Strong rumors had Bryce Harper to the Phillies today - they were unfounded
Phillies Nation woke on Tuesday morning, January 29 to the exciting news spreading like wildfire across the internet that Bryce Harper had chosen a team to sign with as one of baseball’s biggest free agents in years.
Phillies Nation woke on Tuesday morning, January 29 to the exciting news spreading like wildfire across the internet that Bryce Harper had chosen a team to sign with as one of baseball’s biggest free agents in years.
But as the day dragged on and no formal announcement came and no press conference was announced, that excitement dissolved into an even deeper level of frustration.
It was lunch time when Jim Salisbury, the Phillies insider at NBC Sports Philadelphia, made an appearance on local sports radio station 97.5 FM ‘The Fanatic’ and stated “I’ve been hearing the same hysteria all morning as you have. I’m not feeling anything coming down today.”
Salisbury then expounded on his knowledge of the current situation involving the Phillies and both Harper and Manny Machado:
"I have seen that they have made an offer to Machado, but I have not seen that they have made an offer for Harper. I still think they want to see what happens with Machado and then spend aggressively with Harper." - @JSalisburyNBCS
That statement by someone believed to be intimately close to the organization had the effect of an army of firefighters shooting water and dropping vast amounts of fire-retardant foam to extinguish the early wildfire of rumors
So what happened? Just two days ago, things were so quiet of late on the Harper situation that I actually wrote a piece here at Phillies Nation on that silence having taking on such a deafening quality that it could mean we were near a resolution. What suddenly changed to set off such a rumble of gossip and hearsay?
The spark that lit the fire came not from the speculation of a baseball insider. Instead it came from a pair of unlikely sources: the gaming and gambling industries.
First, the video game “MLB The Show” sent out the following cryptic message from their Twitter account yesterday afternoon:
