Bryce Harper Wants To Change Baseball Forever

Bryce Harper - his play, his attitude, his hair! - is on a mission to change baseball forever. Does that make him a hero or a villain?

- Tim Keown

THE SWING is raging and primeval, a broken dam, a convulsion. It appears to have been engineered for a different time—perhaps to slaughter animals for sustenance or enemies for land. Its grace is as undeniable as its brutality, and to employ it strictly for the purpose of striking a moving baseball, as Bryce Harper is doing inside a warehouse in an industrial park near the Las Vegas airport, could classify as a serious underutilization of resources.

This Tuesday afternoon offseason hitting session is off-the-record—observation is welcome; description is not—but it’s no betrayal of confidence to report that Harper goes about his work with forensic vigor. He trains with his father, Ron, and the two move about the cage in silence. There’s an easy, liquid flow from drill to drill, a choreography of blood, with Ron pushing a double-decker shopping cart full of baseballs from station to station and musician Chris Stapleton’s voice carrying that same kind of brutal grace through a tiny speaker behind home plate.

The sound of these baseballs hitting the 34- inch, 32-ounce Marucci bat is what I imagine lightning sounds like when it splits an oak. Inside this warehouse, where four-time National League batting champion Bill Madlock is one cage over employing a career wroth expertise to teach a couple of overindulged 10 year old to keep their weight back its sounds like an entire forest falling one tree at a time.

BRYCE HARPER IS the rare prodigy who appears destined to fulfill his promise. Baseball's culture -- uniquely unkind to prodigies -- is built on earning dues, bus rides, failure, grinding, surviving and then lording that over the guys who arrive after you. It's kind of like the military, with Danville and Gwinnett instead of Forts Bragg and Hood.