In the 15-year span from 1990-2004, Barry Bonds won the National League's Most Valuable Player award seven times. He finished in the top five in MVP voting in five of the other eight years.
Whatever you want to say about how he did it or what became of his legacy, the fact is he was absolutely dominating on the field.
Here's another Bonds fact: In all those years, and in all the other years in his 22-year major league career, he went to the World Series exactly one time, with the 2002 San Francisco Giants.
Blame it on what you will, but without a doubt it stands as a missed opportunity for the two teams that employed him (the Giants and the Pittsburgh Pirates).
The Washington Nationals and Bryce Harper can't afford to miss their opportunity.
Harper isn't Bonds, off the field (good thing) or on the field (more debatable). He is the overwhelming favorite to win his first MVP next month, at age 23 (three years ahead of Barry). He's coming off a season that was arguably the best any player has had since Bonds retired (his Baseball-Reference.com OPS+ of 195 was the best since Bonds).
He's also coming off a season in which the Nationals were the biggest disappointment in the game and is four years into a career in which the Nats have yet to win a single postseason series.
Maybe Dusty Baker can help.
Baker, as you may have read, is one of the two finalists to succeed Matt Williams as the Nationals manager. He and Bud Black each had a second interview this week, according to reports from CBSSports.com's Jon Heyman and others.
Black has an outstanding reputation, from his time in San Diego. Many of the other candidates for the job have fine resumes, too, as does Don Mattingly, who would have been a nice fit but seems headed to the Miami Marlins instead.
Without sitting in on the interviews—sorry, they wouldn't let me—I'd go with Baker, the one manager who took Bonds to a World Series (they lost, in seven games to the Anaheim Angels).
Baker can deal with superstars, and he can deal with clubhouses that include strong personalities. He would walk in and command the type of respect his former player Williams so obviously didn't get.
He won with the Giants. He won in Chicago, where he's still the manager who got the Cubs closer to the World Series than they've been in 70 years (six outs away, in 2003). He won in Cincinnati.
He won with Barry Bonds, with Sammy Sosa, with Joey Votto. He can win with Bryce Harper.
The Nationals need to get this one right, and Harper is a big part of the reason.
It's not that he's difficult to manage. As one former Nationals coach said this week, "He just wants to play, and wants to win."
He also wants to get paid. Most players do, and most players who employ Scott Boras as an agent really do. Perhaps the Nationals will be able to pay him what it would take when he's eligible for free agency after 2018; perhaps they won't.
It sure would help if they can win before that.
Harper was the one Nationals player to publicly endorse Williams in mid-September ("I love him as a manager," he told reporters, according to the Washington Post). He was also at the center of Williams' final embarrassment as manager, when Jonathan Papelbon went after Harper in the dugout and Williams claimed not to notice how bad it was.
Harper is often misunderstood by fans, and sometimes in his own clubhouse, too. The fans part needn't concern the manager, but he'll need to take control of the clubhouse part. The Nationals need someone experienced enough to handle it, someone who can keep Harper's intensity channeled in the right direction and push the rest of the team in the right direction, too.
Whatever the length of the new manager's contract, he and the Nationals have a three-year window to get it right. They have maybe the best player in the game—a player capable of historic numbers.
It would be an historic missed opportunity if they waste it.
Danny Knobler covers Major League Baseball as a national columnist for Bleacher Report.
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