Nationals should cling tightly to Bryce Harper and hope for the best
By Cody Rivera
Soon-to-be free agent Bryce Harper could be on the trade block with the deadline approaching, but the Nationals should risk everything and hang on to him.
Things are not looking good for the Washington Nationals right about now, and it’s putting them in an excruciatingly tough spot with their best player.
Of course, it’s not the first time Major League Baseball teams have gone through this. Sometimes teams have a rough first half of the season, and they feel that trading away their best player for pieces to help them build a future contender is the best option for the team.
But the Nationals aren’t just dealing with the drama of possibly trading their best player. They are dealing with Bryce Harper, the best player in the National League, one of the best players in all of baseball, who is just 25 years old.
Unfortunately, everything pretty much hinges on the fact that Harper will be a free agent after this season, and the thought of Harper taking his talents to teams like the Chicago Cubs or the New York Yankees has long been in the back of everybody’s minds.
If the Nationals weren’t in a full-on freefall right now, this wouldn’t even be an issue. They would do their best to make a World Series push in October, then try to convince Harper to sign a brand new contract to keep him in Washington long term. But instead, the Nats are fresh off of a three-game sweep at home at the hands of the Boston Red Sox, and coming into Wednesday’s game, they had lost 17 of their previous 23 games.
With Wednesday’s 3-0 loss to Boston, the Nationals officially dropped below the .500 mark at 42-43, and are seven games out of first place in the NL East. What started out as a promising 2018 campaign for Washington has suddenly turned into a catastrophic collapse.
Now they are faced with the question of all questions: With their season imploding and trade deadline rapidly approaching, do they deal Harper for assets and rebuild for the future? Or do they hang on to their prized possession, pray that he can help get this season back on track, and run the risk of him walking away next year?
These are the most difficult scenarios in sports, but when it comes down to it, the Nationals can’t willingly let him go. It’s not very often that you luck into getting a player of Harper’s caliber, but they managed to land the No. 1 overall pick in the 2010 MLB Draft, and there he was waiting for them. He made his debut in 2012 at the ripe age of 19, and right from the start, baseball fans knew the Nationals had something special with this kid.
There is still a lot of baseball ahead of Harper, and he can go down as one of the all-time greats, a Hall of Famer. Other than Mike Trout of the Los Angeles Angels, Harper is the biggest must-see player in the major leagues. And as mentioned earlier, he’s only 25; he’s barely even reached his prime yet.
The Nationals were lucky enough to land one of the best players in baseball, the kind of player you build a team around and win championships with. They have to hang on to what they have, and hope that when the offseason comes around, Harper is loyal to the organization that brought him into the big leagues, and that he’s determined to win a World Series title in Washington D.C.
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It’s an incredibly high risk, because he could just walk away after the season, join the Cubs or Yankees and compete for World Series titles on a yearly basis, and the Nats would have next-to-nothing to show for it. But for a player like Harper, you have to take that risk.
You have to take that risk, and all you can do is hope for the best. Because, after all, this isn’t just Joe Baseball we’re talking about. This is Bryce. Harper.