WASHINGTON — Bryce Harper set a Major League record Sunday, becoming the first player ever to reach base seven times in the same game without an official plate appearance. He was walked six times, thrice intentionally, and hit by a pitch. That led to another Major League record being set behind him, one the Nationals might want to soon forget, but shouldn’t.
Ryan Zimmerman, batting cleanup behind Harper, went 0-5 with runners in scoring position, stranding a new MLB record 14 men. To say that he and the Nationals haven’t made teams pay yet for pitching around Harper this season is an understatement.
In the 30 trips to the plate immediately following Harper’s walks this season, Nationals hitters are batting .125 with a .214 on-base percentage and .167 slugging percentage. Ryan Zimmerman, who has been at-bat for all but two of those plate appearances, is slashing .091/.192/.136 with two walks, a hit-by-pitch, a double, a sacrifice fly and four RBI after a Harper walk. Daniel Murphy is 1-2 with a single. Harper has made two of his own outs on the bases, getting caught stealing and picked off once apiece.
Following the eight walks officially classified as intentional, Zimmerman is 0-7 (Murphy is 1-1).
Joey Votto led baseball with 143 walks last year, the most since Barry Bonds’ absurd, record-breaking 232 in 2004, when he was intentionally walked nearly more times (120) than all but three other players had total bases on balls. Heading into Monday night, Harper is on pace for 157 free passes this season.
The last batter to receive the kind of treatment Harper was subjected to in his 13-walk weekend series was Bonds. Buck Showalter once went so far as to walk intentionally Bonds with the bases loaded and a two-run lead, choosing to force in a run and put the game-tying run just 90 feet away rather than let the slugger — who stood incredulous at the plate — beat him. The gamble worked, by the way, as Showalter’s Diamondbacks escaped with an 8-7 win.
Not nearly that dramatic, Cubs skipper Joe Maddon walked Harper with runners at first and second twice in extra innings Sunday — in the top of the 10th and top of the 12th — forcing the go-ahead run to third base. His gamble worked each time as well. Will that inspire others to do the same?
Baseball as an institution is as slow to embrace change as any professional sport. It is closely bound to its ideas of tradition. Just look at Goose Gossage’s raging defense of unwritten rules or Joe Girardi and even Rob Manfred himself discussing banning shifts, as if baseball defensive positioning itself wasn’t simply a glacier-like tectonic adjustment of men with gloves to the spots on the diamond where baseballs are most often hit.
Those who dare go against convention are often ridiculed until their methods prove successful, at which point they are copied to the point that they provoke new innovations. Off the field, that has taken place through the statistical innovations of the Moneyball era. On the field, no active manager has been more instrumental in driving optimized strategy than Maddon.
The first to routinely employ the shift on pull-happy David Ortiz, he is also responsible for unlocking Ben Zobrist’s potential as a modern-day utility man in a world full of specialized players. And he’s made it clear he won’t be pitching to Bryce Harper, ever, if he doesn’t have to. Considering how well his strategy worked last weekend, the teams that aren’t stubbornly wrapping themselves in tradition will likely soon follow suit.
Zimmerman is back hitting behind Harper again in Monday night’s lineup. While putting Murphy directly behind Harper would create a situation with consecutive lefties that might not be ideal matchup-wise late in games, it’s clear that the Nationals will need to do a better job of protecting Harper and making teams pay that choose to pitch around them moving forward.
While they don’t need Clark Kent to save them, Jeff Kent would be nice.
