MLB 2024 Playoffs: Why Bryce Harper is built to rule October

PHILADELPHIA — Inside Bryce Harper’s basement on a recent Saturday morning, his son wanted dad to watch his Hot Wheels races, and his daughter was hungry and needed a bagel, and the baby had just unleashed a volcanic spit-up on him for the second time in five minutes, and amid the chaos, the calls for his attention, the tugs in every direction, Harper exuded calm. Considering the environment in which Harper plies his trade — 40,000 people bleating, praying and exhorting him to carry the Philadelphia Phillies back to Major League Baseball’s mountaintop — the smaller audience posed no problem.

Harper swiped the regurgitation off his hoodie, snagged a plate full of breakfast, cheered for the orange car with the racing stripe and, when those duties were completed, sank into the couch and trained his eyes on the TV broadcasting “College GameDay.” He’s a die-hard college football fan — a logo for Ohio State, where his wife, Kayla, played soccer, adorned his sweatshirt — and its return, as much as the leaves changing colors, signaled to Harper a new season and the arrival of his favorite month.

“I love October,” Harper said. It’s football and Halloween and his birthday, yes, but they’re all secondary to him getting another crack at fulfilling his purpose. That’s how Harper sees it at least. Everything he is — someone ripe to be chewed up and spit out by the machine that makes sports stars but instead met the hype — prepares him for October, equips him with the intellectual and emotional and spiritual tools to match the physical capabilities that were never in question.

All of it converges again Saturday, when the Phillies host the New York Mets in Game 1 of the National League Division Series at Citizens Bank Park. It will mark Harper’s 50^th career postseason game, 30 of them coming the past two seasons, when he has been the best playoff performer in the game. First in hits, first in home runs, first in runs, first in OPS. They’re not just numbers that reflect the Phillies’ success. They are the engine for it.

“When opponents hear his name being called over the PA and they hear the walkup music and they see him walking to the plate, their heart starts fluttering,” Phillies leadoff hitter Kyle Schwarber said. “We all laugh about it, right? But everyone always thinks that something cool’s going to happen. We all think that because he’s proven it.”

Harper’s reverence in the baseball world has been hard-earned. He has lived an inimitable baseball life: a pre-social media celebrity at 15 years old who dropped out of high school to play junior college baseball, proved worthy enough to go No. 1 overall in the draft at 17 years old, reached the major leagues at 19, won an MVP at 22, did it again at 28 and now, on the cusp of his 32^nd birthday, is missing only one thing from his Hall of Fame résumé.

The Phillies were two games from a World Series title in 2022. Their return engagement last season flamed out in the NL Championship Series against Arizona. Now they are loaded: the bats, the gloves, the starters, the bullpen — as well-rounded a team as exists in this baseball landscape suffused with parity. And he is the one to whom his teammates turn for the big hit, the big moment, because he has shown he’s worthy of it.

“He’s actively looking for the situation. He wants it,” said Trea Turner, his teammate with the Washington Nationals who followed him in signing a $300-million-plus free agent deal with Philadelphia. “I think everybody wants to be the hero, but I think he’s a notch above that in the sense that he desires it. And I don’t think you can teach that. I’ve heard him say before that some people are scared to be great, and that’s obviously not him. He wants to be great.”

In baseball, greatness is forged in the everyday grind, and with a game to be played, daddy day care time wound to an end. Harper’s 5-year-old son, Krew, asked if he’d see Harper in the clubhouse after the game, and Harper answered affirmatively, as long as the Phillies won. His 3-year-old daughter, Brooklyn, accompanied Krew outside to sit on the brick ledge as Harper pulled his truck out of the garage and backed out of the driveway. They smiled and waved and sent him off to another day of work, another day closer to October, to the moments he spends the entire regular-season waiting for.

“Your heart’s beating, racing a little bit, and you’ve got the butterflies, and especially Game 1, man,” Harper said. “You go into Game 1 in the NLCS or the NLDS, and you’re sitting there, and the planes are flying over, and the anthem’s going, and you’re like, damn, dude. It feels like Opening Day again. And I think that’s a cool thing, too. It’s a clean slate.

“You have a good year, you have a bad year, you have the worst year of your career — I couldn’t care less about what you did during the season. Does not matter. Because if you have a great 11 games, then you’re going to be remembered for that. You’re not going to be remembered for the year that you had. You’re not going to be remembered for anything else. That’s what you’re going to be remembered for. Remembered forever.”

ON THE 15-MINUTE ride from Harper’s suburban New Jersey home to the ballpark, he can’t stop talking about Philadelphia. He has spent nearly as many years here (six) as he did in Washington (seven), and Harper remains as smitten with the city as ever. When he signed a 13-year, $330 million contract with the Phillies, Harper vowed not to be a carpetbagger. So he roots for the Birds and Sixers and Flyers. He wears cleats and headbands festooned with the Wawa logo. The only thing that would make him more Philly is naming a child “Jawn.” And as much as he wants a championship for himself, he regards it as a communal act, a giveback for the embrace fans bestow upon him.

“At the end of the day, they want to see us win,” Harper said. “And if we’re winning, they’re winning. They can sit there and go, screw you to Boston, screw you to New York, screw you to L.A. They have that demeanor. That’s just how they are. They can hold it over their buddy’s head in New York or Boston because we beat ’em that week. You know how sports are, man.

“That’s the coolest thing about being here and being part of it, and you don’t fully understand it until you’re here. It takes a different mindset to play in this place. And I wanted to do it.”

This place turns into something else in October. The sun sets and the air turns crisp, and all of the negative connotations of past Philadelphia fandom — battery chucking and booing Santa — have evolved into a civilized version of mania. “October baseball here is a performance,” Phillies outfielder Nick Castellanos said.

There are sing-alongs. (“October is a crazy, crazy time here,” said Phillies second baseman Bryson Stott, whose grand slam in the immediate aftermath of the whole stadium feting him with his walkup song became a signature moment of last postseason. It has become — and Philadelphians might scoff at this, but it’s true — almost wholesome.

And yet it’s still a horror show for visitors. The decibel levels, whether the constant din or peak madness, are unmatched in baseball, though that really happened only years after Harper’s arrival.

The Phillies had booked six consecutive losing seasons when they signed him. The turnaround wasn’t immediate. They were 81-81 in Harper’s first season, didn’t make the playoffs in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign and missed again at 82-80 the next year. Before the 2022 season, they signed Schwarber, and that September, the Eagles’ home opener on Monday night aligned with a Phillies off day. A group, including Harper and Schwarber, went to the game and came away inspired. This is what the Bank can sound like. This is energy we need to arouse. They won their first six postseason games at the Bank in October 2022, and they won their first five last year. This year, their 54-27 record at the Bank was the best home mark in MLB.

That’s why Harper pulled into the parking lot before that Saturday game in September and couldn’t wait to go to work.

“I love it. I get here, and it’s so calming for me,” Harper said. “There’s nothing that irritates me. It’s just baseball. I’m a Philadelphia Phillie. I love it. Every day.”

“Calming is not the word a normal person would use,” Stott said. “But he knows this is home now, and this is where he is going to be. And I think that’s just a calming presence, even though the surrounding noise and fans and cheers is not calm at all.”

“When those moments come in the postseason or late in the year, there’s nothing like it,” Harper said. “I feel like there’s times where it’s in slow motion and I feel like the — I don’t know. It’s hard to explain because I’ve been playing baseball for a long time, and I’ve had those moments since I was 10, 11, 12 years old of slowing the game down.

“After 23, 24 years of competitive baseball, since I was 7 years old, I still love every part of the competitiveness.”

HARPER IS NOT exaggerating. His formative years were spent in youth travel baseball, where he traversed the country on weekends as a baseball mercenary for different elite teams. An enormous child, already 6-foot-1 and 170 pounds at 12, Harper unleashed a fastball that touched 80 mph and a swing that crushed home runs. Baby fat covered Harper’s face in the same way his beard does now, both ringing a mischievous grin he looses around teammates.

In 2005, Harper joined a team from Colorado at the Triple Crown World Series in Steamboat Springs. In the gold-medal game, he pitched the final inning with the crowd “screaming and yelling and saying things to a 12-year-old kid that you probably shouldn’t say.” This was three years before he graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, and they still knew who he was.

“So I ended up getting the outs,” Harper said. “We win the game, and I came off the field, and I was bawling, crying because the situation was just so intense. I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t upset. It was just a pure adrenaline rush of emotion. And I loved it. I loved all those opportunities. I loved all those moments. I loved the feeling of that.”

The Bryce Harper who finds calm in chaos — this is where he was built. During a childhood of being berated, doubted, questioned, derided. Harper’s capacity to ignore nonsense and process magnitude emerged early enough in his life that by the time he was 15 years old, everything that typically pollutes the mind of a teenaged baseball player no longer applied to him. He strode into showcase events knowing he was the best player there. He turned competition into fans. When Harper was 15, Castellanos, now his Phillies teammate, saw him at an event at Florida International University. With one swing, Harper converted him. “I can hit ’em,” Castellanos said. “I hit ’em farther than all my friends. But damn. I can’t hit it that far.”

A year later, they were teammates on the under-18 U.S. national team that won gold at the Pan Am Games in Venezuela. A few months after that, Harper dropped out of high school, earned his GED and enrolled at a local junior college, all in an effort to get draft eligible a year early. He hit 31 home runs in 66 games, was the slam dunk top pick and signed with the Nationals for $9.9 million. Harper spent a year in the minor leagues, joined the Nationals in May 2012 and finished the season with the most wins above replacement on a 98-win team that captured the NL East crown. Harper had no business being as good as he was.

“It’s the same thing,” Turner said, “with LeBron [James]. They’re so good at such a young age and then it’s kind of expected of you, but when they’re good people and it doesn’t go to their head — that’s the more impressive part. There’s so many things that could have gone wrong, and it’s a really negative way of thinking about it. But, I mean, think about how many things that people do at 19, 20 that are just stupid.”

Not everything went right immediately. Over the first four games of Harper’s first postseason, the 2012 division series against St. Louis, he went 1-for-18 with six strikeouts. Then in the decisive Game 5, he tripled in the first inning to stake Washington a 1-0 lead, homered in the third off starter Adam Wainwright to extend the lead to 3-0 and saw all those years of preparation beginning to translate in October.

“That was kind of like, man, I can do this,” Harper said. “The moment’s not too big, obviously. It was kind of a stepping stone. And then each year after that, it got better.”

Two years after that infamous 2012 season in which the Nationals shut down Stephen Strasburg for the postseason and surrendered a six-run lead in the division series’ deciding game, Washington again faltered in the playoffs, blowing home-field advantage in a division series loss to eventual World Series champion San Francisco. Harper was the only National who hit, launching three home runs. Two more division series losses ended his time in Washington without a single series win, and it was only the year after Harper left that the Nationals made an improbable run to a World Series victory.

In Philadelphia, Harper found the best version of himself. Consider what is widely regarded as the best at-bat of his life, in Game 5 of the 2022 NLCS, against Padres closer Robert Suarez. Before he left the dugout to hit in the eighth inning, Harper looked at hitting coach Kevin Long and told him: “I’m going to go deep here.” Attempting the herculean task of ignoring everything percolating in the air at the Bank, Harper called multiple timeouts before the first pitch was even thrown.

“You rewatch that at-bat, and it’s incredibly impressive,” Phillies pitching coach Caleb Cotham said. “There’s no one else. It’s just him and a dance with the pitcher. It’s literally what it looks like. There’s no distraction. There’s no nothing. It looks like there’s not even a thought. It’s just he’s completely wrapped up in this moment, in this game with this guy on the mound with a lot of belief.”

Suarez believed for a reason. His fastball was sizzling. First 96 mph and fouled off. Then 97 for a ball. Then 98 and 100 and 99 foul, foul, foul. Next came the moment. Finally Suarez thought he had Harper cheating fastball and uncorked a changeup. Not any old changeup but a diabolical 91 mph dirtseeker that would have induced swings and misses from the vast majority of professional hitters, and Harper instead watched it go by.

On the next pitch, a 99 mph sinker dotted on the outside corner, Harper unleashed what announcer Joe Davis called “the swing of his life.” Seven pitches into the most consequential at-bat of his career, he hammered the final one to the opposite field for a home run.

“That’s what great hitters do,” Cotham said. “They just find a way, and you never know why they did it or were they sitting on it, but to me, it’s wrapped up in the game, being one with the game and in this dance — truly part of this thing.”

Schwarber is perhaps the closest facsimile in the Phillies’ clubhouse to Harper in terms of his reverence of the postseason, and its imminence awakens something within him.

“The biggest thing is allowing the game to slow down,” Schwarber said. “Because if you can tick back everything when it’s the most important moment of that game, slow everything down, take the noise out, realize that the pitcher’s out there and recognize his heart rate’s going, too, you’re just putting yourself in a better position.”

Schwarber leaned back and grinned. Nobody gets paid in October, Schwarber said, and he’s right: Even if players do receive playoff shares that, for the championship-winning team, can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars, their full paychecks stop at the end of the regular season.

“So you’re going out there for one reason,” Schwarber said. “It’s just the purest form of baseball that can be played.”

CHAMPIONSHIP WINDOWS CLOSE quickly. It’s a lesson the Philadelphia Phillies learned the last time they won a championship in 2008. They ran it back one too many times, and a half-decade-long collapse followed. That it led them to Harper — to this time when baseball in Philadelphia feels so damn alive — offers some solace. But it’s also a cautionary tale understood by Harper, who studies the rhythms and history of sports with the assiduousness of a scholar.

Harper aspires to play until he’s 42 years old — another decade, and beyond his contract, which expires when he is 39. That’s because he wants as many opportunities as possible at winning; he can’t forget how Dan Marino made the Super Bowl in his first season, lost and never got back. Schwarber and catcher J.T. Realmuto are free agents after next season, and in 2026, the Phillies are set to pay almost $160 million to six players — Harper, Turner, Castellanos and pitchers Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola and Taijuan Walker — whose average age then will be 33.8.

It’s why getting on track before October arrived this year was so imperative for Harper. Heading into that September Saturday, he hadn’t homered in 30 games, the second-longest streak of his career. The surging Mets jumped out to a 4-0 lead that day, Sept. 14. Harper finally homered in the fourth inning to cut the deficit to 4-1, and two innings later, he blasted a two-run shot to further erode a lead that the Mets eventually would blow in a loss to the Phillies. After the game, Krew and Brooklyn came into the locker room, just like daddy promised, and all of the responsibilities in his life, the things that matter, were aligning in his place of calm.

“And I feel that, right?” he said. “I want to carry this team. With the guys that we have, I don’t have to, obviously. I have to play Bryce Harper baseball. They need me to do that, but that’s all year. That’s not just the postseason. That’s every day. That’s a Saturday against the Mets in September, right?”

Never, during the homerless drought, did Harper panic. Even before the two homers, his swing felt fine, and by the end of the season, his numbers aligned almost perfectly with recent seasons: .285/.373/.525 with 30 home runs, 87 RBIs and a career-high 42 doubles. He has learned not to chase results, lest he fall out of whack mechanically. More than that, it’s a good lesson for the postseason ahead, when the starting pitching is always better and the relief arms significantly so and hitters face a choice. He tries to teach this to the Phillies’ younger players, just as veterans, such as Jayson Werth with Washington, and coaches, such as Joe Dillon in Philadelphia, taught him.

“We always talked about really good players doing bad in the postseason,” Harper said. “It happens because they start chasing or they’re not taking their walks or they don’t have the confidence in the ability of the guy behind them. When you start playing for things that are bigger than you — playing for your team — all that stuff goes out the door.”

“No offense to 162 games,” Schwarber said. “You play 162 games to the end. And then nothing matters except winning a baseball game. And this isn’t about how many home runs you hit. This isn’t about how many RBIs you have. This isn’t what your batting average is. This is about trying to find a way to win a baseball game. And that’s why the best baseball games are in the postseason. When you put special players in environments that are going to be like that, you’re going to see a really good version of that player. Don’t get me wrong. There’s some people who get put in those scenarios and can’t handle it.”

Harper refuses to let himself be anything less than the best version of that player, aware that to be ready for the moment takes more than work or commitment or desire or any other bare-minimum elements. Harper wants to constantly evolve, a difficult threshold when you’re 31 and it’s not as easy to stay in shape as it once was and the baby is puking on you and you’ve got to wake up and jump in the godforsaken cool tub again.

“It’s 39 degrees and I do it for three minutes,” Harper said. “It’s the hardest thing I do all day. I’m not kidding. I sit there and I contemplate my life every single time. I try to get in there and I scream and yell at myself inside, and I’m just like, all right, get in. And so I get in, it’s three minutes and I’m out.”

Pain is gain, and so many of Harper’s days consist of the minuscule rituals or customs he has adopted to maintain his health. The Phillies cannot afford to lose him, so he tailors his life toward ensuring that will not happen. Harper does not eat anything with artificial dyes or seed oils. All of his bread and pasta is homemade. When he’s on the road, he consumes only meat and fruit. He loves Pilates. He arrives at the stadium about four hours before the game instead of the 6½ that used to be his standard and goes right into the trainer’s room to meet up with the Phillies’ massage therapist for a 30-minute calming treatment.

And his body feels like it did when he was a kid and invincible. He’s at 216 or 217 pounds, somewhere between his ESPN the Magazine Body Issue weight (203) and the most yoked version of himself (240). This, he’d like to believe, is his championship weight, perfect to carry him through the postseason, when he’ll take his walks and shorten up his swing to avoid strikeouts and tiptoe the razor-thin line between aggressive and excessive on the basepaths. He will call home runs and hit them, and he will sing along with fans that he, too, is A-O, A-OK. He will do everything he can to represent Philadelphia while knowing that the greatest way to represent Philadelphia is by winning.

“Your superstar players have to show up,” Harper said, and for him, the superstar, that’s what this is really about. It’s the intersection of the calmness with the chaos, the comfort that 40,000 raucous souls are screaming and the contentment in not hearing a single one of them. It is Philadelphia, and it is October, and it is 11 wins away from forever.