Was Bryce Harper’s day off the best thing for the Nationals?

7:27 PM ET

WASHINGTON — There are times when giving Bryce Harper a day off might seem like a no-brainer. Today wasn’t one of those times.

Sure, Harper’s been cold. Before today, he has four hits in his last 28 at-bats. Over the past month, he was hitting just .184 with two homers and eight RBIs, and had more K’s than a Finnish phone book (25 in 76 at-bats). So Dusty Baker decided he would give his star right fielder a “mental day off,” as he described it prior to Wednesday’s finale between the Washington Nationals and New York Mets.

Mired in a month-long slump, Bryce Harper was given a day off in the rubber match against the Mets. AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais

Then Baker had to sit on his hands while rookie Steven Matz carved up his Harper-less lineup to the tune of four hits over eight shutout innings en route to a 2-0 Mets victory that gave the visitors a series win and pulled them to within a half-game of the first place Nationals in the NL East.

Surely, that had to be hard to handle.

“It was tough to sit Bryce,” said the Nats’ skipper after the game. “But you gotta sit him sometime.”

At least that’s Baker’s philosophy, although some might beg to differ. Take Manny Machado, for example. The 23-year-old Baltimore Orioles star is the same age as Harper and plays a more demanding position. He has started every game since the beginning of the 2015 season and it hasn’t affected his production. Last year, Machado finished fourth in the voting for AL MVP, and if the 2016 season ended today, he’d be the odds-on favorite to win the thing. So if we’re talking about days off just for the sake of days off, you could argue that Harper would be just fine going without. If we’re talking about days off as a means of snapping out of a ferocious funk, well that’s a different story.

Prior to Wednesday’s finale, Baker talked about his superstar’s slump and how it was just a matter of time before he snapped out of it. Inevitably the cream rises to the top, he said. And he’s right. The question is, given that this series finale was about as important as a May game can be, did Harper need a mental day off to catalyze the cream, or would it have found its way to the top without his manager’s meddling? If history is any indication, the Half & Half likely would’ve gotten whole all by itself.

Heading into Wednesday’s game, Harper was hitting .246. The last time the reigning MVP had an average that low was on May 5th, 2015, when he took an 0-for-4 against Miami that dropped his average to .245 and extended his skid to 1-for-17 at the time. The following day, the cream rose in the form of three home runs against the Marlins. The explosion started a 22-for-39 streak that raised his average 93 points in 12 days to .338, where it more or less stayed for the rest of the season.

It’s worth nothing that Harper’s three-bomb game …

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