ATLANTA — Bryce Harper crouched in right field, alone, his glove and hat resting on the grass and who knows what running through his brain.
Come to think of it, what was going on up there?
“I’ll tell you what,” Harper said later Wednesday, “I was thinking about Krew, my son — and what I would say to him in that situation.”
The situation: The go-ahead hit clanged off the top of Harper’s outstretched glove after he misjudged a fly ball in the seventh inning of an elimination game. And now here was Harper — Sports Illustrated cover boy at age 16, face of baseball at 19, perhaps bound to be the Phillies’ G.O.A.T. before he retires, left to process possibly being a goat.
Explain that to a 7-year-old.
“You make a play like that, and I’m hearing it out there, obviously,” Harper said. “But how quickly can I turn the page and just get past that moment, knowing that I’m still coming up to the plate to hit?”
Indeed, if we’ve learned anything across these last five postseasons, it’s that anything can happen as long as Harper has one more at-bat. And so, three pitches after Kyle Schwarber homered to draw the Phillies to within a run in the eighth inning, Harper blasted a slider into the right-field seats to tie the game.
They won, 4-3 over the rival Braves in Game 2 of the best-of-three wild-card series, and lived to see another day because Alec Bohm banged a 10th-inning homer and rookie Andrew Painter came out of the bullpen for three scoreless innings in his postseason debut.
But Harper was at the center of it all, as he always is, as he has been since he was a 10-year-old hired gun on the travel-ball circuit.
So, back to that scene in right field, two batters after Harper’s mistake, as the Phillies made the dreaded move of turning to their combusti-bullpen.
Harper thought about Cristopher Sánchez, whom he correctly said “was throwing the crap out of it” for 6⅔ innings. He thought about the 89-mph ball hit by the Braves’ Drake Baldwin — “I thought it was going to be a pop fly, just right at me,” he said — and the potential consequences of a 3-1 deficit against a tough Braves bullpen.
And then, after rookie Alex McFarlane recorded the last out of the inning, Harper made the long jog off the field. Interim manager Don Mattingly, who knows something about big-city baseball stardom, didn’t feel the need to check in with him.
“I never worry about Bryce,” Mattingly said. “He’s been through so much in his life, in his career. I never worry about him handling anything.”
That didn’t stop Sánchez, who slammed his glove in the dugout after coming out of the game but calmed down by the time Harper trudged off the field. The big lefty approached for an impromptu pep talk.
“I don’t really know [why]; it just came out,” Sánchez said through a team interpreter. “I waited for him on the bench, and I told him he was bound to have a great moment. And he had it.”
The Braves brought in lefty reliever Dylan Lee to face Schwarber and Harper. He didn’t allow a homer to a lefty all season. He faced Schwarber and Harper in the eighth inning of Game 1 and got both of them out.
Schwarber worked the count full before hitting a knee-high slider. Harper jumped on a low-and-in slider that wasn’t low enough.
“I wasn’t not trying to hit a homer,” Harper said. “I can tell you that.”
The Phillies leaped out of the dugout. Sánchez, who was in the trainer’s room, said he “just slammed everything I had close to me.”
Harper’s reaction: Relief? Redemption?
“I think it’s a learning situation, not just for myself but for everybody else as well,” said Harper, 2-for-9 with two RBIs in the two games against the Braves. “Everybody is going to make mistakes at some point, but it’s how you come through in the next situation. It’s not that serious, to tell you the truth. I think people take it very seriously. And don’t get me wrong: I take it serious.
“But I think there’s a mindset, especially for kids nowadays, parents and coaches put so much on kids to have to come through and be great. But for me, it’s how can you learn from each situation that you’re in to come out great in the next one.”
The playoffs tend to bring out Harper’s reflective side. And there is surely a moral to the story of Harper’s Game 2 that goes beyond merely whether the Phillies kept alive their season.
But there are also stakes for Harper in the postseason. He’s nearing the end of his eighth season as the $330 million star of Phillies stars. He has five years left on his contract. He turns 34 in a little more than two weeks.
A work stoppage is looming in two months and may not end for a while. The biological baseball clocks of Harper, Schwarber, Trea Turner, J.T. Realmuto, Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, and the rest of the core of a $320 million roster is tick, tick, ticking.
And with each postseason that ends short of a parade down Broad Street, their legacies remain incomplete.
“That’s the one thing on my mantle that’s not there,” Harper said the other day. “Right?”
Right. So, maybe that was going through his mind, too, as he pondered what would’ve been an unimaginable way for the season to end.
Instead, Harper recovered in the only way he knows. And now, the Phillies will have Nola on regular rest and Wheeler on three days’ rest for the decisive Game 3.
“Just a pick-me-up game for me, obviously,” Harper said. “My teammates picking me up in that situation, and that’s what it’s all about.”
