![]() But it comes with a cost, Harper said: Growing up too quickly and missing out on some of the regular parts of being a high school kid. Harper said the everyday part of being a 17-year-old in junior college helped prepare him for life in professional baseball. “I remember saying, ‘This guy can go to any major-league team and he would fit in in BP right now.’ Cam was the same way.”įor Harper, getting to face older pitchers who could throw four pitches was one of the biggest advantages of playing in junior college before the draft. He followed that with homers to the alleys and in his last round of BP, he started pulling the ball and depositing balls beyond the fence. Then Harper started hitting the ball out of the park to left-center. He remembers watching Harper’s batting practice - at first he started hitting balls to the back side. There’s nothing else that I want to work out.”Ĭhipola coach Jeff Johnson coached against Harper when he was at Southern Nevada. “Because my mindset was always that it was going to work out, it was going to work out. “I never wanted to put that in my head of like, ‘man, I can’t believe this worked out’ or ‘I can’t believe this didn’t work out,’” Harper said. Cincinnati had enough in its draft pool to give Collier a $5 million signing bonus, the 10th-largest bonus in the 2022 draft, despite him going No. The Reds were able to get Collier in part because of that leverage. “There was a part of my mind that had a plan in place,” Cam Collier said. He could’ve gone back to Chipola or gone to Louisville, where he’d committed to play. Harper could have returned to his junior college or transferred to a Division I school, but if he did that, he wouldn’t be on the 40-man roster immediately and the Nationals may have taken his development a little more slowly.Ĭollier’s options were greater. The reason he chose to exploit the loophole that allowed him to be drafted after what would have been his junior year was that 2010 was the last year draft picks could be offered big-league contracts. Harper had an extra level of pressure, though. The pressure of that, understanding the pressure that there was nothing else.” “I understood that when I was in junior college there was no fallback, there was nothing else I wanted to do, there was nothing else I could do,” Harper said. “I had a lot of people counting on me being the No. He played in the Arizona Fall League as a 17-year-old and notched only 130 minor-league games before debuting for the Washington Nationals at age 19. First going to the College of Southern Nevada for a year and then being picked first overall in the draft. Harper, of course, felt like he could do it at 16 - and he proved it. “It would have been because we didn’t know it could be done, not because we felt like he couldn’t do it.” “If we wouldn’t have known anything about it, it might have been tough to do something like this,” said Lou Collier, Cam’s father and veteran of eight big-league seasons. He probably wouldn’t have done it had Harper not blazed that trail when Collier was 5 years old. I applaud him because he actually did it.” “Understanding since his junior year of high school, he has to get it done, he has to do it. “From what he’s gone through probably at 16 and 17, not many people go through because he had the pressures of going to Chipola, doing his thing,” Harper said. That’s a statement Harper utters several times when asked about Collier, a player he doesn’t know at all, but one with whom he does share a bond, even if he wasn’t aware of it before April. “He’s gone through the hardest parts of what he’s done, because at 16, 17 in junior college …” Harper said. He also signed the largest contract in baseball history on Ma(a record that lasted all of 18 days.) Getting to this point as a 30-year-old wasn’t easy, even for someone as supremely talented as Harper.īut it was those years away from home, before he could vote or even legally buy a lottery ticket, that were as tough as anything, the now-father of two said last month when the Phillies came to Cincinnati to face the Reds. Since then, he’s been Rookie of the Year, a two-time MVP, a seven-time All-Star, won the Home Run Derby and played in the World Series. Harper was the first to go to a junior college in what would be his junior year of high school and then be taken first overall in the 2010 draft. Now, instead of doing those other, normal high school things, he’s in Daytona, Fla., the youngest player in the Florida State League at just 18 years and 163 days old, as of May 2.Ī dozen years ago, Bryce Harper was exactly where Collier is now. ![]() Instead, Collier took a different path, earning his GED after his sophomore year, playing at Chipola (Fla.) Junior College in what would have been his junior year of high school and getting drafted by the Reds with the No.
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