Phillies Finally Sign Harper and Surprise, It Makes Sense.

So the Phillies finally got their man, wrapping up generational talent Bryce Harper for 13 years and $330M. It's the biggest contract ever (though not the highest AAV), and this is causing some otherwise sensible people to lose their minds.
Before we get into the crazy, let's make one thing clear. The Phillies can afford this. They can afford this and the Andrew McCutcheon deal and the David Robertson deal and the Aaron Nola extension. If they had decided to go that way, they could have afforded Manny Machado's deal on top of it, and probably whatever Dallas Kuechel gets, too. They are a lone team in one of the biggest markets in the country, with a sweet cable deal that's a license to print money. They can afford to spend money to put better players on the field. (Which, history has shown time and again, leads to more butts in seats, more shirseys sold, and more $10 beers getting guzzled at the ballpark, i.e. more profit.)
The main objection to the Phillies - freely and of their own accord - paying Harper this money is that it's a lot of money. To which I say yes, yes it is and it's doing what a baseball team's money is supposed to be doing - paying players, who happen to be the product. (We'll leave the real estate conglomerate that is the Atlanta Braves alone for the moment.) What else exactly should a team be doing with its money? Hoarding it for a rainy day? Trust me, they're not going to turn it into cheaper seats and beers. Keeping it in the owner's hands so they can buy a Dan Snyder-style mega yacht? Surely that can't be what people are actually rooting for.
No, the Phillies did what they were supposed to - they took their revenues and plowed them back into the product, with an eye towards competitiveness and the profitability that comes with it. By shrieking about the size of the contract, all the various voices are doing is demonstrating a lack of understanding of basic economics.

On Goose Gossage Getting Steamed

The general reaction to Goose Gossage's off-color, off-topic (he'd initially been asked about Aroldis Chapman) rant about Joey Bats and Bryce Harper and all those disrespectful younger players is "cranky old man yells at damn kids to get off his lawn."

I don't think this is the most accurate way of looking at it.

Things We Have Learned From NatsThroatGrabGate

Because these days, everything in DC has to be a "gate".

Who The Good Guys Are

Once upon a time, everybody hated Bryce Harper. They hated him because he was cocky and arrogant and disrespectful (or possibly a 17 year old kid who had been told most of his life he was a transcendent talent and who was under an intense media spotlight from the age when it became possible for him to grow hair in awkward places).

This lasted for a while, until suddenly an idiot political columnist had a new idea: Bryce Harper, who didn't do underaged drinking and who went all-out on every play, even when that meant crashing into walls, was no longer Everything Wrong With Baseball.

Bryce Harper, Political Narrative

Hey, you remember back when Bryce Harper was the embodiment of all that was good, right, and apparently politically conservative in the world, and Jason Heyward was the symbol of everything that was lazy and evil and liberal and stuff?

Heyward: 21 HR, 64 RBI, 17 SB, .842 OPS
Harper: 12 HR, 37 RBI, 13 SB, .741 OPS*, 1 case of telling kids to be "sexy"

Yeah. Me neither.

And this, boys and girls, is why you don't try to cram political narratives hamfistedly into one night's worth of Sportscenter highlights.



*None of this is intended as any sort of value or talent judgment on Mr. Harper, who is handling the athletic and social pressures of being in the big leagues before his 21st birthday with grace, aplomb and skill. More power to him, and all that. He's a great ballplayer and, by  most accounts, a pretty decent guy. He's just not a lame political metaphor, and neither is his opposite number on the Braves.

Harper Dugout P.T.A.

So Bryce Harper, wunderkind, had himself an 0-5 night tonight, and in response, he took a swing at the clubhouse tunnel wall. This is, of course, being jumped on by various folks as proof that Harper is a "punk" - that memorable word that got mild-mannered Lenny Randle to punch out his manager - and seventeen kinds of horrible human being. The same reaction, from a different player, might be cast as "competitive" or "he really hates to lose" or "fiery". But with Harper, it's more proof that he's Jerkimus Maximus, because, hey, that's the narrative.
I think it was Bill James who once famously described titanically noggined former Phillie Dave Hollins as "intense", and then added that you're intense only as long as you're playing well, you're the same guy, only now sportswriters feel free to call you a jerk. One gets the feeling that if Harper were hitting over .300 and had blown up after a bad night, some of the people now burying him would instead be lauding his "intensity" and his "fire", and talking about how it brought a needed spark to a veteran team that could use some of that energy. It's happened before, after all. Ask Dave Hollins.
It's not surprising that the knives are out for Harper. He's been touted as The Next Big Thing since he was young enough to unironically like Justin Bieber, his prodigious talent and career-minded upbringing have kept him from being anything like a normal teenager, and he's making a lot of money. Also, he's done a few jerky things, some of which appear far less jerky in full context.
But really, the most important number here is 19. As in, the kid is playing, and holding his own, at the highest level of competition in the world at the age of 19. How many of us would have done so well? How many of us were still trying to figure out when exactly you started "Dark Side of the Moon" in order to sync it up perfectly with The Wizard of Oz at that age, not shrugging off a Cole Hamels fastball to the meat?  How many of us wouldn't have punched something if we got frustrated at failing, especially after failing at something that we've been able to do effortlessly our whole life?
That's not to say that I think it was brilliant of Harper to accidentally Stoudamire his face. He is going to have to learn to control that temper if he wants to achieve the greatness his talent seems to promise. At the same time, he's 19. I'm not quite willing to consign someone to the reflexive hatred bin because he's got his emotions on his sleeve two years before he can legally drink. At least he's not writing bad poetry, right? A dugout tantrum is one night, a bad rhyme scheme is forever.
So come on. Look in the mirror. Then think about yourself at 19, and cut the kid - and he most surely is a kid - some slack. And while you're at it, try to be a little less "intense".