Harper had 'fun' hat made after MLB culture debate

Bryce Harper made a serious statement by donning a "Make Baseball Fun Again" hat following the Washington Nationals' 4-3 Opening Day victory over the Atlanta Braves on Monday, and it appears he planned the stunt well in advance.

Two weeks after he proclaimed "baseball's tired" in an exclusive ESPN interview back in early March, Harper reached out to Tom Rauen, owner of Envision Tees, about producing the hat.

"I thought he was going to wear it right away," Rauen told Dan Steinberg of The Washington Post. "But he knows that if he would have wore it last week after a spring training game, it might have been picked up by a couple people. The fact that he timed it on Opening Day, after he hit a home run and he was already going to make some media headlines, it kind of just put together the perfect media storm."

Harper, who could be baseball's first $400-million man once he hits free agency in a few years, has Rauen seeing dollar signs after the hat went viral.

"I wasn't planning on selling it," Rauen added. "I was lying in bed (Monday night), and I was like 'All right, I've got to get this thing up.' People were bombarding me with emails."