Is baseball star Bryce Harper a historically great figure?
In Sunday’s Washington Post, sports columnist Mike Wise suggested the Washington Nationals all-star right fielder just might be.
In a tongue-in-cheek analysis, Wise compared Harper to other historical figures, including Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Jesus of Nazareth.
His conclusion, based on “sabermetrics and Wikipedia,” was that Harper was much further along at age 20 than any of those figures.
“The Post instead sought out real historians — not just Bill James, Peter Gammons or Terrence Mann from ‘Field of Dreams’ — and found that Harper fared as well or much better than most of the greatest 20-year-olds to, like, ever walk the face of the Earth,” wrote Wise.
Wise even said that some of those figures would be looking up to Harper if they were still around.
“If Edison, Einstein and Gandhi were alive today, it’s pretty clear they would all be wearing rubber bracelets with the same acronym: WWBD,” Wise wrote.
But not everyone was amused by Wise’s column. Tim Graham of the Media Research Center’s Newsbusters blog took on Wise for using Jesus Christ in his column. He said it showed disrespect for Christianity.
“Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise was obnoxious enough when he was mocking the Old Testament and the Ten Commandments, but in Sunday’s paper, he tries to be humorous by suggesting how Washington Nationals star Bryce Harper at age 20 is greater than most of our greatest humans when they were 20: better than Thomas Edison, better than Albert Einstein, better than Gandhi, and better than Franklin Roosevelt,” Graham wrote.
“That may be true in history, but then Wise had to drag in Jesus Christ. How do you compare God to a baseball star? But Wise just thinks religion is something he can pick on weekly.”