The Yankees, Bryce Harper and What Might Have Been

For years and years, I (and pretty much everybody else) felt entirely certain that Bryce Harper would end up on the New York Yankees. It seemed as inevitable as the 4 train.

The guy grew up a Yankees fan. His baseball idol, remarkably, was Mickey Mantle, who retired 24 years before he was even born. Plus he just had this Yankee aura about him; Harper was, at his best, a little bit of Mantle, a little bit of Reggie Jackson, a little bit of Babe Ruth, a little bit of Paul O’Neill.

I always got the sense that the Yankees started working on Bryce Harper’s plaque in Monument Park when he was 16 years old.

How could it go any other way? These were the YANKEES, all capital letters, or at least that’s what they were under the reign of George Michael Steinbrenner III. His Yankees had to have ALL the stars, every last one of them, price was of no concern, budgets were thrown out the window. The 1998 Yankees won 114 games and swept the World Series, but the Yankees STILL had to have Roger Clemens, and then they won again and again but they still had to have Mike Mussina and Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield and Alex Rodriguez and more and more, Veruca Salt in pinstripes.

We loathed the Yankees, so many of us did, not only because of how good they were but also because when they came to your town they were not just there to beat up your team, they were also scouting your best player to take away from you when the time was right.

So, yeah, there was absolutely no doubt that Bryce Harper would be a Yankee. Sure, the team had a pretty full outfield. Yes, they had a blossoming superstar in Aaron Judge. True, they spent a lot of money bringing in Giancarlo Stanton. Absolutely, they liked the look of a young Aaron Hicks. But so what? For New York, it’s never enough. This was the YANKEES we were talking about.

Bryce Harper was destined, practically from birth, to end up on the YANKEES.

Only … these aren’t the YANKEES we are talking about. No, those all capital letter YANKEES, King George’s YANKEES, they’re gone, replaced by Hal Steinbrenner’s lower-case Yankees, a still-wealthy but much more reserved and corporate team. Hal’s Yanks will still sign acquire big-money players, make no mistake, Gerrit Cole and Josh Donaldson and Anthony Rizzo and guys like that. But they don’t sign all of them. They don’t even go for all of them. They talk a lot about fiscal responsibility now.

Point is: The Yankees didn’t just pass on Bryce Harper. They didn’t even call.

Harper would have fit pretty well in the Bronx—for Yankee fans, anyway. (Michael Reaves/Getty Images)

I thought about all this again on Saturday as the Yankees feebly lost to the Astros 5-0 — the Yankees are hitting .161 in these playoffs — and how announcers John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman couldn’t stop talking about how dead the crowd sounded and how fans only woke up to boo Aaron Judge again (and even louder than before).

Meanwhile, 93 minutes away along I-95, Bryce Harper was smashing doubles like they were plates at a Greek wedding and Philadelphia batters were beating up on the Padres pitchers, and Phillies fans felt like they had gone to heaven without the inconvenience of dying and it was all one giant party.

“Bryce,” our pal Brandon McCarthy texted, “looks too good for this level right now.”

And, I have to say, for a lifelong Yankee hater who has endured seven World Series winners in my lifetime, it felt all kinds of wonderful. The Yankees are a really good team, no question. They won 99 games this year. They hit the most home runs by a wide margin. Judge set the league home run record. They’re really good.

But they are finally feeling what the rest of us have long had to live with: limitations. They have several of those, but the biggest is that their lineup has a big fat hole in the middle — they do not have a ferocious left-handed power-hitter to fit between Aaron Judge and Giancarlo Stanton.*

That hole has been obvious for a good long while, and it’s truly crazy: The New York Yankees — you know, Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle, Maris, Reggie, Giambi — can’t find a lefty power hitter for that Little League ballpark where the rightfield fence is roughly 28 steps from home plate?* How is that even possible?

*How great was it for all you fellow Yankee haters to watch Chas McCormick bloop a 335-foot home run over that stupid wall in rightfield to give the Astros a 2-0 lead? The crowd reaction was so wonderful, like, “Wait, how’s that a home run?” I would say it was 12% sweeter because the guy who hit the homer is named “Chas.”

OK, yes, the Yankees do have Rizzo, who hit 32 home runs this year, 19 of them at home, but he also hit .224. He’s not quite the guy. And they did fill the lefty power void for a short time this year with veteran Matt Carpenter, who was all-but-out of baseball before the season began but happily turned into Barry Bonds once he got a look at that short porch at Yankee Stadium III*.

*Carpenter was released by the Texas Rangers back in May. The TEXAS RANGERS couldn’t find a spot for him in their lineup. Then he went to New York, and he definitely hit better than expected on the road. But do you know what he hit in 22 games at Yankee Stadium? He hit .388/.524/.1.082 with seven doubles and nine home runs. He had a home OPS of 1.605.

Realistically, you had to know Carpenter couldn’t last. Not even the Yankees have enough black magic to keep him going like that forever. Carpenter got hurt, and when he returned, the thrill was gone. Carpenter is 1-for-11 with nine strikeouts in these playoffs and has looked … well, he’s looked like he did the last few years. So what left-handed hitting force could fit the bill? Joey Gallo couldn’t do it. Aaron Hicks couldn’t do it. Andrew Benintendi was brought in … that was never going to work either.

Truth is, they have no answers. You just know that King George is yelling at somebody in the afterlife. And you know exactly what he’s yelling: “I WOULD HAVE SIGNED BRYCE HARPER! HOW DID THEY NOT SIGN BRYCE HARPER? HOW WOULD THEY LET PHILADELPHIA GET BRYCE HARPER? PHILADELPHIA? ARE YOU KIDDING ME?”

Anyway, that’s how I imagine it. And it brings me great joy.