FanHouse BryceHarper

Bryce Harper is sixteen years old. Bryce Harper can hit a baseball so far that you would not believe how far he can hit a baseball.

Andrew reported Monday that the young Mr. Harper is skipping out on his junior and senior years of high school in order to make himself eligible for the 2010 draft. On one hand, don't worry, because he's planning on earning a GED. On the other hand, worry, because he's going to miss out on the quasi-consequential stuff that every patriotic public school kid missed out on. The Great Gatsby, right? The green light, right?

You're lucky that it was just a Dugout! A bad driver and not even a Dugout, after the jump!

Fire up the Bryce Harper hype machine. The 16-year-old baseball prodigy who was recently hailed as the "Chosen One" on the cover of Sports Illustrated is poised to accelerate his path to the big leagues.

Harper, who is a rising high school junior, plans to earn a GED later this year and will enroll at the College of Southern Nevada, a junior college in Las Vegas, this fall and play baseball for the Coyotes next spring, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The move – virtually unprecedented – will allow Harper to be eligible for the draft a year early, in 2010 instead of 2011.

Poor Stephen Strasburg hasn't even been drafted, and already there's another kid threatening to steal his spotlight. His name is Bryce Harper. Up until Wednesday, he was known to baseball scouting directors and a small cadre of baseball junkies who attended high school showcase events.

But then he showed up on the cover of Sports Illustrated, accompanied by a story that declared he was baseball's version of LeBron James. Your first instinct is to be skeptical of such high expectations for a 16-year-old, but if you read the story, it's pretty remarkable.

Left on Base is MLB FanHouse's link dump.

You wanna see a future Hall of Famer at the age of 15? He could start in the bigs right now! I kid. Hyperbole aside, though, this 15 year-old player named Bryce Harper is already being touted as the first overall draft pick in 2011. He's a catcher who can run, bats left-handed, and already hits with major league power. Here's a highlight film of this young George Herman Ruth reincarnation.