Bryce Harper is facing a lot of issues at the plate. Like, a lot, a lot.

Bryce Harper, the Washington Nationals’ clean-shaven superstar who will be the league’s most prized free agent after the season, is struggling at the plate. He’s gone 1 for 24 in his last seven games with nine strikeouts and has hit one home run over his last 62 plate appearances. Harper’s batting average has plummeted to near-Mendoza line levels (.212) with an .820 OPS — light-years away from production we’d expect from a player with an anticipated price tag of $400 million this winter.

“I watch him and he gets a little frustrated,” manager Dave Martinez said on Saturday. “The biggest thing is just to keep him level-headed and let him go out there and do his thing. I’ve said this before, he’s one of the best players in the game. He’s going to carry us, I know he is.”

To be fair, Harper is leading the National League with 19 home runs, and his OPS is a still 20 percent higher than the league average, but something is amiss. Actually, a lot is amiss, and it could be a while before he can get himself aligned into all-star form once more.

Fastballs have become a problem for Harper in June. He is striking out almost a third of the time on four-seam fastballs, sinkers and cutters with pitchers owning the outside part of the plate against him — 89 of the 325 strikes off fastballs have occurred with Harper keeping the bat on his shoulder. Harper’s OPS on fastballs is also in a free fall, as is his weighted on-base average, which combines all the different aspects of hitting into one metric, weighting each of them in proportion to their actual run value.

But it’s not just fastballs. Breaking balls, such as curves and sliders, and off-speed pitches, change-ups and split-finger fastballs, have also become troublesome for Harper. He’s batting .148 with a .502 OPS against the former and .208/.710 against the latter, literally making every pitch he faces a harbinger of doom.

So what happened? His plate discipline is no longer elite, and, as a result, his quality of contact is sub par.

There are several places where we can see this. In April, Harper was making contact on 64 percent of pitches he swung at with just 15 percent of his swings resulting in a strike. Harper’s contact rate got even better in May (72 percent) before falling off a cliff in June: 59 percent with a 20 percent swinging strike rate. In other words, Harper appears to be just hacking away out there, expanding his zone instead of waiting for his pitch.

Harper’s quality of contact, measured by the percentage of pitches hit on or close to the sweet spot of the bat, had a more alarming drop from 3.7 percent of pitches from March through May to less than one percent in June. That poor contact has also led to a drop in exit velocity from 91.6 mph in March through May to 87.1 mph in June.

It also appears Harper’s timing is off. His average bat speed, estimated using a pitch’s release speed and Harper’s exit velocity, dropped from 86 mph during the first three months of the season to 84 mph in June. Against fastballs the drop have been even more severe: 90 mph in March and April to 79 mph in June. It’s unlikely one of the game’s best hitters just suddenly forgot how to hit a fastball. So if we’re looking for an explanation, it may be that an injury is preventing him from catching up to the pitch.

We were talking about a Harper slump this time last year, but at that time he was chasing fastballs out of the strike zone, especially from right-handed pitchers. That isn’t the case this time around. In fact, his chase rate is the lowest it has been in the month of June since he was voted the league’s MVP in 2015.

Harper slumped in July 2016, too, but that was mostly due to an unusually low batting average on balls he put in play. During the first half of the season that year his BABIP was .252 and subsequently dropped to .103 early in the second half. We are witnessing similar in 2018 — his BABIP in June is a paltry .214 — but weak contact is driving some of those numbers. For example, based on his average exit velocity and launch angle of balls put in play, we would expect Harper be hitting .209 with a .309 SLG during June this season instead of .135 and .192, respectively. An improvement to be sure but nowhere near what we would expect from one of baseball’s elite players.

Compounding the problem is Harper’s tendency to try to pull the ball. His pull rate is at a career high (48 percent), which allows opposing managers to employ the infield shift more often. That, too, is causing Harper’s descent into mediocrity: he’s producing runs at a rate that is 83 percent lower than the league average (27 wRC+) against the shift, after accounting for league and park effects.

If that sounds like a long laundry list of problems contributing to Harper’s slump, it is, and it could be more difficult than ever for him to get back to where the Nationals need him to be.

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