB pitchers, also blew a relatively high six save opportunities. 

Further, with arbitration eligibility looming in the next couple of seasons for such players as Bryce Harper and Craig Stammen, along with back-loaded contracts for Jordan Zimmermann and Ian Desmond, Washington will likely go to great lengths to ensure that Soriano does not appear for more than 53.0 innings in 2014—so as to avoid the vesting of his $14 million option for 2015.

With the addition of Balfour, Clippard will likely remain in his role as the eighth inning setup guy, and Drew Storen will become expendable.

Storen, at 26 years old, never quite recovered from the 2012 blown save in Game 5 of the NLDS against the St. Louis Cardinals. The Stanford product posted career worsts in 2013 for both ERA and WHIP with 4.52 and 1.362 respectively. 

Balfour may be relatively old, but a bullpen can never have enough quality arms. The Sydney native also represents an interesting trend that’s seemed to be developing since the acquisition of Doug Fister in early December.

The 2012 Nationals team that made history by generating the franchise’s first-ever playoff berth was full of talented young players and veterans that, for the most part, didn’t have much playoff experience.

Fister started and put up meaningful numbers in appearances in both the 2012 and 2013 ALCS for the Detroit Tigers.

Balfour has appeared in the playoffs in seven different seasons with three different teams, along with one ALCS and one World Series. Further, he has the edge that only comes from being an experienced veteran—as displayed by his war of words with Victor Martinez in the 2013 ALDS.

Though Storen may have better upside at this point in time, being that he’s 10 years younger, he doesn’t have the experience that comes from playing for a decade or more.

Balfour, despite carrying the tread that comes from a long career, can get the job done. He won’t have to stay long, but his experience and leadership may be just what the Nats have been missing. 

All stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com

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Through the first two seasons of Bryce Harper‘s career, he’s shown prodigious power at a young age. If his offseason plan comes to fruition, he’ll be bigger and stronger than ever in 2014.

According to Anna McDonald of ESPN, Bryce Harper is looking to bulk up this winter after finishing the 2013 season at 218 pounds. The 21-year-old prodigy isn’t just looking to put on a little weight, he’s looking to transform his body in preparation for the rigors of a long, grinding season. 

“I’m excited to take a month off, that’s something I’m excited for, let the body rest,” Harper said. “Let the body heal a little bit and get as big as a house. That’s the biggest thing I try to do.”

“As big as a house” is a phrase that might already be in production for a line of clothing in Washington, D.C for the upcoming season. While the notion might seem crazy for a young athlete like Harper, he seems to have a goal in mind.

“I want to go into spring training about 240, 245,” said Harper. “I’ll lose about 20 pounds during the season.”

According to Harper’s Baseball-Reference page, he’s listed at 230 pounds. If he shows up to spring training 10-15 pounds heavier, concerns about its effect on his game will become a narrative for the media to talk about. Speed, range in the outfield and injury risk due to more weight will become part of the conversation around Harper.

Of course, so will the added bulk changing his strength profile at the plate. If Harper does succeed in his goal, he’ll likely be stronger throughout the rigors of the season. Even if he loses the weight by midseason or September, he’ll still be bigger than he was when the 2013 season ended. 

Bryce Harper has proven to be an awfully powerful hitter during his short time in the major leagues. Over the first 257 games of his career, Harper has slugged 42 home runs, while posting a .481 slugging percentage. 

Those figures may not be close to as prolific as Barry Bonds or Mark McGwire in their respective primes, but when comparing Harper with every 19- and 20-year-old hitter in the history of baseball, his place in the record book stands out.  

Harper isn’t just powerful, he blasted more home runs through his age-20 season than all but two hitters, Mel Ott and Tony Conigliaro, in the history of the sport. While that is an impressive feat without context, the names below him on that list make it stand out even more. Alex Rodriguez, Frank Robinson, Ken Griffey Jr. and Mickey Mantle began some of the most prolific careers in baseball history by producing fewer home runs than Bryce Harper.

Now, heading into his age-21 season, Harper is poised to become bigger and possibly stronger. It remains to be seen if it will lead to more home runs, but the natural progression of power hitters typically leads to more power as the years go on. 

Legendary baseball writer Peter Gammons agrees with that notion. Recently, before the news of Harper’s weight gain became public knowledge, Gammons listed Harper among five players with the potential to approach a “near-historic” level in 2014. Per the column on Gammons Daily: “His OPS still rose from .817 to .854 despite the injuries, we have seen his prodigious power, his hitting skills, his edgy fire and his wont to be great.”

As Gammons noted, Harper’s .854 OPS, factoring in his excellent plate discipline, was an improvement over his age-19 season. While the home run totals are staggering, so is Harper’s place among the best adjusted OPS marks for young hitters in history. Through his age-20 season, the Nationals star owns the sixth-best OPS+ (125) in history (subscription required for link). Among the names below him on that list: Ken Griffey Jr. and Al Kaline. 

Yes, Harper’s OPS, despite the weight loss at the end of last season, rose from 2012 to 2013. As the former No. 1 overall pick moves into his third year and age-21 season, predicting a rise to 30 or 35 home runs wouldn’t be outlandish.  

Now, Harper’s ascension to the top of the power-hitting charts may begin even more quickly than expected. 

Bryce Harper’s desire to be great, evident to any baseball fan who has followed his path from Sports Illustrated cover boy at the age of 16 to top draft pick to his ascension through the minor leagues to stardom in Washington, is almost surely the driving force behind this offseason’s weight-management tactic. 

Take a look at the following home run hit by Harper in a late-September game this past season. If he’s feeling weaker than usual, it certainly doesn’t show. By blasting a low pitch deep into the right-center field seats, Harper showed the type of easy, natural power that has been present in his swing since video of his amateur exploits first hit the Internet.  

Naturally, without the aid of more bulk, Bryce Harper has the ability to be one of the best power-hitting stars in baseball. 

With some added heft, the National League could be in big trouble during the 2014 season.

Will Harper become one of the best sluggers in baseball in 2014?

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Washington Nationals phenom Bryce Harper is already a pretty big guy at 6’2” and 230 pounds, but it appears that he just isn’t satisfied.

According to Bill Baer from HardballTalk.com, Harper wants to get “as big as a house” before the start of spring training.  

I’m not a doctor or anything, but I’m pretty sure that’s going to be hard to do.

With 42 home runs over his first two years, Harper appears to want to add weight in order to add some pop to his bat. Houston Astros strength and conditioning coach Jake Beiting will lead the charge to help Harper beef up, as it seems that the star outfielder is planning on sacrificing speed for power in 2014.

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