Bryce Harper's MVP (?) Season: Close, But No Embiid

Andrew Unterberger is a famous writer who invented the nickname 'Sauce Castillo' and is now writing for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey As Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard. 

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When we last checked in on the .500 Phillies, Bryce Harper was in the midst of the third consecutive very-good-so-close-to-great season to start his 13-year megadeal with the Fightins. It seemed pretty certain that this was going to be the player he was indefinitely in the red, white and occasionally blue; despite stretches of undeniable brilliance, they would never last long enough for him to justify the exorbitant hype and price tag that had long defined him. "Anytime he seems like he's breaking out as the MVP Bryce Harper of 2015, he'll go 0-4 and get pulled for a defensive and/or injury replacement in the 8th," I wrote. "Expecting more at this point feels foolish."

That was written during the All-Star Break, at which point Harper had a .899 OPS and was coming off a 3-13 series against the Red Sox where he had one extra base hit and zero walks. Since then, he's hit as if every baseball pitched to him had that specific passage printed in between the seams. Over the 61 games he's played since the Break, he's slashed an unthinkable .347/.481/.743, with 18 homers, 24 doubles and more walks than strikeouts (53 to 46). He's gotten a hit in 24 of his last 27 games, with an extra-base hit in 19 of 'em. It's a hot streak that's only gotten hotter over the past two months -- and it's raised his .OPS to an NL-leading 1.050, making it easily the best season since his all-timer 2015 campaign, and pretty inarguably the best season a Phillie has had at the plate since Ryan Howard in 2006. It's also garnered Harper MVP buzz, and something even rarer and more valuable: Joel Embiid comparisons. Which are fair, to a point.

Indeed, when Harper's season is over, it'll probably look a lot like Embiid's 2020-'21 run: A marvelous, career-validating campaign with a couple sizeable holes in it, leading a team that wasn't quite good enough to get over the hump with or without him. Of course, the hump for Harper's Phillies is lower to get over than for Embiid's Sixers: the latter actually had to win a couple rounds and generally not embarrass themselves in the postseason, the former just has to get there by any means necessary. The Sixers failed; so probably will the Phillies, who have still much better odds than they should of making the playoffs for a team three games over .500 with less than two weeks to go (17.5% according to ESPN), but feel much more likely to settle at exactly .500 for a 237th and final time. Nonetheless, Harper has a decent chance of doing what Embiid couldn't, and winning MVP anyway if he can stay hot for the remainder; there's no other runaway NL candidate, and baseball isn't as stringent about MVPs coming from playoff teams. (Jo also likely would've won himself if the NBA gave out MVPs for both the East and West.)

And it's true that the feeling of watching Bryce Harper step to the plate the past month or so has been similar to watching Embiid get the ball in the mid-post for the first few months of his past season -- that same sense of what do you even do with this guy if you're the other team. I've certainly never watched a baseball player that was as essentially impossible to get out as Bryce Harper most of the past few months; not a feeling you often get watching a sport where even the best players make outs over half the time. But this version of Bryce seems to have eliminated all the junk from his game: He doesn't get fooled by pitches, he doesn't make soft contact, he doesn't hit pop-ups. Sometimes he hits a hard grounder right into the shift, sometimes he flies out to the warning track, sometimes he gets caught looking at a borderline strike three -- but none of his outs are gimmes, and you can't really beat him one-on-one. You gotta just make your best pitches and hope you get the help you need from your defense and from the umpires.

It's been fun enough to watch that I was originally gonna do this article as a Vs., stacking Harper and Embiid up against each other in a bunch of categories of varying degrees of importance, and tallying up a winner. But just running through the categories in my head, I knew I couldn't stretch it enough to justify the battle: Embiid's season was still better, and still means a lot more. I haven't even really been tremendously supportive of Harper's MVP campaign, because as brilliant as he's been at the plate, he's been mediocre to subpar in most other facets. His defense, sliding catch against the Mets on Sunday aside, has been decidedly unremarkable -- a net negative according to both Baseball-Reference and FanGraphs, and an anecdotal "didn't this guy used to be a lot better at this stuff?" just from watching the games. Meanwhile, after going 12 for 12 in steals through July 24, he's been a paltry 1-4 in the two months since, and seems to be on pace for a single-season record of times getting thrown out trying to stretch singles into doubles and doubles into triples. Compared to Jo's all-around game of dominance and efficiency, where his historic offensive season was arguably still the lesser of his two sides of play, it's not terribly flattering.

Meanwhile, while Bryce Harper finally living up to his contract is undoubtedly a net good for Philadelphia sports, it's hard to argue that it's as meaningful for the franchise as Embiid's emergence as a true top five talent and anchor in the game. The Phillies remain a middling mess, near the top of the pack only in their salary sheet, still with little particular hope for meaningful improvement in the years to come. They might end up with both the best hitter and the best pitcher in the NL this season, and still have so many sinkhole spots on the roster that they can't even get to win 82. And while Harper has been a good soldier throughout his first three seasons here, and generally rallied the fans and gotten his "M-V-P!" chants and everything with his recent play, he's still an import -- one who can (and will!) torture his former team as much as he likes whenever he faces them, but can't drown out the narrative that they won a World Series the first season after he left, while he's yet to sniff the postseason without them.

That, of course, is what really separates Embiid's near-MVP campaign: The combination of long-term investment and long-delayed triumph. Embiid represents not just a team but a movement, an era, an ideology even, via which he's playing for something much larger than himself every time he logs a stat line in the box score. We wanted him to win MVP not just for what it would mean for him, but what it would mean for all of us who had spent so many years watching him, wishing good things for him, praying he would rise even with all the weight we'd foisted upon his shoulders. Him winning MVP would've meant as much to a lot of us as the Sixers winning the championship. I can't imagine too many Phillies fans would say the same about Bryce taking home the trophy.

Still, Bryce's fantastic season has been nearly as enjoyable as Jo's, even if the all-around game and emotional heft of it can't possibly compare. Harper's achievement is that of making a mediocre team a must-watch, giving you a reason to care -- to look forward to watching, to wake up early to check for stat updates on Baseball-Reference, to get into arguments on Twitter and consider shelling out for a proper jersey -- for 162 games (or at least the last 60), even when you're pretty sure the team around him will ultimately lose as many of those games as they win. Another Embiid would be too much to ask for anyway, especially on a team as roundly unlikeable as the 2021 Phillies. They don't need or deserve a true savior to lift them out of their drudgerty, just a star bright enough to make the muck still shimmer a little. It's the difference between feeling lucky to root for a player, and feeling truly blessed. We're lucky to have Bryce Harper swinging for the heavens this season -- at any salary number -- and to no longer fear his inevitable crash down to earth. For these Phillies, that's more than we ever could have expected.