West Palm Beach, Fla. • One Sunday morning a few years ago, in the well-worn clubhouse at Turner Field, Bryce Harper sat on the edge of the black leather rolling chair at his locker and looked around the near-empty room.
"What if I just went and became a firefighter in Huntington Beach?" Harper asked, to no one in particular. Nobody answered him.
What would they say if they had? Everyone knows the man heralded as the most transcendent baseball talent of a generation since he was a teenager, the one who lived up to the hype and somehow fostered more can't up and leave it all behind.