Bryce Harper hits outrageous broken-bat HR

You already knew Bryce Harper was a ridiculous human being, but this is just getting out of hand.

There’s scorching hot, and then there’s whatever Washington Nationals superstar Bryce Harper is to start the 2018 MLB regular season. It’s nothing new that Harper has been the league’s best player in the month of April — he has hit .320/.436/.649 with 40 home runs and 107 RBI in 137 games in the season’s first month for his career — but the things he is doing this year are just on another level.

Harper entered Monday night’s contest against the New York Mets with a .300/.479/.740 line with an MLB-leading seven home runs, 20 walks (against only 11 strikeouts) and an OPS of 1.219. Not a bad way to start a walk year, if I do say so myself, especially considering how awful the weather has been in most cities.

As if Harper wasn’t making his case to vault over Mike Trout for the unofficial title of best baseball player on the planet, his first-inning home run tonight against Jacob deGrom is just another bullet point, broken bat and all.

https://twitter.com/statcast/status/986023963158630401

Seriously — that’s just some next-level strength.

April has always been a great month for Harper, but he has never been as locked in as he is right now, as he approaches more home runs than strikeouts on the year. The rest of the National League had better be on notice for the rest of the year as the 2015 NL MVP looks beyond motivated to make his case for the largest contract in MLB history (forget $400 million, how about half a billion?).

Next: Will Ronald Acuna live up to the hype?

The rest of the Nationals lineup is slow to heat up to start the year, but that won’t matter with the team’s right fielder putting on displays of superhuman strength on a nightly basis. So far, 2018 is shaping up to be the Year of Bryce, and that’s excellent news for baseball.