The Philadelphia Phillies and MVP candidate Bryce Harper have ripped off eight wins in a row to surge past the New York Mets and take control of the National League East standings. They are now six games over .500 even with a negative run differential, but hey, why complain when you're in first, especially after a weekend sweep of New York?
The Phillies' big surge has been due in large part to the return of Bryce Harper the MVP, who has been on an otherworldly tear since the All-Star break. Since July 16, Harper is batting a ridiculous .370/.516/.740 with five homers, 11 RBI, 12 doubles and a tremendous 21:14 walk to strikeout ratio. Harper also sports a 159 wRC+, which is the highest mark since his MVP campaign in 2015, when he had a wonderfully absurd 197 wRC+.
But that MVP version of Harper, who has dipped in and out of our collective view over the past few seasons, dating back to his final year in Washington in 2018, is officially back and baseball is all the better for it.
When Bryce Harper burst onto the scene at just 19 years old in 2012, he was expected to become the face of baseball. He certainly appeared to be on that path in his MVP season, in which he hit .330/.460/.649 with 42 home runs and 99 RBIs at the age of 22.
But those are impossible numbers to replicate, and though he's had good-to-great seasons pretty much every year since, Bryce Harper has seemingly been absorbed into the day-to-day flow of Major League Baseball, somehow just a cog in the machine at times, as strange as that sounds. After all, he hasn't made the All-Star Game since 2018.
You could chalk that up in part to the league's continued inability to market its best players, but that's a much longer diatribe for a different day. The fact is, Bryce Harper is mashing and more people are paying attention.
To be fair, part of the issue is that the Phillies just haven't been that close to contending since Harper signed with Philadelphia in 2019 on a 13-year, $330 million deal. But the Phillies are for real right now, and they are ready to contend, putting Harper right back in the spotlight where he belongs.
He should stay there, too. Most fans take for granted how long Bryce Harper has already played and just how good he's been every single year, which gets lost among the truly wild expectations that come from having a $330 million deal. He's already in his tenth season, averaging .278/.389/.517 with 25 home runs a year. Another decade of this and Cooperstown no doubt awaits.
While Bryce Harper is a legitimate NL MVP candidate this year, the Phillies have gotten to this point – as all good teams do – with good pitching, which got much better with the acquisition of Kyle Gibson at the trade deadline. Gibson, 33, has a 2.79 ERA and 157 ERA+ in 21 starts this season between Texas and Philadelphia. In two starts with the Phillies so far, Gibson has given up just three runs in 12 2/3 innings.
In addition to having a leading NL MVP candidate, the Phillies also boast a leading NL Cy Young candidate in Zack Wheeler, who came over from New York. He adds a considerable amount of salt to the wound of the pitching-needy Mets.
Wheeler, 31, signed a five-year deal with the Phillies last season and is certainly living up to it this year with a 2.42 ERA in 23 starts and 181 strikeouts in 156 innings. Wheeler and Gibson will form quite the 1-2 punch down the stretch and into any potential playoff series.
Harper is surrounded by solid bats in the lineup as well. J.T. Realmuto, Rhys Hoskins, and Jean Segura are all having particularly solid seasons, and the Phillies have a firm place as a top-10 offense in the National League.
The Phillies should be in the race all the way to the end, but the continued success of Bryce Harper will dictate whether the team makes the playoffs and how far it ultimately goes… which is exactly how it was all drawn up when Philadelphia committed to Harper.
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