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Last year at this time, Bryce Harper without a doubt deserved to be an All-Star as he was on having an MVP season. It would have been clown question, bro to question his greatness. His .339 batting average to start the season, which was the best in the league, proved he was not just a home run hitter. The 2016 season started and the reigning MVP looked just as good as he did the previous season.
On May 8th against the Cubs, Harper came to the plate seven times and within those seven times he proceeded to first base in all of them. He became the first player in modern Major League Baseball history to have seven plate appearances in a game without recording a single official at-bat. Harper was walked six times with three of them being intentional. There are only three other players in major league history to ever have that many walks in a single game, including Jeff Bagwell, Andre Thornton, and Jimmie Foxx.
After that month, however, he started to go into a slump where he saw his average drop 0.70 in two weeks. This was not the Bryce Harper we all love and cannot wait to watch come to the plate, but people still wanted to see him in the All-Star Game. It was early in the season and everyone expected he would eventually break out at some point, but the slump continued, longer than expected and now we all wonder, does Bryce Harper really deserve to be an All-Star? Is it the hype of his name that got him on the team this year , his good looks, or is it that we all know he can play better than how he did this season? Who really knows. All I know is that I voted for him because I know he can do better than how he has this season. We have seen it before; his hard work and talent is impeccable. Where is the old Bryce Harper?
