So there's a long piece about Bryce Harper in the latest Sports Illustrated. It's long, and it's written by Tom Verducci so it's good. There's maybe not a lot of new information in there, if you've been tracking Harper's career. What new information there is, is actually positive stuff about what a clean-living, hard-working kid the Nationals have.
Comparing Bryce Harper To Jackie Robinson
There are, on the other hand, a few paragraphs that have raised the hackles of some our nation’s historically minded baseball scribes ...
"Jackie Robinson," says Tony Tarasco, a former major leaguer and a Nationals minor league coordinator who has become Harper's player-development Yoda. "You have to go back to Jackie Robinson to find anybody who goes through this much scrutiny. It wasn't like this for [Stephen] Strasburg. Wasn't like this for Alex Rodriguez."
Jackie Robinson? Surely Doug Harris, the Nationals' director of player development, with 21 years in pro ball as a player, scout and executive, would find a different comparable for Harper. Independent of Tarasco, Harris offered, "This is really unfair and it's totally different, but if I can make a comparison to one guy that has been scrutinized like this, it would be Jackie Robinson. And it's unfair because it was a different standard. He was under a microscope in an era when we didn't have Internet, didn't have cellphones.
"Now, Jackie Robinson had his life threatened. I'm not comparing Bryce to that. But as far as nonstop scrutiny? Absolutely. Day to day."
That’s it. Three grafs in a long profile that’s worth reading. But it’s those three grafs that are setting Twitter afire (assuming you follow the same feeds I do), because Jackie Robinson is He Who Must Not Be Compared To (unless one is trying to make the Hall of Fame case for Larry Doby, in which case Anything Goes).
Well, okay.
Yes, it’s preposterous to compare Harper to Robinson, for two obvious reasons.
The first and most obvious is that Harper gets to stay at the same hotels as his teammates, probably isn’t receiving letters threatening his life, etc.
The second is that neither Tony Tarasco nor Doug Harris were around in 1946, when Robinson was starring for the Montreal Royals. So unless they’re serious students of baseball history, they probably have almost no idea about how much Robinson was scrutinized. I would argue that both he and Harper have been massively scrutinized, but in ways so different that comparisons are meaningless, if not just downright silly.
My suggestion? Read Verducci’s piece, learn something about one of the best young hitters on the planet, and try to forget those three paragraphs that probably should have been left on the cutting floor. Because they mar what’s otherwise a pretty good story.
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