Who the Heck is "Bryce Harper"?

According to The New York Times, he's "Baseball's Next Sure Thing":

Baseball scouts can have the bowed perspective of an Escher print, but most insist they have seen no player this good this soon. As far as they are concerned, Harper is a tape-measure-testing, laser-throwing, eyeblack-oozing baseball cyborg.

“I don’t like to put labels on kids like they’re the best this or the best that, but with this kid, I don’t think we have much choice,” said one veteran scout who watched Harper play Thursday for College of Southern Nevada, a junior college just outside his home of Las Vegas.

Speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss his evaluations, the scout added: “I honestly don’t think we’ve seen anything like him in my 30 years doing this. He’s that good.”

A catcher and occasional outfielder whose 6-foot-3, 205-pound frame is still filling out, Harper already holds the draft record for hype: Sports Illustrated put him on its cover last year as a high school sophomore, and videos of his left-handed bombs are mushrooming across YouTube.

For a teenager, Harper has been tested in an unprecedented way. Many sluggers of his age have lost their power after trading their aluminum bat for wood. The former Yankees phenom Drew Henson is a good example. But Harper has assuaged those concerns through a maneuver never tried before.

After hitting .626 with 14 home runs last spring and winning Baseball America’s high school player of the year award — no junior had ever been so honored, let alone a sophomore — Harper completed his general-equivalency diploma so he could be drafted a year early. He also enrolled at Southern Nevada so he could play in a wood-bat league.

It will be interesting to see what happens at the MLB amateur draft on June 7. Let me just take a moment and look that up, yeah, it's right here someplace -- who has the first pick? Wait. I'll find it in a sec. Oh! I remember now: the Washington Nationals!

With a tip of our rally cap to MightyMatt.