Bryce Harper's $330 million deal doesn't mean we have to stop yelling about him

Whoa, hey! It happened. It finally happened!

If you somehow missed it, Bryce Harper signed a 13-year, $330 million free-agent deal with the Philadelphia Phillies. The deal - the biggest in terms of total value in the history of American professional sports - stunned the baseball world even despite the fact the Phillies were a favorite to land Harper since long before the offseason even started.

It was enough to inspire Phillies pitcher Jake Arrieta to clean his house in a tiny, bedazzled bathing suit, though, really, if I were built like Jake Arrieta I don't know that I'd ever wear anything more. It marked the fifth major addition to the overhauled Phillies this offseason alone.

The deal extended a run of terrific sports fortune for the once woebegone city of Philadelphia. And it put Bryce Harper - the Bryce Harper - in the middle of a lineup that already looked stacked.

It also inspired a whole lot of talk about a subject I've covered in the past: If Harper is worth $330 million, how much will Mike Trout get when he hits free agency in two years? Harper and fellow $300 million man Manny Machado are excellent players, but Trout has somehow been more valuable than both of them combined.

In response to the Trout speculation, I tweeted a joke.

I don't want to explain the joke and I don't even think it's terribly good, but it caught a lot of attention on Twitter. And because of that, I learned that the Bryce Harper contract is a prism through which you can spy basically anything you want to believe about Harper, baseball, pro athletes, and the world at large. A downright shocking number of people on that godforsaken website saw it as an opportunity to send me their hottest takes on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. For real.

And hey, really: Why would something as piddling as a 13-year, $330 million contract be enough to get us to stop yelling about sports online? Harper's long winter of uncertainty came with allegations of greed, frustration among players, and tons of talk of collusion and parsimony among MLB owners. Its conclusion practically demands takes.

Here's mine: The specifics of the contract actually seem surprisingly lousy for Harper, even if, again, it's literally the biggest baseball contract ever. I'm not here to tell you it's a terrible deal since it practically guarantees Harper's great great grandchildren will be rich people, just that it seemed for a while Harper's great great grandchildren would be even richer people. The average annual value is well less than what Nolan Arenado got in his extension with the Colorado Rockies, and less than a million more than Alex Rodriguez got in the 10-year-deal he signed with the Texas Rangers in 2001, when MLB was bringing in far, far less revenue than it is today.

The deal does not include an opt-out clause, an increasingly popular and very player-friendly feature of most recent longterm MLB contracts. That's the part that seems especially ominous for Harper (again, in that a contract guaranteeing a guy $330 million for playing baseball can seem ominous): There's some chance the entire MLB economy will swing back toward the players if the MLBPA does a better job negotiating the next collective bargaining agreement, so Harper might have stood to make a lot more if he could've opted out of this contract in three years.

Like Manny Machado's contract before it, Harper's deal does not signal an end to MLB's labor concerns. Valuable free-agent pitchers Craig Kimbrel and Dallas Keuchel remain on the open market, too many credible Major Leaguers to count have settled for minor-league deals this offseason, and MLB teams will continue to manipulate young players' service times to suppress their future earnings and pay minor leaguers less than minimum wage.

But then, maybe the upside of all that to Harper is the way the long free-agent freeze-out kept his name in headlines all winter. If Major League Baseball's inability to make players transcendently famous is a real issue, then the league, for better or for worse, at the very least contributed a lot to Harper's celebrity by looking like it was failing him all offseason.

Thursday's big winner: Bullpen carts

Usually this space is reserved for actual human people, but I need to call out Michelle Martinelli's excellent and important bullpen cart coverage. For The Win's resident driving expert attended and participated in the Washington Nationals' tryout for a new cart driver. She did not win, but to her credit: When are bullpen cart drivers going to have to navigate an obstacle course? You literally just follow the warning track. No need to test them on driving curlicues, except, you know, that it's super fun.

Quick hits: Kyler Murray, Rajon Rondo, hugs

- Heisman winner Kyler Murray's NFL draft stock is being dogged by talk of his small hands. Our Steven Ruiz looked deep into the data and found that, despite years of NFL coaches and executives suggesting otherwise, hand size just doesn't matter at all for NFL quarterbacks.

- Lakers guard Rajon Rondo took a break from pregame warmups to perform a phenomenal Craig Kimbrel imitation. It's really good. And given how often I read and write about baseball's inability to mint recognizable superstars - as referenced above - I'm honestly impressed Rajon Rondo knows who Craig Kimbrel is. Rajon Rondo seems way more famous than Craig Kimbrel, all told.

- Here's something beautiful and heartbreaking from the hockey world.

This day in dumb sports

It was on March 1 of 2016 that Mets outfielder Yoenis Cespedes capped his much-ballyhooed run of arriving to spring training in a new and ostentatious car every day by arriving to spring training atop a horse, alongside teammate Noah Syndergaard. The display, though awesome, prompted no shortage of hand-wringing. Cespedes has missed so much time over the last two seasons that it's hard to remember what he's like when things are going well, but baseball is always better for his presence. He'll likely miss the first half of this season following surgery on both his heels, but here's hoping that just when the Mets need him most, he rides into their clubhouse on horseback, wearing a cowboy hat.