Bryce Harper is the worst human being on Earth for the next 15 seconds ... GO!

In the essential 1986 Richard Ford novel, The Sportswriter, the eponymous narrator states that to cover sports successfully, “More than anything ... what you needed was a willingness to watch something very similar over and over again, then be able to write about it ... plus an appreciation of the fact that you’re always writing about people who wanted to be doing what they’re doing or they wouldn’t be doing it, which was the only urgency sportswriting could summon, but also the key to overcoming the irrelevancy of sports itself.”

I am still unsure if this means a sportswriter must possess a great imagination and no tolerance for complacency, the complete opposite, or some mix, like he or she must have a great imagination about things that one would normally be complacent about, namely very similar things that happen over and over again. I suspect it is the latter, mainly because if we just took things for what they mostly are, a scenario that repeats and then dissipates like a thin vapor -- I have weirdly fond memories of the Camel billboard that loomed over Times Square when I was a kid, puffing out ring after ring of “smoke.” It didn’t make me want to smoke at all, but the mechanism fascinated me. Puff. Pause. Gone. Puff. Pause. Gone. It expelled a new smoke ring every four seconds.

Boswell -- please pardon the unforgivable and timeworn pun here -- deserves his reputation as one of the game’s inner-circle Boswells. It is shocking that a writer as good as Boswell has been during a 30-year career as a baseball columnist has not won the Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award (that is, the award that admits one to the so-called, non-existent “writer’s wing” of the Hall of Fame) given some of the soon-to-be-forgotten yabbos who have received it (check the list, see how many are still read, even the recent ones). Still, baseball is a game played primarily by stupid young men who do stupid young men things. And Alex Rodriguez. The Harper scenario is one that repeats time and again, particularly, almost inevitably, when you have the following two elements in the mix:

1. A rookie manager who needs to establish himself as the voice of authority on the club.
2. A star player who is perhaps not so good at deferring to authority.

This is the precise formula when examples are made and much ado is conjured out of nothing, much like those old cigarette billboards (I pause here to note that the Camel billboard had its run from 1941-1966, so I am far too young to have seen it, but I am certain I saw some variant thereof, perhaps a confidently exhaling Marlboro Man). The Nationals can “narrow their eyes” until they go blind, and that’s a serious risk. Boswell says, “The enormous benefits of the doubt -- on whether he’s really more about the team or about himself or about both -- that he got when he was 19 are not going to obtain (sic) when you are in your third full year in the big leagues.” Harper was never considered to have an Ernie Banks-type attitude, even as an amateur, but that’s not the point here, nor are the number of years on the back of his baseball card. He is still, as we all were at 21, an idiot with maturing to do. Moreover, he’s generally been a productive idiot. A team that loses track of these considerations will consistently undervalue a player. Boswell, who has called Harper the Nationals’ seventh-best player, is arguably already there. To paraphrase “Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream,” they refused Ted Williams too.

If Harper continues to be a problem, you do what Casey Stengel said: You conclude “this man is limited, and you disappear him.” But this is just a guy jogging when maybe he should be running. He’s still in the process of climbing his peak. The Nationals -- and their media -- can work their way through to that with him or they can have a very exciting week of bitching about it until he hits his next home run. Remember when Buck Showalter criticized a young Ken Griffey, Jr. for not taking the game seriously enough? Yeah, Griffey is going to the Hall of Fame. Showalter is likely not. It happened, though, and it was a big deal at the time -- for about 15 seconds, prior to about 600 home runs.