Bryce Harper's power and Brock Holt's eephus pitch bring the good times
By Jake Mintz
FOX Sports MLB Writer
Welcome to Good Times. Every week, we’ll focus on three things from the previous week in baseball — teams, players, managers, cities, fans or mascots — that highlight the best of the game.
Here we go.
1. Bryce Harper
Harper had just two hits over the weekend against the Mets, but surprise, surprise, they were both homers. All in all last week, the Phillies’ star hit four homers as his team racked up eight consecutive wins. That streak included a four-game mop over the Nats and a three-game sweep against the Mets that catapulted the Phils into first place in the NL East.
This recent power surge is just more of the same for Harper, who is quietly producing another outstanding season, despite missing a significant chunk of time due to injury earlier in the year. His .983 OPS is fifth in the bigs behind only Vlad Jr., Tatis, Ohtani and Acuña. Harper hasn’t dominated headlines or your Instagram feed and wasn’t even an All-Star, but this has very much been the player the Phillies broke the bank for back in 2019.
As the Phillies racked up wins in a potentially season-defining stretch that sees them atop the division by two games, my mind kept going back to Bryce Harper, the $330 million man.
This is Harper’s third season in Philly, and until this month, things hadn’t exactly gone according to plan. When you give someone a contract greater than the GDP of a handful of small Pacific Island nations, you expect to win a lot of baseball games sooner rather than later.
But in the first two-and-a-half years of Harper’s 13-year deal, the Phillies have been downright forgettable. The results haven't been dreadful from a win-loss perspective, but until recently, the Harper-era Phillies have generally been a bit uninspiring and flat, like a soda left out in the sun.
But finally, thanks in part to a tail-spinning Mets club and an underwhelming division, things are looking up at Citizens Bank Park. In fact, it’s starting to look like the world Bryce and the Phillies imagined back in February 2019 when he signed the deal.
This is not basketball; one superstar at the height of his powers cannot singlehandedly thrust a team into contention (Mike Trout, cough, Mike Trout). The Phillies’ hot stretch has also been driven by non-Harper dudes such as J.T. Realmuto, Jean Segura, Zack Wheeler and — checks notes — Brad Miller, as Andrew McCutchen and Rhys Hoskins make their way back from injuries.
But at the end of the day, this is Bryce Harper’s baseball team, the baseball team that Bryce freakin’ Harper is on, and as he goes so will they.
Again, this is Bryce Harper we’re talking about. The recent tidal wave of young, fun and generationally talented players such as Guerrero, Tatis, Acuña, Soto and Ohtani has, understandably to some extent, overshadowed the peak of literally Bryce Harper. For a moment, it looked like his narrative arc had run dry: The Nats won the 2019 World Series without him, and he was destined to spend the next decade OPSing .950 on 81-81 Phillies teams.
But Bryce Harper, The Baseball Experience, is undeniably back, suckers, as are the long-dormant Philadelphia Phillies, owners of the National League’s longest postseason-less streak. The season is far from over, the Phillies' bullpen is still held together with duct tape and gum and string, and the Mets, though down, are certainly not out. But after two years of gray, the sun is at long last beginning to peek through the clouds in South Philly, and Bryce Harper is soaking up the rays.
2. Brock Holt
Brock Holt was a pretty crucial part of the 2018 Red Sox, a team that won the World Series and had a jolly time along the way. So you’ve got to imagine that being on the 2021 Texas Rangers, a team that is not winning a lot of games, is probably not the most fun Holt has ever had playing baseball.
Being on a bad team has to get monotonous, the search for happiness much more difficult when you’re racking up losses like they’re going out of style. But Saturday afternoon, Holt was able to manufacture one of the most joyful and memorable moments of his entire career while making a little baseball history along the way.
That eephus pitch from Brock Holt clocked in at a whopping 31 miles per hour, which makes it the single slowest pitch to ever be called a strike in the pitch-tracking era. I’m sure some dude named Captain or Dinkie threw a pitch 10 mph in 1889, but as far as real baseball goes, this might be about as slow as it gets.
It’s probably not a good thing for the Rangers that they had to send a position player out there in the first place, but it’s a great thing for baseball— and for humanity — that Holt got to trot out there and loft lollipops toward home plate.
Things are not exactly "fun" baseball-wise on the North Side of Chicago right now. After ditching Báez, Rizzo, Bryant and Kimbrel at the deadline, the Cubbies have dropped four straight and eight of their past 10, including a sweep at home to their crosstown rivals. But things weren’t all bad for the Cubs over the weekend, as 35-year-old journeyman infielder Andrew Romine provided a brief respite of joy amid a sea of baseball sadness.
In Friday's game against the White Sox, Romine, who’d been up with the big-league club for only a week, knocked the season’s most improbable homer: a game-tying, three-run shot in the eighth off recent Sox acquisition Kimbrel.
The shocked look on Romine’s face reflected how everyone else in Chicago and beyond felt at that moment. To put into perspective just how unlikely this dinger was, Romine had hit only 10 MLB homers in more than 1,300 major-league trips to the dish. He hadn’t hit one since 2017, as a member of the Detroit Tigers, in a game against Toronto in which José Bautista started for the Blue Jays. A long time ago, indeed.
Romine might never hit another home run in his MLB career. In fact, I’d gamble that he won’t, and the Cubs won’t come close to sniffing the postseason this year, but he’ll always have this. Good moments, even moments that come in tough losses, are always worth remembering.
Jake Mintz is the louder half of @CespedesBBQ and a baseball analyst for FOX Sports. He’s an Orioles fan living in New York City, and thus, he leads a lonely existence most Octobers. If he’s not watching baseball, he’s almost certainly riding his bike. You can follow him on Twitter @Jake_Mintz.