Whatever you feel about Bryce Harper, and you probably feel something one way or the other, you would have to admit that last night gave us some fantastic baseball.
Or rather, the baseball was fine. Last night gave us some fantastic drama.
With Harper’s return to Washington with his new Philadelphia Phillies team, a lot of the context got stripped away – Harper’s reported desire to stay in Washington and the team not offering him a fair deal; the Nationals’ insistence that his team was the one that cut off communication – and we were left simply with boos.
Boos from the home crowd, then drama, delicious drama. Harper striking out in his first at bat, then ripping an opposite field single and then, with the game all but put away for the Phillies, a monstrous home run that left the Phillies fans in attendance dancing in their seats.
With that swing, a new Phillies – Nationals rivalry was born.
AP Photo/Alex Brandon
And yes, a rivalry already existed. The NL East connection saw these two teams meeting multiple times per year. There was already a healthy dislike between Washington fans and the Philadelphia fans just up I-95.
But this, this is something new. With that home run shot, and those Phillies fans raucously celebrating in Nationals Park, Harper launched not only a baseball (which he did, so, so far) but a new rivalry
This is great, by the way. As long as things remain more or less civil, and never violent (last night’s fans, for all the booing and cheering on both sides, were well behaved), rivalries are fantastic. They make sports feel more important, every time.
Look at this tweet from the Washington Post’s Dan Steinberg this morning:
Last night felt different. Last night felt special.
This is fantastic.
No matter what side you are on, and last night was pretty bad for Nationals fan not going to lie, you have to love the fact that last night felt real, like it mattered. A game in early April had all the urgency, the passion, the stakes, almost, of a playoff game.
Baseball has a length problem. They know it. Asking fans to commit to 162 games per year is a tough ask. Games run into each other. No win or loss, at least for the first several months of the year, is season-defining or anything even close to that.
MLB won’t give up the long schedules, for history reasons and TV-revenue reasons and a whole host of other reasons. But they do still need to make regular season games matter.
My colleague Ted Berg wrote his newsletter this morning about how the booing by Nationals fans is small time and makes them look silly. I disagree, mostly because booing makes games feel like they matter, but all that is irrelevant to the fact that Ted and I are disagreeing/talking about a baseball game in April. In what other world would this be happening? This is great.
By choosing to join Philadelphia this offseason, Harper gave a rivalry new life. Then with one swing of his bat, and then one excellent flip of his bat, Harper ensured that this rivalry would matter, in a real way, moving forward.
Regular season baseball can matter, and sports hate can make it that way. This is a beautiful thing.
