PHILADELPHIA -- Bryce Harper didn’t need to manufacture a storyline on the first Sunday of Phillies camp.
One was already waiting for him — a four-month-old comment from the man who runs baseball operations, and the kind of public evaluation franchise players usually only hear behind closed doors.
Back in October, after the Phillies’ NLDS exit, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski was asked to assess Harper’s 2025 season. He didn’t question Harper’s importance. He questioned the level.
“Can he rise to the next level again? I don’t really know that answer,” Dombrowski said. “He’s still a quality player… Again, it wasn’t a bad year. But when I think of Bryce Harper, you think elite, you think of one of the top 10 players in baseball, and I don’t think it fit into that category.”
That’s the kind of quote that lives longer than an October. It’s too sharp, too specific, too loaded with implication — and it landed on the face of a franchise who has spent seven years in Philadelphia trying to make “in-house” more than a slogan.
So when Harper met with reporters Sunday, he was asked the obvious question: did that comment motivate him?
“Not really,” Harper said. “I don’t get motivated by that kind of stuff. For me it was kind of wild the whole situation of that happening.”
And then Harper explained why it stuck with him at all.
“I think the big thing for me was when we first met with this organization it was, ‘Hey we’re always going to keep things in-house and we expect you to do the same thing,’” Harper said. “So when that didn’t happen it kind of took me for a run a little bit.”
That’s the crux of the “drama,” if you want to call it that. Not the criticism. The venue.
Because Harper isn’t pretending 2025 was his standard. Statistically, it was good — just not Harper-good. He hit .261 with 27 homers and 75 RBIs, posting an .844 OPS, the lowest of his career since 2016. A wrist injury cost him roughly a month, and even Harper acknowledged Sunday that his production, including October when he hit 3-for-15 without an RBI in the NLDS, didn’t match what he expects of himself.
But this is where the Phillies’ reality gets tricky. They don’t employ Harper to be “quality.” They built their identity around him being catalytic — the guy who bends games, bends series, bends months. And if the Phillies are going to live in October instead of merely visiting it, they need the version of Harper who turns elite from a debate into a given.
Dombrowski has since tried to sand down the edges of his October line, saying on a later appearance that, “First of all, to me, Bryce Harper is one of the best players in the game of baseball… He had a very good year; I don’t think he had an elite year.”
Which is a softer phrasing — but essentially the same point.
Harper’s response Sunday to reporters at camp in Clearwater wasn’t defiant, and it didn’t sound like a fracture. It sounded like a star player recalibrating the boundaries of trust: if we’re going to talk about “in-house,” then let’s actually keep things in-house.
The rest is interpretation — and baseball, as always, will do the interpreting soon enough.
Because if Harper hits like Bryce Harper again, this becomes February noise. If he doesn’t, those October words will replay all season long, not because Dombrowski said them, but because they’ll feel like a question the Phillies couldn’t afford to ask out loud.
Either way, Harper made his own point Sunday: he heard it. He remembered it. He just didn’t love where it was said.
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