Bryce Harper is the having the best age-22 season since Ted Williams hit .406 in 1941 – and one could make an argument it’s even better.

We could do 25 Things You Didn’t Know About Bryce Harper rather easily, frankly, but tying together Harper and Williams seemed about right. Joe DiMaggio’s amazing .346/.412/.673 season at 22? Great, but not as great as Harper. Jimmie Foxx’s .335/.429/.637? Can’t even compare it.

Going into the last 10 days of the season, Harper is hitting .341/.472/.669, and he’s doing it against the nastiest stuff in the history of the sport. The average fastball Harper has faced this season is the second highest ever: 93 mph, according to PITCHf/x data on FanGraphs. Only Cubs rookie star Kris Bryant has seen funkier cheese: 93.1 mph

Among the fastballs and sinkers and sliders and cutters and changeups and splitters and curveballs, the repertoires Harper faces nightly certainly best what Williams saw. And though it’s impossible to measure the quality of the competition, Williams played before integration and before the Latin American influx. MLB was only half as big in 1941 as it is now, and each team used just eight or nine pitchers regularly, so calculating the watering down of expansion vs. the much better player pool isn’t easy.

Williams’ numbers are indisputable: .406/.553/.735. Harper is out-homering him 41 to 37. Williams struck out 27 times in 456 at-bats. Harper struck out 30 times in April and another 92 since.

The fact that we’re comparing him favorably to one of the greatest seasons ever, of course, shows just how incredible Harper is and why he deserves the National League MVP award even if his Washington Nationals are a disappointment. Here’s one more enjoyable tidbit: Harper is hitting .415/.551/.954 with 10 home runs in September, an OPS 160 points higher than the next best, Chris Davis.

Read the article “25 Things You Didn’t Know About Baseball” on sports.yahoo.com.