Bryce Harper: National League Ranking

By Brandon Conner | Nov 25, 2014

Throughout the month, we will be ranking each Nationals starter and a couple of bench players to see where they rank at their positions in the National League. Earlier this week, we ranked Anthony Rendon and Ryan Zimmerman. Today we will be continuing our series with Bryce Harper.

In these rankings, we will be using statistics from the last two seasons to give us a bigger sample size – to see just how good Nationals players are. In this effort, we will see which parts of the team need to be fixed and which are solid compared to the rest of the league. The first step for the Nationals is to win the division, so if any National League East player comes across in our findings, we will be sure to point it out. If not, the main goal is winning the National League Pennant and going to the World Series.

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I will analyze standard offensive and defensive statistics, as well as advanced statistics. This will give us a full picture of who the best players are at that position. To put the players in some type of order, we will be using WAR. This gives us a baseline to start the analysis.

Over the last two seasons, the top five National League left fielders by WAR according to FanGraphs are Starling Marte (8.6), Matt Holliday (8.2), Justin Upton (7.0), Christian Yelich (5.7) and Carl Crawford (5.4). Bryce Harper sits just outside of the elite left fielders at the six spot, posting a WAR over the same time span of 5.1.

Being ranked sixth isn’t bad for such a young player, especially one who’s missed as much time as Harper. But what’s surprising is that even as high as he is, Harper is still only the third best left fielder in the NL East, with Justin Upton (Atlanta) and Christian Yelich (Miami) ranked ahead of him.

The bright side of this is that Harper, seated just outside “elite” status, is one of the younger left fielders on the list. At 34 and 33 respectively, Holliday and Crawford have both probably seen their best days. Marte (26) and Upton (27) are right in their prime. Meanwhile, at 22, both Harper and Yelich look like they have incredibly prolific careers ahead of them. In all likelihood, both of these players are nowhere near their ceilings as of 2014.

Looking a little more closely at the offensive numbers, Harper’s numbers offer some encouragement. Re-ranking our list of the top offensive left fielders by wOBA, a stat which attempts to measure the real value of hits rather than taking a simple average, Harper ranks sixth overall, but behind only Holliday and Upton from our original top five. In a way, we can take this to mean that Harper is, by some standard, a valuable contributor to the offense.

Harper also ranks fifth in OPS, again trailing Holliday and Upton from the top five. That’s fairly impressive. But what’s really impressive is the fact that Harper, even with all of his time missed, ranks sixth of all left fielders in home runs and tenth in RBIs. The fact that he’s even in the top ten is a good sign. That he’s fifth in homers is just a testament to how good he could be.

Defensively, it’s a little bit of a mixed bag for Harper, as well as the rest of our original top five. Harper’s UZR/150 over the last two seasons is -0.3, good for the familiar position of sixth out of qualifying left fielders. As far as our top five goes, Harper manages to beat out Holliday (-19.4) and Upton (-20.1), but still ranks below Marte, Crawford, and Yelich.

This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. Harper has a cannon for an arm, but there are moments when he takes a bad angle on a ball or makes a boneheaded drop. But, like any other evaluation on Harper, we have to remember that he’s young and still learning, and his UZR/150 in 2014 was 3.8, up from -3.6 the previous year.

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So what does all of this mean for Harper? It’s hard to give a definitive answer that everyone will be happy with, but the short answer is that it’s rather promising. No, Harper is not Mike Trout, who has basically become the new face of baseball over the past two years. But he’s moving his way up, and he’s starting to show more than just flashes of the potential that made him the number one overall pick.

This ranking might not sit well with some fans, who seem to have a thin supply of patience when it comes to Harper. People expect a lot from the young star, and Harper’s sixth place standing against other left fielders in so many stats is likely to draw more than just a few comments about how he “just isn’t good enough.”

Truth be told, Harper probably hasn’t lived completely up to his potential, but his career has been riddled with injuries, and those have definitely stunted his growth as a player (note: the beef with Matt Williams didn’t help things either).

But remember, Nats fans, how awesome Harper looked at the plate in the NLDS. That’s what this is building toward. Harper may be in the middle of the pack now, but give him time, and you could be watching that version of Harper a lot more in the very near future.

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