Nearly four months have passed since Dave Dombrowski, the Philadelphia Phillies’ president of baseball operations, raised eyebrows with comments he made about first baseman Bryce Harper’s 2025 season. Time may yet heal all wounds, but it hasn’t stopped reporters from asking Harper about what Dombrowski said, nor has it stopped Harper from admitting he continues to be mystified by it.
“I don’t get motivated by that kind of stuff,” Harper told reporters on Sunday. “For me, it was kind of wild the whole situation of that happening. I think the big thing for me was, when we first met with this organization, it was, ‘Hey, you know, we’re always going to keep things in-house, and we expect you to do the same.’ And so, you know, when that didn’t happen, kind of took me for a run a little bit.
“So I don’t know. It’s part of it, I guess. It’s kind of a wild situation, that even happening. Obviously I didn’t have the year I wanted. Obviously I didn’t have the postseason I wanted. My numbers weren’t where they needed to be. I know that. …For Dave to come out and say those things, it’s kind of wild to me, still.”
Harper in 2025 posted his lowest OPS+ since 2019. In that sense, Harper and Dombrowski would seem to more or less agree, even if they may differ in whether or not it was appropriate for Dombrowski to say the following during an end-of-the-season press conference in October after the Phillies were eliminated by the Dodgers in the NLDS:
“He’s still a quality player. He’s still an All-Star-caliber player. He didn’t have an elite season like he has had in the past. And I guess we only find out if he becomes elite or he continues to be good. If you look around the league, I think … Freddie Freeman: He’s a really good player, right? He still is a good player. Is he elite like he was before? Probably not to the same extent. Freddie is a tremendous player, and that, to me, is Bryce. Can he rise to the next level again? I don’t really know that answer. He’s the one that will dictate that more than anything else.Â
“I don’t think he’s content with the year that he had. And again, it wasn’t a bad year. But when you think of Bryce Harper, you think of elite, right? You think of one of the top 10 players in baseball, and I don’t think it fit into that category. But again, a very good player. I’ve seen guys at his age — again, he’s not old — that level off. Or I’ve seen guys rise again.”
Again, those are fairly tame comments for an executive to make — the Chicago White Sox exercising a “diminshed skills” clause in Frank Thomas’ contract this was not. Dombrowski acknowledges that Harper’s numbers were down while leaving open the possibility that Harper rebounds. Harper’s issue, then, has to be that his boss (for all intents and purposes) was willing to offer a blunt assessment of his season publicly for no apparent gain other than providing an honest answer to a question. Fair enough.
Harper, 33, remains under contract with the Phillies through the 2031 season. In the past, the parties have been rumored to have interest in a contract extension. One gets the sense they may want to put those talks on ice until they can finally move past this mess.
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