Fanhouse: Bryce Harper Embarks on Old College Try

Boras, whose agency discovered Harper when he was 13, said “We advise families that, until you are drafted, it’s not a good idea to say anything [to the media]. When you are an amateur just coming into the system, you just don’t know a lot of things.”

The handlers are happy to have anyone watch, though. And when Harper played his first regular season college game on Friday night, people came.

Lots of them.

For the fourth year in a row, CSN opened its season with the Coyote Border Battle, a showcase of two-year colleges from Nevada, Arizona and Utah. This one was nothing like the previous three, though.

Morse Stadium would normally be filled by a few hundred fans and a few dozen scouts, but for Friday night’s game against Arizona Western, the place was packed to capacity, with anywhere from 1,300 to 2,000 people, depending on whose estimate you believed.

“I’ve never seen so many people here,” marveled a woman in a CSN sweatshirt.

It was all because, as one wide-eyed little boy said as his jaw dropped, “That’s Bryce Harper!”

After the SI story, Harper attracted full houses to a tournament in Oklahoma—“The (team) paid for its whole season with the gate that week,” Chambers said—and he had a camera crew following him while he worked out with the Team USA 18-and-under club in North Carolina, where he gave a rare extended interview. He was preparing there for an international tournament in Venezuela.

“He’s probably gotten more attention than any other high school player I’ve ever seen,” Boras said.

And Scott Boras, like Sauron, sees all!