Alex Rodriguez on Bryce Harper: “I love everything about him”

Alex Rodriguez sat down with the New York Daily News (?!) to talk about Bryce Harper and how his journey through the big leagues at such a young age compares with Rodriguez’s own. Short version: not even close:

“The pressure that he’s under doesn’t even compare,” Rodriguez said. “His is so much harder, so much more challenging than when I came up. We didn’t have any of the social media stuff. I give Bryce a lot of credit for how he’s handling everything.”

And he loves Harper’s game, from how he carries himself to this body language on the field and the stuff he does in the moments others don’t much notice. The kind of things, one presumes, that other ballplayers can notice pretty easily that the rest of us can’t as easily.

I’m also assuming there’s an element of Rodriguez that likes Harper because Harper is another guy who, whenever he does something, it gets magnified into comically exaggerated proportions, be it bad, good or indifferent. There will likely always be players like that. Rodriguez has been that guy for years. Harper is just the latest.