Phillies receive minor scare after Bryce Harper takes brutal pitch to ankle

The Philadelphia Phillies and their fans were holding their breath on Friday when Bryce Harper took a nasty pitch to the ankle during a spring training game against the Toronto Blue Jays.

With Opening Day against the Atlanta Braves right around the corner, the Philadelphia Phillies and their fans cannot wait to see what the 2019 season is like now that Bryce Harper is part of the picture.

For months, the Phillies were viewed as one of the top favorites to land Harper since unlike most teams across the league, they could afford to spend the kind of money the star outfielder would be looking for, which turned out to be exactly the case.

As Philadelphia fans know, Harper would go on to land a whopping 13-year, $330 million contract to basically indicate that he plans on remaining a member of the Phillies for the remainder of his professional career while hopefully adding a few World Series titles in the process.

Paying one player this high amount of money sounds ridiculous to even consider in any sport, Philadelphia doesn’t seem too concerned about it since if Harper does provide the necessary boost to help make this team a series World Series contender, the deal will be 100 percent worth it.

Of course, one of the tough factors about paying a player like Harper all that money is the fear of that money seeming like a waste if they were to ever suffer some sort of injury that kept them out for a significant amount of time.

While Harper hasn’t been officially placed in that category, the Phillies did receive a bit of a scare Friday afternoon when their latest star took a nasty pitch to his ankle, which resulted in him leaving the game.

Hearing the video at first will make any baseball fan in general cringe since that sound of the baseball hitting his ankle is tough to hear, but the good news is Harper was able to walk around on his own.

According to Gabe Kapler, Harper appears to only have a right foot contusion as a result of the 96 mph fastball from Trent Thornton, and will hopefully be back playing in no time.

Still, this minor injury to Harper is the last thing the Phillies want to be dealing with at this point in spring training, because if the injury ended up impacting the outfielder to officially start off the 2019 season, one can only imagine how depressing the atmosphere would have been.