Harper's new disciplined-aggressive approach paying early dividends
In the top of the sixth inning Sunday at Great American Ball Park, before a scant 10,335 paying customers, Bryce Harper smacked his first home run of the season, clobbering a 92-mph fastball from Cincinnati Reds starter Sal Romano into the right-field bleachers.
For the next 30 hours, give or take, Harper didn't get out.
An inning after that first homer, a 397-foot blast, Harper walked on five pitches. Then, in the top of the ninth, Harper provided a crucial insurance run with an even more ostentatious dong, a 425-foot solo shot into right-center (that silenced one sorely misguided heckler). He then got on a plane and flew, with his teammates, to Atlanta.
At SunTrust Park on Monday evening, in his first plate appearance against Braves left-hander Sean Newcomb, Harper walked. In his second trip to the plate, an inning later, he homered. He then walked in each of his next three plate appearances, seeing a combined three strikes over that span, before a ninth-inning groundout snapped his on-base streak at eight consecutive plate appearances. Harper has since homered and walked again.
All told, five games into the season, Harper ranks fifth in the majors in wRC+ (285), with a garish .400/.542/1.200 slash line to his name. On a per-plate-appearance basis, only Freddie Freeman, Paul Goldschmidt, and Jesse Winker, and Gregory Polanco are walking more often than Harper (29.2 percent), who also leads the majors in isolated power (.800), averaging almost a full extra base per at-bat. His four homers have him tied for first in the bigs with Charlie Blackmon. The dude is, as they say, on one.
For some time now, of course, Harper has been among the game's foremost purveyors of homers and walks - since his 2015 MVP campaign, he ranks second in the bigs in walk rate and eighth in ISO - but the heretofore unseen level of plate discipline he's demonstrated through this nascent campaign has been straight-up bonkers.
Throughout the first almost-week of the season, after all, Harper has pretty much refused to chase, offering at pitches outside the strike zone at the lowest rate (19.7 percent) of his career by far. Such a precipitous drop in chase rate, an improvement of more than 11 percent on his career mark (30.8 percent), is noteworthy in and of itself, but it's especially impressive considering the five-time All-Star has been more aggressive than ever when he gets a pitch inside the strike zone, hacking at those meaty offerings a career-high 81.6 percent of the time. The result: a career-high 41.2 percent hard-contact rate, better even than the 40.9 mark he managed in 2015 MVP campaign.
Among qualified hitters, in fact, only six have been more apt than Harper thus far to lay off pitches outside the zone and offer at strikes: Ryan Flaherty and Matt Joyce, whose inclusion on the following table bespeaks the wackiness of small samples; DJ Lemahieu, who has been uncharacteristically selective early on; Alex Gordon and Whit Merrifield, who have also shown more refinement in their approaches this year; and, least surprisingly, Joey Votto, the future Hall-of-Famer with a career 158 wRC+ whose plate discipline is the stuff of legend.
| Name | Swing% | O-Swing% | Z-Swing% | Attack/Chase |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joey Votto | 51.1% | 14.3% | 80.8% | 5.65 |
| Ryan Flaherty | 40.9% | 14.6% | 76.7% | 5.25 |
| DJ LeMahieu | 29.1% | 11.8% | 60.7% | 5.14 |
| Matt Joyce | 52.8% | 17.7% | 84.2% | 4.76 |
| Alex Gordon | 45.5% | 15.4% | 72.4% | 4.70 |
| Whit Merrifield | 42.9% | 16.1% | 68.8% | 4.27 |
| Bryce Harper | 43.4% | 19.7% | 81.6% | 4.14 |
You don't even have to squint that hard, either, to see that Votto and Harper - the game's second- and third-best hitters, respectively, over the last three seasons, by wRC+ - are behaving very similarly at the plate in 2018. Votto has swung at a higher percentage of total pitches than usual, and Harper has swung at fewer, but both are hacking at pitches inside the zone at almost the exact same rate, and Harper's ability to lay off pitches outside the zone is starting to look vaguely Vottoish, too. His teammates, for what it's worth, are taking notice.
"Bryce is a great hitter," second baseman Howie Kendrick told MLB.com's Jamal Collier on Tuesday. "He's getting even better. It seems like the plate discipline's becoming even more, not that he hasn't known the strike zone before, but it's impressive what he's been doing and what he did last year."
It remains to be seen, obviously, whether Harper can be as selective over a full season as Votto, whose swing rate since Harper's debut in 2012 (39.3 percent) is 27th-lowest among the game's 377 qualified hitters over that span. At the very least, though, Harper's increasingly patient-aggressive approach has given us a glimpse of what someone with Votto-esque discipline might look like with Harper power. After all, Harper isn't just keeping his bat on his shoulders, content to lay off both balls and hittable strikes just to take a walk - he's also murdering the relatively low number of pitches he's seeing inside the zone: of the 12 would-be called strikes that Harper has put in play, all but two have left his bat with above-average exit velocity, while four have eclipsed triple digits. Let's take a gander at Votto's swing breakdown from the past few seasons, though, to get a more accurate sense of how Harper's early-season approach compares.
| Player (Split) | O-Swing % | Z-Swing % | Hard-contact % | BB% | K% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Votto (2015-2018) | 18.6% | 67.5% | 37.5% | 18.4% | 16.3% |
| Harper (2018) | 19.7% | 81.6% | 41.2% | 29.2% | - |
Notably, Harper has been more aggressive on pitches in the zone early on in 2018 than Votto has been over the past few years, but his chase rate is virtually identical. As for his newfound unwillingness to strike out? That's definitely Votto-inspired. Now more than ever, power hitters swing and miss a lot - last year, the 10-most prolific sluggers, by ISO, averaged a 24.5 percent strikeout rate - but Votto doesn't, really; the former MVP is one of just 10 players with an isolated power above 200 and a strikeout rate below 16.5 percent since the start of 2015. And as you surely inferred from the table above, Harper - who whiffed in 20.1 percent of his plate appearances in 2017 (when he hit .319/.413/.595) - has yet to strike out in 24 plate appearances this year. Only five other qualified hitters haven't struck out yet in 2018, and none of them have multiple home runs. At the risk of belaboring the point, Harper is on one.
Having said all that, it's important to remember that it's only five games. That hardly even qualifies as a sample. But it's worth keeping in mind, too, that Harper has made adjustments to staggering success throughout his career, and if these early gains are indeed indicative of a substantive change in his approach, there's no telling what the soon-to-be free agent might do this summer.