Phillies’ Bryce Harper ‘a great host’ for house guest Bryson Stott during the playoffs

HOUSTON — As the Phillies’ regular season reached its final few weeks, Bryson Stott was faced with a dilemma. It wasn’t an on-field dilemma. In fact, it was a quite mundane one.

His lease was running out, and he needed a place to stay in Philadelphia during the playoff run. Stott didn’t intend on paying for a few extra months because he didn’t want to renew the lease. As he started to look at hotels in the area, Bryce Harper and his wife, Kayla, intervened and offered a room in their home for the Phillies rookie.

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You don’t say no to the 2021 NL MVP. Since the National League wild-card series in St. Louis, the DH (Harper) and the shortstop (Stott) have been living together.

“It seemed like a good option,” Stott said with a laugh. “He’s a great host.”

This is not Stott’s first time living with Harper. Their friendship has been well-documented. Both are Las Vegas natives and they lived together during spring training. But this is the first time they’ve experienced a playoff run while under the same roof.

Despite what’s been going on in October and November, Stott says that Harper is the same roommate he had in Clearwater, Fla., in the spring. His two kids are his top priority when he’s home. He does a good job of leaving his day job at the door, and Stott tries to do that too.

“He’s got other stuff outside of the field,” Stott said. “I’ve always been like that too. When I’m home, I’m home. I don’t get wrapped up in it all the time. When you get wrapped up in it, that’s when stuff starts to snowball. So I try to have two separate lives, even though I don’t have kids or anything. He does a good job of that.”

Harper is so good at keeping those lives separate that Stott has not seen Harper’s National League Championship Series MVP trophy in his house.

“I don’t know where that thing is,” Stott said. “I really don’t. I don’t know if he knows where that thing is, to be honest. I haven’t seen it.”

Joking aside, Stott said that seeing how Harper has been able to create distance from anything that goes on on the field has had an impact on him. It’s been especially important over the past few weeks, as both Stott and the Phillies have been under a national spotlight.

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But the rookie has looked unfazed by it all. He worked a 10-pitch walk off Houston Astros starter Justin Verlander, a future Hall of Famer, in Game 1 of the World Series, and smacked a double off the San Diego Padres’ Yu Darvish in the NLCS pennant-clincher Oct. 23. He looks like he belongs.

There are many reasons why this transition has been seamless for Stott, but one is that he’s learned from one of the best. And over the past few weeks, he’s been able to see that no matter how big the moment is, nothing is more important than the loved ones you return to at the end of the night.