Stars collide: Trout, Harper have more in common than you think

ANAHEIM >> When Andrelton Simmons was with the Atlanta Braves, Bryce Harper was a frequent opponent and Mike Trout was just a guy on TV in the other league.

Back then, Simmons said, he thought the two players were in a similar class.

“Then I saw Mike every day,” Simmons said, “and now it’s like, ‘No, this guy is better.’”

Comparisons between Trout and Harper have been frequent ever since they came to the big leagues as two of the top prospects in the sport. Although Trout got to the majors first for sporadic playing time in 2011, they both reached the majors for good on April 28, 2012, a coincidence that may one day be noted in Cooperstown.

Trout, 25, and Harper, 24, still share spots on the short list of the game’s elite. Although Trout’s consistency has clearly separated him from Harper, the two are still often mentioned in the same conversation.

And on Tuesday they’ll be on the same field.

With the Washington Nationals meeting the Angels in a two-game interleague series starting Tuesday, Trout and Harper will share a field for just the fourth and fifth times in the regular season. The Angels played three games in Washington in 2014. The Angels will return to Washington for two games in August.

“It’s always fun to play against guys like that,” Trout said.

Trout said he and Harper are only friendly acquaintances from their rare times together on the field, dating to their time as teenage teammates in the Arizona Fall League in 2011. Since they’ve been in the majors, their paths have crossed mostly at All-Star Games.

Even though they have little on-field history to form a rivalry in the vein of Tom Brady-Peyton Manning, Steph Curry-LeBron James or Sidney Crosby-Alex Ovechkin, they will nonetheless be connected.

“I think throughout my career and his career, we will always be linked together because we came up together,” Trout said.

To the players who have seen them both up close, there are plenty of similarities.

“Both are in a different league,” said Angels outfielder Ben Revere, who played for years against Harper with the Philadelphia Phillies and last year as his teammate in Washington. “They’ve got the God-given talent to take over a ballgame. They are five-tool guys, the faces of major league baseball. It’s amazing seeing them every day.

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“Playing against them, you know they are going to do some damage nine out of 10 times. They are great players.”

Their personas are also more similar than you might expect, according to their shared teammates.

The view from the television screen of Trout is of someone who is always smiling, who never argues with umpires, charges the mound or confronts reporters. By contrast, Harper seems to have much more of an edge on the field. He has been ejected, has been at the center of bench-clearing incidents and has even gotten into at least one very public scrap with a teammate in the dugout.

Revere, however, said that Trout is more of a “bulldog” than you may think, and Harper is more of a “jokester.”

“I know it doesn’t seem that way, but he’s an overall good guy,” Revere said of Harper.

Danny Espinosa spent five years with Harper in Washington and was Trout’s teammate this season, until he was designated for assignment on Sunday. He said the different images of the two players is partly related to the different way the media portrays them.

“East Coast is a different monster, with the media and everything else,” Espinosa said. “You have to deal with that as an 18-19 year old. ... Off the field, Bryce is a great guy. Probably the image you see sometimes is not the best representation of him as a person.”

The indisputable difference between the two lies in the consistency of their performance, which is why it’s generally accepted that Trout is now the best player in the game.

In Trout’s five full seasons, he won the MVP in 2014 and 2016 and finished second three times. Harper won one MVP, in 2015, and has received only one vote in one other season. He finished 30th in 2012, his rookie year.

Trout’s lowest single-season OPS is .939. That would be Harper’s second best, trailing only the 1.109 mark of his MVP season.  Trout’s career WAR, according to FanGraphs, is 51.2, nearly double Harper’s 27.0.

“Trout does it day in and day out,” Simmons said. “It’s not just when he’s hot. It’s very rare that he’s not kind of hot. He’s either really hot or kind of hot. I’ve seen Harper cold. I’ve seen him hot. I’ve seen him OK. That’s the difference.”

Injuries have played a role. Trout has been relatively healthy, never going on the disabled list until a thumb injury cost him six weeks this season. Harper was on the disabled list in 2013, 2014 and already briefly in 2017. There’s also a widespread belief that he played much of 2016 with an injury, accounting for a dramatic drop in production. He had a 1.016 OPS on May 22, around the time the baseball world was debating whether Harper had caught up to Trout. Harper slumped the rest of the season to finish at .814.

“I’m sure he was dealing with something, but he didn’t want to make a big deal,” Espinosa said. “He didn’t say anything to us.”

Harper has made up for last year’s decline in 2017, though. He is having his second-best season, hitting .327 with 22 homers and a 1.038 OPS. Trout is hitting .337 with 16 homers and a 1.171 OPS.

“He’s having an unbelievable season,” Trout said. “He’s obviously bouncing back from last year. it’s good to see. It’s good for the game.”