10 Degrees: The reckoning of Bryce Harper is upon us

This is Bryce Harper, the one so many of us have breathlessly touted as the next big thing for years, to much chuckling and consternation. It started when he was a teenaged cover boy, continued as he blew through the minor leagues like a kiss, hastened when he became the youngest player to debut in nearly 15 years, grew with his All-Star-level talent, shriveled as his performance didn’t quite match it and left him here, 22 years old, grown up and ready to dominate like his destiny foretold.

It doesn’t always work out that way, of course, so to see Harper doing everything Harper was supposed to do (hit monster home runs) and even more (take walks like he’s Barry Bonds) is the story of this baseball season. As Mike Trout does Mike Trout in his inimitable fashion, Harper’s game of catch-up is going rather well, thank you very much.

Another two-hit day Sunday left Harper’s slash line this season at .300/.435/.655 with a National League-leading 11 home runs and MLB-best 27 walks. Trout is at his typical .307/.407/.596, consistent as a heartbeat, and it’s why he’s surged ahead in the Trout-vs.-Harper debate that raged at the 2012 All-Star Game and beyond.

The Schadenfreude that accompanied Harper’s injury troubles – and continues to lurk as he proves himself one of the game’s best players – never made a whole lot of sense. Harper’s greatest sin is staring at his home runs, and anyone who says he wouldn’t levy a starry-eyed gaze at a tank like this is just lying. The whole Willow Smith hair-whipping thing is a little fratty, but complaining about that is practically encouraging athletes to hide their personalities, which is the antithesis of what baseball needs.

Even before his six-homer binge this week, Harper entered the week with a .416 on-base percentage and slugging percentage approaching .500, so this is no prisoner-of-the-moment celebration. It is a perfect time, in fact, to break out the annual Dubious Start column, which takes a look at some of the hottest players and teams in the early going and assigns a 1-to-5 rating, with the lower numbers legitimate and the bigger ones flukier. The Dubious Scale features the face of all dubious faces: Olympian McKayla Maroney.

Before the proceedings start, one final announcement: There are only a few seats left on the …

1. Bryce Harper bandwagon, so sign up fast. It will look awfully smart, because Harper’s transformation looks very real and is trending positively in every fashion.

For a player with his raw power, Harper hit the ball on the ground far too much coming into this season – nearly 45 percent of the time. This year, his groundball rate is near 34 percent, while his flyballs have jumped to around 43 percent, about 10 percentage points higher than his first three years. With batted-ball percentages just about reaching stabilization, this version of Harper looks to be staying.

Even better, Harper’s selectivity at the plate has grown. It’s not just the walks, which have spiked to one in every five plate appearances. Harper is becoming far more judicious at what he offers. He’s swinging at about 20 percent fewer changeups this season; they’re the pitch on which he grounded out at a higher rate than anything else he regularly saw. Better yet, Harper is destroying sliders. Coming into this season, he hit .194 and slugged .353 against sliders, according to Brooks Baseball. This season, he’s hitting .286 and slugging .667, and while that’s in a small sample – he has seen 83 sliders this year – it’s a promising start for a past weakness.

If there’s anything bad to say about Harper, it’s that he has been injured and that he needs to stop trying to steal bases (0 for 3 this year). And … yeah. That’s about it. When you’re 1,627 plate appearances into your career and still younger than the best rookie in baseball, that’s a promising sign. When Harper was debuting …

2. Joc Pederson was playing in the Cal League, doing then what he’s doing now: walking a lot and hitting home runs.

The walks are Pederson’s trademark. He took three more Sunday, bringing his season total to 27 in 30 games. While Pederson debuted with the Dodgers last September, this spring is his first shot at playing full-time, so a Baseball-Reference deep dive was in order.

Pederson has walked in 18 of his 30 games. Among the first 30 games of players’ careers, only six have walked more frequently. Pederson has seven multi-walk games, same as the leaders through 30. Pederson’s eye is matched only by his power, which at one point led to home runs accounting for his last seven hits. And that’s why he gets two McKaylas.

Pederson’s contact rate is dreadful: 61.4 percent, the worst in the major leagues. It’s almost counterintuitive how someone with such a good sense of the strike zone could have such a tremendous inability to not hit the ball. Pederson’s 61.4 percent is the worst rate this millennium, and considering how strikeouts are more prevalent than ever, it’s probably the worst ever. He’s got plenty of time to fix it, of course, because he is just 23, just getting used to the big leagues, just starting at the Dodgers leadoff slot …

3. Dee Gordon vacated during the offseason. Los Angeles shipped him to Miami, and all he’s done since is hit. Gordon doubled twice in four at-bats Sunday, and it raised his batting average all of two points. They were his 53rd and 54th hits of the season, pushing his average to .439.

Much of that is owed to Gordon’s batting average on balls in play. The general rule is a BABIP of around .300, give or take a few points in either direction. Gordon’s current sits at .491, meaning almost five of every 10 times he makes contact, the ball drops for a hit in the field of play, whereas on average it’s three of 10.

This is not to impugn Gordon. Speedy players tend to have higher BABIPs, and so for Gordon to end up in the .380s, as Ichiro did regularly during his prime, would not be a huge shock. But then Ichiro finished seasons strong, and Gordon led this column last year because of an excellent, BABIP-fueled start. It dipped, and so did his stats, and by the end of the season most of his offensive value came from his superlative baserunning.

Second base has turned into something of a glory position this season, with Gordon raking and the marvel that is Jose Altuve and Kolten Wong approaching stardom. Twelve regular second basemen have slugging percentages over .400 – that’s two more than the supposed power position of third base, one fewer than left field and two fewer than right, according to FanGraphs – and ...

4. Devon Travis, of all people, tops the list. Travis is a testament to scouting and how investment in it pays off. When the Blue Jays beefed up their pro scouting department a few years ago, the idea was for multiple scouts to get multiple looks at a player. With Travis, one Blue Jays scout graded him as a 5 – on the 2-to-8 scale, a 5 is major league average – while another gave him a 6, an All-Star-caliber grade, aggressive for a 13th-round draft pick just two years out of college.

Early in the offseason, when teams do their typical here’s-what-we-want-and-here’s-what-we-got phone calls, the Blue Jays threw out Travis’ name and that of Tigers center fielder Anthony Gose. Later in the winter, they returned to the proposed trade, and Toronto got its .550-slugging second baseman.

Travis has slowed down, and while he hit seven home runs in his first 24 games, enough questions remain – and enough adjustments must be made – that if he wallops seven more in his next 124 the Blue Jays will understand. So long as Travis can play decent-enough defense, he’s a cheap second-base solution for another five seasons. And when teams can pay productive players pennies, like ...

5. Dallas Keuchel with the Houston Astros, the excitement of surplus value numbs any potential disappointment. Keuchel is making $524,500 this season and has been arguably the best pitcher in baseball. His 1.39 ERA is tops. So is his 63.8 percent groundball rate. And the latter is the reason for this.

Since MLB introduced PITCHf/x, only 10 pitchers have finished seasons with better groundball rates than Keuchel’s. And it’s not like this is an outlier; last season, he was at 63.5. Keuchel is a left-handed Brandon Webb, and considering Webb’s run of dominance in the mid-2000s, it’s an awfully complimentary comparison.

There was a temptation to add an extra McKayla due to Keuchel’s .199 BABIP portending a regression in other places, but forget that. Keuchel’s emergence as a 27-year-old speaks to the excellent work done by the Astros and pitching coach Brent Strom. Sinkers are devastating pitches when executed properly, a maxim ...

6. Tim Lincecum seems to be embracing. Lincecum is sporting a handy-dandy 2.00 ERA despite a career-low strikeout rate, and on the surface it looks quite dubious. A closer look reveals something different altogether: a new Timmy.

His groundball rate is at 54 percent, more than 7 percent better than his career average. His home run rate has cratered, too, though that may be more due to his low homer-to-flyball rate than something he’s doing. Time will tell on that.

The point is: Lincecum is trying something new, and it’s working. After throwing his four-seam fastball 30 percent of the time and sinker 18 percent over the last two years, according to Brooks Baseball, he’s employing the sinker on 26 percent of pitches and the straight fastball on 21 percent. Lincecum has thrown 143 split-fingered fastballs this year – one fewer than the number of sinkers. Combine them, and it accounts for more than half his pitches – zone-diving, groundball-inducing beasts, even when they’re registering in the 80s on radar guns.

The three is more a heart-than-head pick, because any right-handed pitcher sitting 87-88 with his fastball is in peril. And yet Lincecum is a brilliant pitcher, as much head as heart, and seems to be embracing a new style that better suits what his arm can give him. We’ll see if it lasts. That’s the theme when handing out Doobs to the …

7. Stephen Vogts of the world, who come out of nowhere and OPS over 1.000 for the first five weeks of the season. Vogt’s emergence is a nice story, and it has saved the A’s even more headaches than they’ve had already, but history tells us that 30-year-olds who suddenly turn into Babe Ruth in April without having shown a previous sign of doing so lose their glass slippers by the All-Star break.

Apologies for the excessive dubiousness. Just going with history, as is the case with some of these quick-hit dubious starts:

• Nick Martinez: His 1.47 ERA ranks second in baseball. His strikeout rate of 3.68 per nine innings is the third worst. The latter says more than the former. And he still hasn’t given up a homer. Groundball tendencies notwithstanding, those are coming. Dubious maximus.

• Gerrit Cole: Undubious. Seventh-best groundball rate (59.6 percent) and ninth-best strikeout rate (9.84 Ks per nine) among starters? An ace in blossom.

• Mike Moustakas: Mild doobs on the career .236 hitter sitting at .326? Perhaps not that high, but .300 isn’t out of the question.

• D.J. LeMahieu: First 18 games: .419/.455/.548. Last eight games: .222/.276/.259. Career coming into this year: .276/.314/.361. As nice as it would be to think he can turn into prime Rod Carew, this one gets mega-doobs.

• Jake Odorizzi: He’s excellent, and he’s going to need to be with Alex Cobb and Drew Smyly shelved for the season. But zero home runs among 600 pitches is tremendously lucky, especially with a groundball rate below 40 percent. Medium dubiousness.

• Chris Archer: Similar to Cole, with a big fastball, lots of grounders and flailing hitters. Occasional flagging control – eight walks over his last two starts – makes him moderately dubious.

• Matt Harvey: Sliver of dubiousness that exists only because of the scar that traces his right elbow and the fallibility of Tommy John surgery.

• Hector Santiago: Dreadful walk rate. Excessive strand rate. Low groundball rate. Santiago is the Mayor of Dubioustown, a place in which the ...

8. Minnesota Twins currently reside. The Twins have ridden a number of anomalies to their current 91-win pace. The two most glaring involve the entire offense and their best starting pitchers, which aren’t exactly the sorts of people a team wants involved in its unsustainable features.

With the bases empty, the Twins are hitting .247/.290/.367. When a runner is on base, it jumps to .289/.358/.414. Get runners into scoring position and it goes to .306/.385/.441. And with runners in scoring position and two outs, even higher: .306/.408/.486. Offense tends not to work this way. Yes, winning teams do hit better in the clutch. Just not almost 125 OPS points higher with runners in scoring position. Some teams manage to keep up ridiculous lines with RISP – the 2013 Cardinals finished the season at .330/.402/.463 – but these Twins would be the distinct rarity.

More than that is their starting pitching. Mike Pelfrey and Kyle Gibson, each with a sub-3.00 ERA, are begging to be called the Regression Twins. (That would’ve worked better for any of the other 29 teams. It was not meant to be a pun. Sorry.) The only two worse strikeout rates than Gibson’s 2.72 per nine innings since the turn of the millennium belong to Nate Cornejo (2.13 per nine in 2003) and Kirk Rueter (2.65 per nine in 2004). And they played in a period with 17 percent fewer strikeouts. Adjusted for era, Gibson strikes out fewer than Rueter and barely more than Cornejo. Pelfrey isn’t much better, at 4.19 per nine, and at least Gibson has the excuse he’s a groundball pitcher. Minnesota has the 13th-best ERA in baseball. It has the single worst xFIP, a metric that helps estimate future performance by using strikeouts, walks and home runs allowed.

Other candidates of dubiousness include:

• Houston Astros: Ben Lindbergh did the yeoman’s work in explaining the Astros’ resurgence. Their pitchers make up for lack of velocity by feasting low and away. They generate a ton of groundballs. (Thank you, Dr. Keuchel.) They’ve caught the ball awfully well. Their bullpen has been nuts and made up for mediocre starting beyond Keuchel and Collin McHugh. Working in their favor: A division that’s something between mediocre and plain bad, not to mention the six-game cushion they’ve built. Are they a 105-win team, as is their current pace? No. Are they a 90-win team? Probably not. Are they good enough to contend in this meh division? Absolutely. Middle-of-the-road dubiousness.

• New York Mets: Not sold on the offense – particularly with David Wright out for who knows how long – but the ability to go to Triple-A and get Dilson Herrera and Noah Syndergaard for fill-in roles makes the Mets a deep kind of dangerous. Waning dubiousness.

• St. Louis Cardinals: The 119-win pace seems rather unlikely. And as much as the Best Fans in Baseball hope Adam Wainwright’s season-ending Achilles injury is just a blip like in 2011, the downgrade to whomever ends up in the fifth slot is marked. The Cardinals are a playoff team, and they may even be a championship team, but the march to both is far more arduous without Wainwright. Creeping dubiousness.

• New York Yankees: The Yankees’ team ERA is 3.34. The Yankees’ team ERA without Andrew Miller and Dellin Betances is 3.78. They are eminently vital to the Yankees, and Joe Girardi has used his ace relievers like plow horses over the season’s first five weeks. After Sunday, Betances has an MLB-high 17 appearances in 32 games. Miller has thrown in 15 games. Their combined scoreless streak to start the season is 34 1/3 innings, and they’re a huge reason the Yankees are 20-12. The combination of needing to pare back on their usage, plus Masahiro Tanaka’s ever-fragile arm, gives the Yankees palpable dubiousness. Of course, when …

9. Michael Pineda is going out there and throwing 16-strikeout, no-walk gems like he did Sunday, the Yankees look like world beaters. No Yankee ever had struck out more than 13 in a walkless effort, so to see Pineda do what he did – and in just seven innings no less – speaks to his potential greatness.

Until he can string together more than a few excellent months at a time, that’s all it will be: potential. Pineda is 26 years old, and Sunday was just his 20th start since 2011. He missed all of 2012 and 2013, and last season his longest stretch of consecutive starts was nine.

So consider these three floating heads a rightful landing spot. The performance merits one. Pineda’s 54-to-3 strikeout-to-walk ratio is the craziest thing this side of Bartolo Colon’s 40-to-1. History warrants five. One of baseball’s great truths is that injured pitchers get injured again. If Pineda is the exception, the trade for Jesus Montero – he of the 23-to-2 strikeout-to-walk ratio hitting at Triple- A – turns into one of the all-time lopsided deals. He could find himself pitching in his second All-Star Game, perhaps against …

10. Bryce Harper, who already has been to a pair himself. Popularity came before production that merited it, and that started the anti-Harper sentiment that pervades the game, even among his peers. Calling Harper overrated was ludicrous. Overhyped? Sure, and that wasn’t his fault. If he turns down Sports Illustrated’s request to talk, he’s not on the cover at 16. But then if he turns down Sports Illustrated’s request as a 16-year-old, he truly is a superhuman, because not even the most protective parents could say no to the SI cover.

To think it’s barely been half a decade since Harper dove headlong into the national consciousness. Every step along the way, each loaded with a greater charge of dynamite, he has calmly pinched the lit fuse with his two fingers and let his bat provide the pyrotechnics. And now we’re seeing it with the big things and the little.

Coming into this season, pitchers had thrown Harper 766 curveballs. They weren’t his biggest weakness, but he hit just 21 of them for line drives. This season, he has seen 56 curveballs. Six have been ropes off his bat. It is, like everything else in this column, a small sample that may or may not presage conclusions worth making. Harper could fall into a deep slump and toot a dog whistle for all the people who find his hair obnoxious or want to harp on something else not worth the time.

The rest of us, meanwhile, will wait for the next jag like what we saw this week, when Bryce Harper was who Bryce Harper was supposed to be: a man at 22, all grown, not just ready to dominate but doing so in spectacular fashion.

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