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Bryce Harper Suggests Bruce Bochy Retirement Played a Role in Choosing Between Phillies and Giants
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Bryce Harper was on Pat McAfee’s show on Monday as part of a WBC kick-off type of thing:
“It was like San Diego and a couple other teams, but it came down to Phillies/Giants… It was close. The thing that killed me was (Bruce) Bochy was retiring. He’s the greatest of all time.”
We knew that San Francisco was in on Bryce when he signed here back in 2019, though Bochy’s name didn’t come up in that first wave of reporting.
In a March, 2019 article from Ken Rosenthal at The Athletic (now with ads), he said this:
“The next day was Thursday. Scott (Boras) called me at like 9 a.m. I was still sleeping, still laying in bed. He says, ‘Hey, we have an offer from the Phillies. Here’s what they’re willing to do.’ I said, ‘Hey, have you heard back from San Fran?’ He said he hadn’t heard back from them yet. I said, ‘OK, once you hear back from San Fran, let me know.’
“He said, ‘All right. Talk about this. Make a decision with Kayla. Figure out, do we want to hear from San Fran?’ Me and Kayla had already kind of (decided), ‘We’re going to go to Philly, or we’re going to go to San Fran. What works best for us? What works best for our family? Where do we feel like we could build a family and be around a city we felt really cared about us as individuals and not just Bryce the baseball player?’
“We sat there and talked for a little bit. And I remember standing there, me hugging her and saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to Philly.’ That was before we even heard from San Fran. San Fran called back, offered whatever it was. By that point, it was kind of like, ‘I’m already a Philadelphia Phillie.’ In my heart, I was already a Philadelphia Phillie. It was nothing against San Francisco. They’re a great organization. It’s a great city. It just came down to what I felt. And by that point, it was Philly.”
Funny how these things work out. Bochy ended up coming back in 2023 to coach the Texas Rangers, and won a World Series. Gabe Kapler, Harper’s first manager in Philly, went on to become Giants coach for a couple of seasons before he got canned.
And here we are now.
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com