Clearwater, Florida– philadelphia phillies first baseman bryce harper “It’s still kind of wild to me,” the president of baseball operations said Sunday. Dave Dombrowski There were suggestions in October that the two-time NL MVP may no longer be an elite player.
Harper said he was not motivated by Dombrowski’s comments. He said he did not understand why Dombrowski made his review of Harper’s season and postseason public.
“I don’t get motivated by things like that, the whole situation of that incident was kind of strange to me,” Harper told reporters. “I think the big thing for me was that when we first met this organization it was, ‘Hey we’ll always keep things in house and we expect you to do the same thing,’ so when that didn’t happen it kind of took me for a run, so I don’t know. That’s part of it, I think. It was kind of a wild situation.”
Harper’s .844 OPS was his lowest since 2016, and his .261 average was his worst since 2019. The 33-year-old Harper has six seasons left on a $330 million, 13-year deal. He hit 27 homers and drove in 75 runs in the 2025 regular season and was 3 for 15 with no RBI in the Phillies’ four-game loss to the Dodgers in the NL Division Series.
Harper’s numbers led Dombrowski to conclude that it was a good season but below his MVP levels of 2015 with Washington and 2021 with the Phillies.
“Can he get to the next level again? I don’t really know the answer to that,” Dombrowski said after last season. “He’s a guy that will decide that more than anything else. I don’t think he’s satisfied with the year he had. Again, it wasn’t a bad year. But when I think about Bryce Harper, you think elite, you think one of the top-10 players in baseball, and I don’t think it fits into that category.”
Harper was sidelined for a month with a wrist injury. Nevertheless, he agreed that their production was not up to his standards.
“Obviously, I didn’t have the year I wanted,” Harper said. “Obviously, I didn’t have the postseason I wanted. My numbers weren’t where they should have been. I know that, and I don’t need to be motivated to be great in my career or anything else. So it’s not a motivating factor for me. For Dave to come out and say those things, it’s still weird to me.”
Harper has a batting average of .280 with 363 homers in 14 seasons, including seven with the Phillies. Even taking into account time lost due to a wrist injury, his production last season was not a dramatic drop off compared to his 2024 season, when he finished sixth in NL MVP voting after hitting .280 with 30 homers and 87 RBI, while earning his fourth Silver Slugger Award and making his eighth All-Star team.
