Why outfielder/broadcaster Bryce Harper is just what MLB needs

We had grand plans on Sunday Night Baseball last week. Braves vs. Phillies, with Philadelphia beginning to turn up the pressure on first-place Atlanta, and a couple of MLB stars had agreed to wear microphones and ear pieces to complement the competition. Former Cy Young Award winner Jake Arrieta was on the mound for the Phillies, and the Braves spiced up the matchup by making a morning trade for Tommy Milone.

Then the Braves scored 10 runs in the top of the second, one of the mic'd up stars got hurt and the broadcast was saturated with underlying tech problems. That's when Bryce Harper saved the night in the manner that Madison Bumgarner hoisted the '14 Giants onto his shoulders.

"He single-handedly made that game enjoyable to broadcast and watch at home," Matt Vasgersian, ESPN's play-by-play man, said of Harper.

Added producer Jeff Dufine: "He gave us something to latch on to and saved the show."

Harper did everything he could to help ESPN, going way beyond what anyone might've expected, and he made our broadcast and his product -- baseball -- much better.

The broadcast plan, as the game began, was for Harper to interact with Vasgersian and Alex Rodriguez in the booth in the first inning. Then, in the second, the Braves' Ronald Acuna Jr. was scheduled to use a mic and earpiece, with Alex serving as the interpreter. Then Harper was supposed to rejoin us for innings 3 through 5.

Right away, however, problems piled up. Because of miscommunication, Harper was not given an earpiece for the first inning, so he could not hear the booth. In the top of the second inning, Acuna's hamstring tightened during a journey around the bases, so his dugout conversations were limited to the Braves' athletic training staff. On top of that, the Braves burst out with a touchdown, extra point and field goal against Arrieta and a reliever, slowing the pace of the game dramatically -- and, we assumed, putting into jeopardy Harper's participation in the broadcast.

In a sport saturated with unwritten rules, none of us knew how Bryce would feel about participating in a live television broadcast with his team down by double-digits in the second inning. I know some retired old-school players who would have ripped off the microphone and earpiece, partly out of a superstitious belief that the early deficit was somehow related to the decision to talk on air.

Vasgersian recalled, "I was thinking, 'Well, it was a nice idea, but he's probably not interested in this now.'"

But Harper indicated to our crew that he was good to go, engaged Matt and Alex in the booth and all but predicted the Phillies' comeback that followed. Philadelphia scored a run in the second on a Didi Gregorius home run and six more runs in the third inning.

In the top of the fourth inning, Adam Duvall drove a fly to deep right field, and after catching the ball, Harper ricocheted off the wall and threw toward the infield -- and the ear piece he was wearing dislodged. Harper spoke into the microphone and let our techs know what had happened, and once that was relayed to the rest of the staff, we assumed that was the end of Bryce's participation for the night.

Wrong again. Remarkably, after some time passed, Bryce found the earpiece and reengaged. "That was incredible," Dufine said.

For the rest of the game, Harper chatted with Matt and Alex (as part of our tech issues, I couldn't hear him, despite being in Citizens Bank Park) as well as the Braves' Freddie Freeman about the recent news that Freeman and his wife are expecting twins. The Phillies and Braves combined to use 15 pitchers in the game, with the pace dragging, and Harper continued.

Rodriguez said, "I kept looking at Matt, saying, 'He's keeping us alive.'"

During the commercial breaks in the final innings, Vasgersian repeatedly offered Harper a chance to exit -- "only to have him respond with, 'I'm good, I'm good,'" Vasgersian said. "He at one point told me that when he's on deck, he's going to put the earpiece in his pocket, so we didn't go to him and not get a response."

"Defensively, I offered to only go to him between batters, and once again, he said he was fine with anything. There were even a few moments where he listened to a question and said, 'Hang on a sec.'"

Along the way, Harper turned and complimented Braves shortstop Dansby Swanson for his strong offensive season, which, as it turned out, served as the perfect framing for when Swanson clubbed a ninth-inning home run that all but closed out the Phillies.

Baseball players are sometimes criticized for being inaccessible to fans -- see Rob Manfred's comments about Mike Trout a couple of years ago -- and for not showing the kind of personality the sport needs. But in this game, Harper could not have been more generous, more gracious, more helpful.

"Bryce Harper is one of the biggest stars in our sport," Vasgersian said. "If anyone could have asked to only do a half-inning or back out altogether, it's someone on his level. Not only did he hang with us for basically the entire game, he was candid, courteous, patient and thoughtful."

• Following the death of Tom Seaver last week, there have been many reflections on his life and his career, how helpful he was as teammate and all of his incredible pitching accomplishments compiled at a time when the sport was so different. In the 11-season stretch of 1967 to 1977, Seaver threw 2,980 innings and racked up 180 complete games -- nearly half of his 381 starts -- with a 2.48 ERA.

Major League Baseball will never get back to a time when anyone bears that much responsibility and carries that kind of workload, but it desperately needs the starting pitchers to regain preeminence.

Statistical analysis drives every decision in baseball in 2020, and the drive for efficiency has created a system in which teams are regularly deploying relay teams of relievers. As of Friday morning, no starting pitcher was averaging seven innings per outing this season; only a small handful were averaging six innings. Major League Baseball's batting average is .245, the lowest since 1968, when the league-wide average was .237.

Roger Clemens struck out more batters than all but two pitchers in baseball history, with 4,672, and his career rate of strikeouts per nine innings was 8.6. This year, league-wide pitching staffs are averaging 8.9 strikeouts per game. That's worth repeating: The whole league is averaging more strikeouts per game than The Rocket.

You cannot dispute the success of the pitching committee formula, nor can you pick apart the efficiency-driven logic behind it. But privately, many, many folks in the industry hate the product that has been formed. Think about this: Less than two months into this weird season, a total of 674 pitchers have been used -- already the eighth most in MLB history. The record was set last season, with 831 pitchers used, and that was in 4,858 games.

The union and Major League Baseball have so much to haggle over in the next 20 months, from free agency to service-time manipulation to tanking to pace of place to new rules. Somehow and in some way, the game needs to restore the star power of the starting pitchers.

Maybe it's a rule reducing the number of pitchers on a roster to 10 on a given day, or maybe there can be some kind of regulation about the number of pitchers a manager can deploy during a game, with obvious exceptions made for injuries and blowouts. A good number, in my opinion, would be four pitchers per game, a limit that would compel managers to try to get as many outs as possible from their starting pitchers.

But the sport needs to get back to a place where the starting pitchers inspire fans to watch -- in a way that a bunch of relievers never will. It would be better for the TV product and better for the players' association, which needs the starting pitchers to carry more importance and, in turn, get paid more.

• Jason Heyward is in the fifth season of his eight-year, $180 million deal with the Cubs that often hasn't paid off the way the front office had hoped. But Heyward is having arguably his best season with the Cubs so far, through a significant adjustment at the plate.

For years, Heyward was often beaten by inside fastballs, and at times, he tried to move up on the plate, like teammate Anthony Rizzo, in an effort to combat that pitch. This year, he has moved far away from home plate -- in fact, you'd be hard-pressed to find a hitter who stands more removed from the plate than Heyward -- but with his long arms, the 6-foot-5 Heyward is covering all parts of the zone and often shooting the ball to left field. If pitchers try to beat him with inside fastballs, he has done well in laying off those pitches, which, because of where he stands, will almost uniformly be out of the strike zone.

His plate appearances have been routinely excellent, and through Saturday's games, Heyward carried a .421 on-base percentage and .973 OPS, career bests. The other day, Pirates catcher Jacob Stallings wore a microphone and earpiece in the stands during a game with the Cubs and explained just how difficult Heyward's new approach is to combat.

• Most of the aggressive moves to improve leading up to the trade deadline were executed by National League teams, such as the Padres, whereas AL contenders such as the Yankees, Astros and Rays mostly stood pat. The polarized nature of the American League standings probably has a lot to do with that. As of Saturday morning, the eight front-runners to make the postseason in the AL each bore at least an 88% chance to reach the playoffs. The Yankees, for all of their injuries and recent struggles, have a 98% chance to get into the postseason tournament.

• In recent years, it has become standard operating procedure for managers to pull starting pitchers before opposing hitters get multiple looks, thus making the pitcher more vulnerable. In particular, more and more starters are being yanked before opponents see them a third time in a given game.

None of that has applied to Shane Bieber so far in 2020:

Opponents' average against him first pass through the lineup: .509 OPS
Second pass: .494 OPS
Third pass: .347 OPS

• Adam Wainwright has the seventh-lowest average fastball velocity at 89.4 mph, and he doesn't really rely on that pitch. Rather, he throws a ton of curveballs (with an average velocity of 73.8 mph) and some cut fastballs. But at age 39, the Cardinals' right-hander is having one of the better starts to any season in his career.

It's reasonable to wonder if part of the reason Wainwright is thriving is because he's an outlier. In this era in which hitters are geared up for the Stepford Wives Relievers with fastballs consistently thrown in the upper-90s, batters really struggle to figure out what to do with a right-hander dealing stuff they don't see much anymore.

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