Bryce Harper On Fast Track To Becoming Biggest Dork Ever

The great thing about Bryce Harper is that he’s shaping up to be not only a phenomenal baseball talent, but a self-oblivious goofball. Consider Monday night’s game, in which Harper hit a home run, strutted out of the box, and blew a kiss to the pitcher as he rounded third.

Okay, listen. I don’t want to be all “Bryce Howard is a thugclown fraudbaby” over this. In fact, I’d like to argue that Harper evolving into this kind of player would be a good thing for you and me. Stick with me here.

His mullet/rat-tail thing he has going, his mustache, the weird eye black he occasionally wears that makes him look like Venom from the Spider-Man universe ... either all of this silly s*** is calculated, or he has a natural predilection toward pseudo-punk dorkiness. This isn’t really a knock on Harper, who doesn’t turn 19 until October. When I was 18, I listened to Incubus and spent $1200 installing a stereo system in a barely-functioning Oldsmobile. Most of us are dummies at that age.

Harper’s behavior, though -- the strutting out of the batter’s box to admire his home run (you’re in single-A ball, dude), the kiss he blows to the pitcher -- is comically over the top, especially for an 18-year-old. He’s destined to become the one-dimensional mean/arrogant nemesis from every baseball comedy ever. This dude, in other words.

This is good, because the closest thing we have to a dorky irrepressible bad boy in the majors might be Kyle Farnsworth, and for all his 100-MPH pitches, he has never been quite good enough to take the national spotlight. Harper, meanwhile, gives us every reason to believe that he’s going to be one of the best hitters in baseball, and he’s finally going to give us a bad guy. And not the boring “he did steroids” or “he’s a Yankee”-style bad guy we’re left with today, but the sort of villain we haven’t seen since Barry Bonds.

This is also good because you’ll be able to look at this guy, this phenomenally talented and famous individual, and know that no matter how uncool you are, you are almost certainly cooler than he is. Keep in mind that he cannot possibly be wearing that mustache ironically. He isn’t old enough.