Boras: Harper won't play in World Baseball Classic
Team USA will vie for its first-ever World Baseball Classic championship in March without Bryce Harper.
Harper, the 24-year-old Washington Nationals star who stumbled in 2016 after becoming the youngest unanimous MVP in baseball history the season prior, won't represent the United States at the 2017 WBC so he can focus on his conditioning, according to his agent, Scott Boras.
As he held court with the media Wednesday at the GM meetings in Arizona, however, Boras made it clear that Harper is, to the best of his knowledge, healthy.
"He has no lingering injuries that I know of," Boras told Chelsea Janes of the Washington Post.
Though Harper appeared in 147 games this season, the four-time All-Star saw his production drop off dramatically from 2015, and some speculated he played hurt for a considerable part of the year. After posting a 1.109 OPS with 42 homers two seasons ago, Harper hit just .243/.373/.441 with 24 homers in 2016, providing comparable offensive value, after adjusting for park effects, to Elvis Andrus.
Harper, 2014-2016
| Season | WAR | wRC+ | ISO | Hard-Contact % | Pull % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 1.4 | 115 | .151 | 30.2% | 38.9% |
| 2015 | 9.5 | 197 | .319 | 40.9% | 45.4% |
| 2016 | 3.5 | 112 | .198 | 34.1% | 39.3% |
Incidentally, nearly 73 percent of the players on Major League Baseball's Opening Day rosters in 2016 were born in America, but international supremacy has thus far eluded the United States, who hasn't finished higher than fourth place since the World Baseball Classic was introduced in 2006. The Dominican Republic took home the championship in 2013 with a 3-0 victory over Puerto Rico at AT&T Park, and Japan took home the title in the first two installments of the tournament, beating South Korea in the finals in 2009 after downing Cuba in the inaugural championship showdown three years earlier.