– Bryce Harper – ESPN

HE WANTS TO change the game. He wants to change the perception of baseball players, to become a single-name icon like LeBron and Beckham and Cam. “I don’t know much about Bryce,” says his new manager, Dusty Baker, “but I know he’s one of the hippest kids around.” Harper wants to elevate his sport’s profile through his play, through his fashion, through the charisma of his personality, maybe even through the fascination with the size of the first free agent contract ($400 million? $500 million?) that he’ll sign shortly after his 26th birthday. Is this a prodigy’s natural urge to innovate or a sign of youthful hubris?

“Endorsements, fashion — it’s something baseball doesn’t see,” he says. “In soccer, it’s Beckham or Ronaldo. In basketball, it’s Curry and LeBron. In football, it’s Cam. Football and basketball have such good fashion.”

There are impediments endemic to the sport. Everyone knows about Russell Westbrook’s unique couture because he’s wearing it in an interview room. The baseball player, on the other hand, is interviewed at his locker, often shirtless and sporting a hat head that can ruin even Harper’s unique follicle landscaping. As Nationals first baseman Ryan Zimmerman says, “We’re uniformed personnel.”

And then there’s the larger obstacle: the game’s stern code. Case in point: Papelbon vs. Harper. It started when Orioles third baseman Manny Machado hit a home run against the Nationals last September and reacted with too much excitement, so Jonathan Papelbon drilled him the next time Machado came to bat, which caused Harper to suggest to reporters that baseball’s code is “tired,” which led to Papelbon berating and then choking Harper four days later after the closer found his teammate’s hustle lacking — a Rube Goldberg display of baseball’s grim underside.

Harper has admitted fault in going to reporters instead of speaking to Papelbon directly (“If I had a problem with Pap, I should have gone up to Pap,” he says), and both men say it didn’t last beyond that day. But that’s not what Harper wants to talk about now.

“Baseball’s tired,” he says. “It’s a tired sport, because you can’t express yourself. You can’t do what people in other sports do. I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair. If that’s Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom or Manny Machado or Joc Pederson or Andrew McCutchen or Yasiel Puig — there’s so many guys in the game now who are so much fun.

“Jose Fernandez is a great example. Jose Fernandez will strike you out and stare you down into the dugout and pump his fist. And if you hit a homer and pimp it? He doesn’t care. Because you got him. That’s part of the game. It’s not the old feeling — hoorah … if you pimp a homer, I’m going to hit you right in the teeth. No. If a guy pimps a homer for a game-winning shot … I mean — sorry.”

He stops, looks around. The hell with it, he’s all in.

“If a guy pumps his fist at me on the mound, I’m going to go, ‘Yeah, you got me. Good for you. Hopefully I get you next time.’ That’s what makes the game fun. You want kids to play the game, right? What are kids playing these days? Football, basketball. Look at those players — Steph Curry, LeBron James. It’s exciting to see those players in those sports. Cam Newton — I love the way Cam goes about it. He smiles, he laughs. It’s that flair. The dramatic.”

The question is this: Can Bryce Harper turn that swing into an enzyme to quicken a chemical reaction that will eradicate baseball’s old-school thinking — the unwritten rules, The Code, a century and a half of shut-up-and-play — and create a game in which players respect each other and retain the right to express themselves fully without fear of a fastball to the ear hole?

It’s a big dream. But if not him, who? Mike Trout is Harper’s equal as a player, but he’s as publicly charismatic as a plate of sand. Harper, in true prodigy fashion, demands attention. In Game 4 of the 2014 division series against the Giants, he stood on deck in the seventh inning with the Giants leading 2-1. A fan in the sunken seats about 10 feet away, holding a glass of red wine, berated Harper with an intensity that couldn’t be ignored.

“Hey, buddy,” Harper said. “How’s that glass of wine?”

Harper remembers that the fan sputtered before saying, “You’re going to strike out.”

“You know I love playing here, don’t you, buddy?”

Seconds later, Harper drove a fastball into San Francisco Bay. As he touched home plate and turned for the dugout, Harper fixed his eyes on the fan, holding his stare a step or two longer than necessary.

“He was just devastated about life,” Harper says.

It’s the certainty, right? That’s why so many people have a problem with Harper. He can be good — we’re fine with that — but he can’t let us know that he knows how good. He can hit that homer, sure, and we can admire it, but it’s that stare he gives the wine-drinking fan — the extra-long linger that sinks the needle just a bit deeper — that changes everything.

Peter Hapak

HARPER TREATS THE subject of his Q Score like something he pulled from the shower drain. He’s too young or too arrogant or too young to be arrogant. He’s heard it all. How did the kid who went to LDS religion classes almost every morning in high school, the guy who still lives with his parents in the offseason, get stamped with the word that’s become America’s all-purpose evasion? Is Bryce Harper polarizing?

“I don’t care,” he says. “I … don’t … care. I really don’t. As long as I can look in the mirror and say I played as hard as I could. I think people get opinions when they see me play the game and see the hard-nosed, chip-on-my-shoulder kind of thing. That’s the way I play. I want to kick your teeth in. And after the game I can walk out of those doors and be the happiest person in the world.”

He has “Pop” tattooed on the underside of his right wrist and “Mom” in the same spot on the left. He has his surname and “Luke 1:37” (“For with God nothing shall be impossible”) in elongated script down his right side, stretching like taffy from underarm to hip. Luke’s message is a recurring theme: Limits are unwelcome.

“He’s the same way he’s always been,” Chauncey says. “When we were little, I was scared to death of him. The thing about Bryce was, he did not ever slow it down.

“A lot of people look at his attitude as negative, that he’s cocky or arrogant. Douche — that’s the word I hear a lot. Is he a douche? No, he’s not. They say, ‘Well, he kind of acts like one.’ I always answer: ‘Why, because he’s good and he shows it?’ ”

Why pretend? Is false modesty any less distasteful than outward self-assurance? Besides, Harper doesn’t have a problem admitting failure. In fact, he relishes it, bringing it up as often as he can, as if pressing his fingertips into a bruise to relive the pain. He was 0-for-4 at the start of the fall season at the College of Southern Nevada, and he sat on the edge of his bed, a 16-year-old playing against men, and asked himself, “Can I really do this?”

He told Pop, “I don’t know about this. I kind of want to go back to high school.”

“Is that what you really want?” Ron asked. “If it is, we can go back.”

“No, no, no,” he said. “I can’t go back.”

The next day, he homered in his first at-bat and came home and sat on the same edge of that same bed and told himself, “I think I’ve got this.”

He’s got one more failure story: It was the summer after his freshman year in high school and he was playing in the Area Code Games in Long Beach, California. He drove the ball all over the field before facing lefty Tyler Skaggs, an eventual first-round pick of the Angels.

“That’s when I got a taste for what a top-level guy is all about,” Harper says. “He was lights-out. He struck me out three times, and I walked back to the dugout thinking, ‘Wow. These guys are good.'”

“Was that the last time you faced someone you could say was better than you?” I ask.

The noise he emits is difficult to categorize. Technically a laugh, if defined by the strictest rules of noise classification, but probably closer to a scoff or a choke.

“I will never say anybody’s better than me,” he says. “I don’t think those words will ever come out of my mouth.”

Doubt didn’t get him to this point, and it’s sure as hell not going to help him change the game. There’s something resembling a smile at the corners of his mouth, and the look on his face says, “What did you expect?”

So … douche? Trust me, he doesn’t come off the way he reads in black and white. Honest. Not that he would care if he did or if you thought he did. Not even a little bit.