When I moved to Chapel Hill, NC for grad school four years ago, I was a little worried about being five hours away from Major League Baseball in any direction. I’d spent my entire life to that point in Western PA, growing up an hour away from PNC Park and spending an undergraduate career a 20 minute walk away from the stadium. In North Carolina, I’d have to go cold turkey from Major League games. Luckily, I quickly found that North Carolina is full of college and minor league baseball and while it’s not the exact same thing, there’s plenty to be excited about.
Since moving here, there have been a few prospects I’ve gone out of my way to see. The Durham Bulls’ rotation has been particularly worth seeing in recent years; I saw David Price, Jeremy Hellickson, Jeff Niemann, and Wade Davis all pitch in blue and orange well before they pitched in the American League East. I also made a couple trips out to see Matt Wieters, back in 2009 when he was the second coming of Clark Kent and I saw Tommy Hanson and Andrew McCutchen play in Durham as opponents. When I checked the Greensboro Grasshopper’s schedule last week and saw that the Hagerstown Suns would be in North Carolina over the weekend, I dropped pretty much everything I was doing and made a few friends do the same so that we could go watch Bryce Harper.
By this point, everyone knows who Harper is. He’s the cocky kid who proclaimed himself baseball’s LeBron James in Sports Illustrated and was drafted first in last year’s draft after skipping his junior and senior years of high school to play in a junior college. He signed a big league deal worth $9.9 million last August, pretty much unheard of for a player his age, and the Nationals sent him to the lower reaches of the minors this spring to start his professional career. Most prospects his age are worried about the draft right now. If they’re lucky, they’ll be picked in June and play in the Gulf Coast League this year. Many of them will play short-season ball next year, while the very best may see full-season Single-A next spring. Harper, meanwhile, is already in full-season Single-A and he’s batting .320/.45/.615 with 10 homers in 43 games of full-season ball. He’ll almost certainly be promoted to either Advanced-A or Double-A before the season ends. There’s an awfully good chance he’ll be with the Nationals sometime in 2012 before his 20th birthday.
Harper’s the sort of prospect that was impressive even when his line wasn’t that great. When I saw him last Saturday, he was only 1-for-5 with a single and one run scored. But you can learn a lot from every at-bat in the minor leagues and even though I’m not a scout (or anything like a scout, really), Harper was impressive. In his first at-bat, he crushed a groundball that Greensboro’s second baseman had to dive for, even though the ball was only hit a few feet to his left. It was hit that hard. His second time up, he hit what can only be described as a Major League pop-up; the sort of pop-up that you know was only a fraction of an inch away from being a home run. His third time up he singled to center field on a ball hit so hard I thought for a second that Isaac Galloway was going to come up throwing to first base, because that’s how quickly it got out to him. His fourth time up, he hit a ball to the warning track in dead center even though it came off of the handle of his bat. His fifth trip to the plate was another massive pop-out, so high that the various Grasshoppers gathered underneath it visibly had trouble tracking it.
There was another first round pick from 2010 in the game; Christian Yelich, who the Marlins took with the 23rd pick last year. He’s 19; he struck out three times and grounded out once. He definitely seemed uneasy coming back out to left field (right in front of the spot I had steaked out on the lawn) after the third strikeout, even though Greensboro had just rallied to take the lead. It wasn’t just that Harper seemed at ease in a league where even the youngest players are a year older than him; he actually stood out at the plate in a game where he did next to nothing. It’s not like this is a groundbreaking sentiment or anything, but I think the kid’s going to be alright.
