Jonathan Papelbon’s attack on Bryce Harper during a September 27 game was the chokehold heard round the world, leading to plenty of hot takes from the likes of C.J. Nitkowski and even Don Cherry, but Harper doesn’t seem to think it was that big of a deal, and neither do the Nationals. They surprisingly brought Papelbon back this year, and he apologized during his first media availability Friday, calling it the lowest point of his career. In his own first comments on the matter Monday, Harper said it was “blown way out of proportion” and said he wouldn’t address it again:
“It was something that just happens. This is the first and last time I’ll talk about it with you guys. It’s just something that happens, something that got blown up out of proportion with the media and what not. I was squashed that day and that’s what it’s going to be like for the rest of the year. We’ve got things that happen during the year, and it’s part of baseball and part of sports and life, and you try to build from that and do everything you can to not let it happen again. Hopefully we’ll go about it the right way this year and do everything we can to come together as a team, as family. And, you know, that’s all that matters. I just want to win, I just want to be a family out there, pulling each other up every single day, working hard, and doing everything we can as an organization to get better and win ballgames.”
That’s an MVP-worthy collection of clichés there from Harper, but it’s interesting that he says he didn’t consider it to be that big of a deal. If that’s accurate, then he’s right; this probably was blown out of proportion. It’s still a story regardless of Harper’s reaction to it (players choking out their teammates in public during a game is obviously newsworthy, especially when it involves a player of Harper’s level), but maybe it shouldn’t have escalated into the national debate on toughness and physical fights between teammates it turned into. However, it’s worth pointing out that Harper could have forestalled a lot of that if he’d addressed it himself soon after the fact. His lack of comment was part of what turned this into such a big story.
[WJLA]
