Bryce Harper’s “Make Baseball Fun Again” campaign continues to pick up steam and isn’t showing any signs of slowing down. In the upcoming edition of ESPN the Magazine, Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Yasiel Puig shared his thoughts on Harper in an interview with Marly Rivera:
Bryce Harper is my idol now. I’m going to join him in the “make baseball fun again” campaign; I’m just waiting to get my shirts and baseball caps. He’s always been a great friend and a great athlete, and I admire him. I like how he plays the game, and I think he gets it. It’s good to see an American player saying that there needs to be a little more fun in baseball. Fans leave everything behind to come and see us play. We have to make baseball fun for the fans and not take everything so personal.ESPN the Magazine is the same periodical in which Harper declared that baseball was “tired” back in March and mentioned Puig as one of the young players who could inject more flair into the sport.
“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,” Harper said. “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.”
Strong right arms and flairs for the dramatic aren’t the only things that Puig and Harper have in common. They’ve both found the respect of their peers hard to come by, with Puig finishing second to Harper in the “most overrated” category in an anonymous ESPN the Magazine poll of MLB players in 2014 and 2015. They’re also both fond of taking selfies of unknowing kids in their jersey T-shirts — Harper at the Smithsonian and Puig at the Aquarium of Canada.
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