Collette Calls: Bryce Harper On His Own

Lost in all the craziness of the 2021 season is the rather unique season Bryce Harper is having at the plate. The .266/.371/.505 line as play begins July 5 is not anything special, but his 26 RBIs in 61 games played is. That is only possible because all 14 of Harper's home runs in 2021 have come with nobody on base. We projected him for 99 RBIs this season, and yet his rest-of-season projections plus where he stands to date this season would bring him 25 RBIs short of that projection. How does such an established and notable player — someone whose ADP was 18 and went as high as second overall — miss his projected RBI total by that much?

Harper has notably missed some time in seasons over the years, but was an RBI machine in 2018 and 2019 when he was healthy:

He spent a majority of 2012 and 2013 hitting second or third, but has hit third or fourth almost exclusively since.  RBI production is more of a measure of opportunity than it is actual performance.  Hitting in the middle part of the lineup leads to the most opportunities, so even a down year can lead to someone still driving in 70-plus runs if nothing else is going well for the hitter. Harper's overall slash line is certainly a productive line in the current run environment, so we should look into what is driving the unique season for Harper. To set the context for this, the list below shows the record for the fewest RBIs in a single season where a batter has hit at least 14 homers:

This list is mostly populated with part-time players or leadoff hitters (Acuna, Mullins) with Reyes the closest comp on the list to what Harper is doing, and even he wasn't a full-time player in 2018. The obvious starting point for a matter such as this would be to look at how Harper is hitting with runners in scoring position. After all, while RBIs are a skill of opportunity, it requires an actual skill of hitting to cash in on that opportunity and that skill has been noticeably different in 2021 for Harper:

Diving into this issue, I expected to see the struggles here because the player is ultimately responsible for his production. That said, I did not expect to learn that Harper has just one more extra base hit with runners in scoring position than I have in the 2021 season. The numbers in the table show that Harper has been a well-above average run producer nearly every season of his career whether he was hitting the baseball or keeping the line moving by accepting his walk and allowing the next guy to come up. After all, we're talking about a guy who put up six consecutive seasons of a .450-plus OBP with runners in scoring position. This year, the numbers are down across the board for him even though he is not striking out much more than he has in recent seasons. 

To be fair, Harper cannot shoulder all the blame here as Philadelphia has not exactly put a high amount of traffic on base in front of him. Perhaps Harper's struggles are due to the fact he is stunned to see players on base when he steps to the plate. Harper has seen the lowest percentage of his overall pitches with runners on base this year at 19.5 percent where his average the previous five seasons was 23.8 percent. The table below shows the number of baserunners Harper has seen when he comes to the plate and how many of those have scored. Note the percentage is his worst since the 2014 season and well below both his career average and the league average:

The two pitch zones below show how the league pitched to Harper with runners in scoring position in 2019 (top) and how pitchers are pitching to him this season (bottom): 

One noticeable difference is the league is pounding Harper down and away in LH vs. LH matchups and down and in when he is facing RH. Where things really get wonky is when we look Harper's numbers when he is facing righties with runners in scoring position. Naturally, we would think these would be the ideal situations for him and that his issues would be in the LH vs. LH matchups. We would be dead wrong as Harper has a .148 average against righties with runners in scoring position after hitting .315 under those same conditions from 2015-2020. A .211 xBA offers a glimmer of hope, but Harper is clearly pressing in this situation. 

I say situation because Harper is doing well in other situations as the data shows below:

While he strikes out more with nobody on, he is still 54 percent better than the league average in those situations. However, once anyone is on base, he has just three extra-base hits on the season. This situation appears to be more mental and a matter of him pressing to fix everything in one swing more than anything else. Things should get better for him and perhaps the break next week is just what he needs to reset his mind to get into a better place because this lack of production has been tough for fans and fantasy players alike.