Bryce Harper gets as angry as Phillies fans after big losses. He’s the anti-Giannis Antetokounmpo.

In the five years of Bryce Harper’s tenure in Philadelphia, he’s been visibly angry after a loss two times.

Game 6 of the 2022 World Series. Game 7 of the 2023 National League Championship Series.

The Phillies’ season ended in each of those games. His teammates? Some were philosophical. Some were sad. Some, embarrassed. Some were wistful, especially the underdog squad in 2022, whose postseason run as a wild-card team shocked the baseball world.

After the World Series loss, a dozen or so Phillies gathered in the corner of the visitors’ clubhouse at Houston’s Minute Maid Park, where they shared beers and memories in various states of undress. Harper, fully clothed, held a long, terse press conference near the clubhouse exit, and was gone.

After the NLCS loss last year, Phillies stars walked around in a daze, lamenting the loss they’d suffered in a seven-game heartbreaker. Harper gave a long, terse press conference, seething at the upset.

Both times he was as furious as any preadolescent fan ... or any typical Phillies fan.

“I’m still that same 11-, 12-year-old kid,” he admitted this spring, laughing at the memory. It was a rueful laugh.

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Between the Phillies’ postseason runs, two-time MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo, who won the 2021 NBA title with Milwaukee, said, after the eighth-seeded Heat beat the top-seeded Bucks in the first round of the 2023 playoffs, a playoff team not winning in the postseason did not equate to failure.

Said Giannis:

“Michael Jordan played 15 years, won six championships; the other nine years was a failure? That’s what you’re telling me?”

Yes. In fact, that’s what peak Jordan would tell you.

“There’s no failure in sports,” Antetokounmpo said. “You know, there’s good days, bad days. Some days you are able to be successful, some days you’re not. Some days it’s your turn, some days it’s not your turn. And that’s what sports is about. You don’t always win; some other team’s going to win.”

And when you don’t win, especially as the favored team, you have failed.

Full stop.

Of course, the Participation Trophy Crowd ate this up. They actually lauded Giannis for his New Age sensibilities. The Competitor Crowd? They threw up in their own mouths. This wasn’t intramural club soccer. It was adults playing basketball, for millions of dollars. When a No. 1 seed loses a series four games to one to a No. 8 seed, it’s failure on the highest level. Just ask Bucks coach Mike Budenholzer, who got fired.

Imagine if Doc Rivers had tried to “no failure in sports” his way out of the Sixers’ collapse in Games 6 and 7 of the Eastern Conference semifinals against the Celtics. He’d never have kept ...

Oh. Wait.

Better example: 2022-23 MVP Joel Embiid, who ultimately had this to say after the Sixers’ collapse against Boston:

“If I don’t finish first, it’s a failure. I don’t think I would have been proud of myself going to the Finals and losing. I freakin’ hate losing. If you want to call me the best player on the team, every loss and failure should be on me.”

Embiid gets it. Harper gets it.

Philadelphia sports fans, like fans everywhere, take losses hard. But Philly fans tend to get angry at failures, no matter how explicable they are. The Phillies were outclassed by the Astros in the 2022 World Series and outplayed in the 2023 NLCS by the Diamondbacks, but the fans and the superstar were far angrier at the outcome than they were appreciative of the opportunity.

So Harper was angry, yes ... but at what?

His manager?

Rob Thomson made a fateful pitching decision in Game 6 of the World Series when he pulled ace Zack Wheeler for reliever José Alvarado, who gave up the winning homer. Thomson also disastrously used foundering closer Craig Kimbrel in Games 3 and 4 of the NLCS, then declined to pinch-hit for overmatched rookie Johan Rojas with the bases loaded early in Game 7.

So, his manager? Not really.

“That’s not for me,” Harper said. “Those are big moments. But it’s not for me to decide.”

His teammates?

Kimbrel didn’t deliver in the NLCS, and neither did the well-paid gaggle of sluggers, who combined to go 3-for-36 in Games 6 and 7. Harper was among that group, but he’d done far more to that point than had Nick Castellanos, Kyle Schwarber, J.T Realmuto, and Trea Turner.

The same was true in the World Series the previous year, when after the Phillies took a 2-1 Series lead, Castellanos, Harper, Schwarber, and Realmuto went 4-for-41 in three straight losses.

Not exactly.

“As a clubhouse, we have to understand what we can do as individuals to make this team better so we can win and we can grow,” Harper said.

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Mostly, he was mad at himself, like any 12-year-old boy (or grown-up Philly fan) would be.

“You start thinking about all the things you could have done. I look at myself, more than what this guy did, or what that guy did,” Harper said. “I always think, ‘I can do more.’ I miss a pitch, or whatever it is. In those moments you want to come through.”

Which implies that Harper didn’t come through. Which is ridiculous.

Among players with at least 167 postseason plate appearances — that’s how many Babe Ruth had — only two other players’ OPS is better than Harper’s .996, and they’re George Brett, who’s in the Hall of Fame, and Carlos Beltrán, who should be.

Harper acknowledged that his self-criticism isn’t entirely rational.

“I still get [upset] if I didn’t make the play to win the game, or didn’t hit the ball in the gap, or whatever,” he said.

That’s what Philly loves about Harper. He’s been an MVP twice, he’s made $170 million, and he’ll make at least double that in his career, but winning matters. Nothing else.

And that’s what his teammates love, too.

“He’s an ultimate competitor. He wants to do it. When we’re not having a parade down Broad Street, that bothers people. It bothers him,” Schwarber said. “When you have this guy, and he cares that much, and it’s eating him alive, you can only respect it.”

We do.