At churches, grocery stores, school events, ballfields or wherever then-Angels area scout Jeff Scholzen would come across travel baseball parents in his hometown of St. George, Utah, he would hear the name.
The parents would then explain how impressive Harper had been when playing against their kids in various tournaments, imploring Scholzen to give the young man from Las Vegas a look.
Only problem: Harper was 10 years old.
“I don’t scout 10 year-olds,” Scholzen would tell them. “If someone wants to give me an eight-year contract until he’s a senior in high school, I’ll start watching him.”
This went on for a while.
Finally, when Harper was 12 years old, Scholzen went to watch him in a tournament in the St. George area, “just to get people to leave me alone.”
What did Scholzen see that day?
“It was,” he says, “otherworldly.”
“Otherworldly” is as good a word as any to describe Bryce Harper.
The soon-to-be-33-year-old Phillies superstar has had a clear Hall of Fame career. He’s been a two-time MVP, a Rookie of the Year, a Home Run Derby champ and an eight-time All-Star.
The only thing really missing is a World Series ring. But for four straight years now, Harper has helped power Philadelphia to the postseason, where he has one of the most productive track records of any player in MLB history:
Career Postseason OPS Leaders (MIN: 150 PA)
What truly sets Harper apart is that he’s done all of the above after embarking upon his professional career under the most unusual circumstances the sport had seen before or has seen since.
Harper was on the cover of Sports Illustrated as a 16-year-old, dubbed “Baseball’s Chosen One.” Then he earned his GED in October of his junior year of high school, allowing him to play junior college baseball and become eligible for the MLB Draft at 17 years old.
Fifteen years ago, when the Nationals took Harper at No. 1 overall, the expectations for what his career could become were enormous.
Somehow, Harper has met them.
To those who knew him when, this otherworldly outcome is not at all surprising.
“In my report on Bryce,” says Mitch Sokol, the scout who signed Harper to the Nationals at age 17, “I wrote, ‘The bigger the stage, the more production you get out of him.’ He’s always loved the big stage, and that’s a makeup thing. It’s proven true.”
With Harper again vying for baseball’s biggest prize, we checked in with a few people who saw, firsthand, how Harper’s superstar story began and what it’s been like for them to watch him become the October icon they envisioned.
“Like an uncaged tiger”
Glen Evans played with Harper when he was young.
As in, Ron Harper. Bryce’s dad.
The two were on the same softball team when Bryce was just a baby. And when Bryce got a little older, Evans, a coach in the Vegas area, gave him lessons.
“If you’d ask Bryce at 8 years old, he was going to play middle linebacker,” Evans says. “That’s how it was then. Over the next few years, I would do lessons with his brother Bryan, who was a left-handed pitcher. Bryce was the little brother coming to catch Bryan and throw, too. You could see the talent start to mature beyond his years.”
Evans coached Harper in American Legion ball when Harper was a teenager. In addition to his coaching duties, Evans served as an associate scout, feeding tips about the local talent to Sokol.
So when it became clear to Evans that Harper, who at the time was playing catcher, shortstop, the outfield and doing some pitching, was worthy of a professional look, he called the Nats’ scout in the lead-up to the Draft one year.
“I’ve got somebody for you to see,” Evans told Sokol.
“What year is he?” Sokol replied.
“Jeez, Glen,” he responded, “I really don’t go see seventh graders.”
“Trust me,” he said, “You’ve got to see this kid.”
So Sokol took Evans up on it, and his experience was much the same as Scholzen’s had been.
“I just remember walking up, he was on deck, and we were standing there,” Sokol says. “Bryce is a very intelligent kid. He knew who I was. He looked up at me and had the same kind of steely, focused eyes that he has today, that you see on TV. Very business-like. And you would have thought it was the most important game in the world. Honestly, any game that he plays is the most important game in the world. He’s a great competitor.”
We throw terms like “great competitor” around a lot with regard to pro athletes. But Harper didn’t end up on the SI cover at age 16 on some overeager editor’s whim. He made a name for himself on the amateur circuit with 500-foot home runs, 96 mph fastballs, bat speed, sprint speed and a body size that belied his age.
None of those traits were preordained. Harper did not descend from big league lineage. He was the son of an ironworker and a paralegal who took on debt to support him in all those showcases and travel tournaments.
What set young Bryce apart was a blue-collar work ethic that he took to unusual extremes.
“He’d get up at 4 o’clock in the morning and go to the gym,” Evans says. “I would say, ‘Why do you do that?’ He would say, ‘The sun rises on the east coast, and I don’t want anyone to beat me to the gym.’ That was his mentality.”
Adds Scholzen: “Everybody thinks they work hard. But we actually watched Bryce. While other kids were at the lake or dances or parties, he’s out there in 110-degree heat, blocking balls in full catchers’ gear.
“A lot of people thought he came up with a silver spoon in his mouth. He didn’t. He came from a steelworking family. He saw his dad work hard, and Bryce had that DNA with him. Most kids get complacent in their ability and don’t pan out, but he just had that incredible drive and was not going to be denied. He wanted it more than anybody.”
Harper very quickly asserted himself as a man among boys, on the field and in the cage. There was thunder in his bat and a ferociousness to his playing style.
“Like an uncaged tiger,” Scholzen says.
Evans tells a story that speaks to that trait.
It was the first game of the American Legion season, the first game he coached a 13-year-old Harper. And right away, in his first at-bat in the first inning, the kid was jawing with the home-plate umpire.
“You can’t turn around and talk to the umpire like that,” the ump said, before turning toward Evans. “Coach, you won’t believe what this guy is saying to me.”
When the ump suggested that Harper did not belong on the field, Evans gave him a piece of his mind and got thrown out of the game.
“After I get tossed, I walk across the soccer field to my car,” Evans recalls. “I’m walking and all of a sudden I hear, ‘Crack!’ Bryce hits a home run to center field. That’s kind of how he is. I had his back, he had mine.”
Scholzen, who went on to work for Prep Baseball Report, wound up coaching Harper on a scout team when he was 14 years old, playing against and alongside juniors and seniors in high school.
“It was one of the most driven personalities you’d ever seen,” Scholzen says. “An alpha. He was extremely confident. A lot of people would have seen it as borderline arrogant. But I saw it as a kid with supreme confidence in his ability, and he backed it up.”
“Damn, this kid’s good”
Harper has said that the greatest pressure he faced in his life was not in the wake of getting drafted at No. 1 or reaching the big leagues or signing a mammoth free-agent contract with the Phillies.
It was that one year of JUCO ball he played at the College of Southern Nevada (CSN) while trying to cement his Draft stock.
Harper had been advised by agent Scott Boras that likely changes in baseball’s next Collective Bargaining Agreement — specifically, amateur spending pool limits — would reduce his earning power in the Draft.
So it was vital that he seize the moment in 2010.
What transpired, with a 17-year-old playing against college kids, was the stuff of legend.
Evans, who by then was CSN’s pitching coach, had a front-row seat for the unusually intense fan and media attention that prompted the school to add seats to its stadium and expand its parking lot.
“Coach [Tim] Chambers called a team meeting [before the season], and we had everyone come but Bryce,” Evans says. “We said, ‘We’re not sure what we’re supposed to be doing here. But he’s young, and he’s a kid, and so we’ve got to look after him.’”
In fall practices, Harper struggled. He privately began to express doubts that he had made the right decision in leaving high school early. Chambers, who passed away in 2019, calmed Harper down, told him to relax and take it one game at a time.
Harper wound up leading the National Junior College Athletic Association Division I and breaking a school record with 31 home runs. He hit .443 and drove in 98 runs in 66 games, leading CSN to the JUCO World Series.
“The amount of media that was there for a junior college baseball player was insane,” says Scholzen, who was there to scout CSN pitcher Donn Roach because he knew the Angels (drafting at No. 18) had no shot at Harper. “It was like he was a rock star.”
That meant there were a lot of eyes on Harper when his intensity got the best of him. CSN was two wins away from the junior college championship game when Harper argued with the home-plate umpire after a fifth-inning strikeout and drew a line in the dirt. He was ejected from the game, and, because it was his second such ejection of the season, he was suspended for the next two games.
CSN did not recover in the tournament.
“That umpire got sent home for throwing Bryce out of the game,” Evans says. “We ended up losing to Iowa Western, 9-8. We figure Bryce was worth three or four runs a game with a bat in his hand.”
Harper’s fiery nature gave his critics ammo. It fed the perception some had of him as a hothead, a punk, a showboat.
Those who knew him didn’t see it that way at all.
“On the field, he played with reckless abandon, like Pete Rose,” Scholzen says. “Off the field, he was the complete opposite. He had a great upbringing. He was well-mannered, respectful, humble and just very mature for his age. You give Ron and Terry Harper so much admiration for how they raised him. He treated everybody with class and dignity.”
This is the side of Harper that got lost or ignored by much of the general public who saw a kid with eye black caked on his face on the SI cover and saw quotes about trying to become “the greatest baseball player who ever lived” and assumed the worst about him.
When Evans is asked about Harper’s personality, he recalls the holiday season when his then-wife Nicole was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
“Christmas Eve, there’s a knock on the door,” Evans says. “There’s Bryce and his brother with a gift basket and a $500 gift card. They had just heard about it. Out of the goodness of their heart, those two together did that for my wife. Bryce was only about 14 years old when he did that. So if anybody wants to question where that guy’s heart is at, I’ll argue with them all day.”
Sokol believes the resentment Harper faced as a 17-year-old at the junior college level likely heightened his emotions on the field.
But as a scout, he was much more interested in Harper’s on-field aptitude than his on-field attitude. Sokol was there to witness Harper’s first weekend at CSN, when Harper had a monster start to his brief JUCO career. The following weekend, Sokol and Harper got to talking by the batting cage.
“You know what I was most impressed with last week?” Sokol asked.
Harper rattled off his biggest hits — a home run to right field, a triple to the right-center gap, a double off the left-center wall.
“No,” Sokol said. “You hit a groundball up the middle so hard that you undressed the second baseman.”
“Yeah, really,” Sokol said. “Bryce, you don’t have to save the world. You don’t have to hit every ball over the moon. Early in the ballgame, when you’ve got a guy in scoring position, if you can take a step back and just hit a line drive up the middle and score a run, usually your team wins.”
In his first at-bat after that conversation, Harper had a difficult left-on-left matchup against a hard-throwing pitcher from Chipola College. There was a runner at second with two outs. Rather than try to pop one over the fence, Harper kept his hands above the ball and guided it up the middle for a line-drive RBI single.
“I had to chuckle to myself,” Sokol says. “That’s when I realized how good this kid really was. It was, ‘Hey, old man, I can do anything you ask me to do.’ He kind of stuck it in my face. There’s not many hitters where you can say something verbally and they can put it to work immediately. I just remember laughing in the stands because, ‘Damn, this kid’s good.’”
“I believe he’ll get a ring”
Certain moments are snapshots, and we’re lucky if we have the foresight or insight to stop and appreciate that snapshot as it’s developing.
Scholzen captured one such snapshot in the spring of 2006.
Bishop Gorman, a private Catholic prep school in Vegas, brought a bunch of eighth graders, including Harper, to St. George for a weekend tournament. This was when Harper was thinking about attending the school, before he ultimately chose to go to Las Vegas High.
The coaches at Bishop Gorman had been unable to secure enough hotel rooms for the team that weekend, so Scholzen offered to put the kids up in his own home, with futons and sleeping bags strewn all over his living room. In the midst of the noise and clatter of a bunch of boys playing video games and many of their parents chit-chatting, Scholzen looked over at a 14-year-old Harper sitting in front of his fireplace.
“You see that young man?” he said to his daughter. “That kid is going to be one of the biggest household names in baseball.”
Scholzen was right about that.
If Bryce Harper had been a bust, a bit player or a candidate for the Hall of Very Good, he would have plenty of company in a sport that has seen just four of its No. 1 overall picks — Harold Baines, Ken Griffey Jr., Chipper Jones and Joe Mauer — reach Cooperstown so far.
But Harper has done as prescribed and asserted himself as one of the greatest players of his generation. And the unprecedented scrutiny at the start of his career only makes that achievement all the more meaningful.
“As someone who knows him personally,” says Evans, “the thing I’m most proud of is the maturity. If you go back to when he first started, he was a little awkward in interviews. Now he looks mature and comfortable. He’s got his wife and kids, and to see the man he’s become and know the pressure he was under is really special.”
Sokol, of course, wishes Harper had been a part of the Nationals’ 2019 World Series championship team. And he finds it ironic that the No. 1 pick he signed for Washington in 2010 has become the face of the Phillies, his former employer.
Still, Sokol deeply admires not just the player but the person Harper has become.
“[A few years back] I saw him at a UNLV game, and he introduced me to his whole family,” Sokol says. “He’s a good father, a good husband. In this day and age, he’s a little bit of a throwback. His family is important, his faith is important. There’s a lot of things that are important to him before baseball. What I’m most proud of him for, is he is so good with young kids. He goes out of his way to make them feel special.”
You didn’t have to be a pro scout to know Harper was special as an amateur. Those travel ball parents in Utah knew it when he was 10 years old. But having already achieved so much of what was prescribed for him way back when, Harper has one last item on the agenda … and a lot of old friends rooting for him.
“I believe,” says Evans, “he’ll get a ring.”
