One day, Bryce Harper woke up and chose violence. Over nine years ago, the Major League Baseball star made a controversial comment that might have some truth to it.
We all know baseball is a very old game, but do the rules have to be so dated?
Harper dug into this dynamic almost a decade ago, and his headline-making remarks made many around the sport bury their face.
Throwback to Bryce Harper Spitting Facts
In a 2016 interview with ESPN The Magazine, Harper made multiple noteworthy comments that raised many eyebrows. But it was one comment he made surrounding the state of the sport that caught the most attention.
“Baseball’s tired,” the young star said. “It’s a tired sport, because you can’t express yourself. You can’t do what people in other sports do.”
By the time of the interview, Harper was already a star with an extremely bright future ahead of him. It’s odd to see the face of an entire league criticize their sport in such a manner. But in this case, it seems Harper was still feeling some type of way over an incident that occurred months earlier.
In a September 2015 matchup between the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals, Orioles star third baseman Manny Machado celebrated a home run. In his next plate appearance, Harper’s teammate, closer Jonathan Papelbon, drilled Machado with a fastball as retaliation.
There are a plethora of “unwritten rules” in baseball that have served as a code of conduct for players throughout the game’s history. However, discrepancies often arise from time to time due to the subjective, non-formal nature of these “rules.”
In this case, the veteran Papelbon felt that Machado celebrated his home run too much. In baseball, one of the more common unwritten rules is to never “show up” or embarrass your opponent. Papelbon has never been shy to speak his mind or show his emotions. But in this incident, he clearly viewed Machado’s celebration as over-the-top and crossed the line, a subjective judgment. So, purposefully hitting Machado was a way to stand up for his teammate and remind Machado of the rules.
After the hit-by-pitch, Machado was not happy, a small argument between the teams took place, and Papelbon was ejected. Papelbon denied hitting Machado on purpose, but the league didn’t believe him and suspended him for three games.
Harper almost immediately took Machado’s side in this incident, not his teammate’s. This didn’t go over well and helped lead to the infamous scene of Papelbon choking Harper in the Nationals dugout just a few days later.
In the ESPN interviews, Harper detailed his desire for stars to have the leeway to express more passion and emotion in the game. Having to play the game in a buttoned-up manner, just because that’s how players have always done it, was described as “tired” by Harper.
While there will always be a line between celebrating a feat and embarrassing your opponent, Harper felt that players should have more freedom to wear their hearts on their sleeves.
“If a guy pumps his fist at me on the mound,” Harper said, “I’m going to go, ‘Yeah, you got me. Good for you. Hopefully I get you next time.’ That’s what makes the game fun. You want kids to play the game, right? What are kids playing these days? Football, basketball. Look at those players — Steph Curry, LeBron James. It’s exciting to see those players in those sports. Cam Newton — I love the way Cam goes about it. He smiles, he laughs. It’s that flair. The dramatic.”
440-foot home runs will help win you Player of the Week 😮💨
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— MLB Stats (@MLBStats)
It’s interesting to see how the game has evolved in the nine years since those comments. While the “old-school” mentality still appears occasionally, players have more freedom to express themselves as they please. Whether it’s bat flips, admiring your home run rather than immediately running around the bases, or dying your hair, MLB players have never expressed themselves more than right now.
MLB is still behind leagues like the NFL and NBA, but it will be interesting to see how the game evolves even further.