WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- The Nationals played their first spring game on Saturday night at The Ballpark of the Palm Beaches. It was against Houston, in a facility they share with the Astros. Juan Soto, who may turn out to be a better baseball player than Bryce Harper before he’s through, had an RBI single his first time up in the first inning and Anthony Rendon hit a home run in his second at-bat. If the Nationals are indeed moving on without Harper, as their owner Ted Lerner said the other day, this was the beginning of it all, on a Saturday night that ended with fireworks. With or without Harper, the Nationals hoped there might be some symbolism attached to that.

We are already just a month away from Opening Day in baseball, and the Nationals still don’t know where Harper will play this season, because nobody does. Now that manager Dave Roberts confirmed that the Dodgers are back in discussions with Harper, just when people thought the Phillies were about to run away in a limited field in the Bryce Harper Derby. To that end, Harper’s agent Scott Boras is still agent-ing as fast as he can.

There has been the feeling since last week that Boras is looking to break the free-agent record that Manny Machado set by getting $300 million from the Padres. Machado’s agent is Dan Lozano. Now we are about to see if the object of the game here for Boras is to out-Lozano Lozano, even if that would involve scorekeeping that would have little to do with what’s best for the prime of Harper’s career. 

You would think that the real object of the game for Harper is supposed to be about that, and deciding why the Phillies would be a better destination than the Dodgers. Or is this about Harper just returning to the Nationals with a huge contract?

But if Harper does move on from the Nationals, it will be fascinating to watch how they do without him in their batting order, and outfield. Because, guess what? Sometimes these things don’t work out the way you expect them to with big glamorous free agents once they leave the last room they were in.

Boras likes to call Harper a “generational player,” though you have to say that the jury is still out on that. Nearly 20 years ago, Boras had another generational player in Alex Rodriguez, when Rodriguez was leaving the Mariners. He and Boras sure did break a record when Rodriguez signed with the Rangers for $252 million.

Here’s what happened to the Mariners without Rodriguez in 2001: They managed to scrape by with 116 regular-season victories before the Yankees beat them in the American League Championship Series. Would the Mariners have won even more than 116 with A-Rod, and gone on to win the World Series? We’ll never know. But sometimes the math can be crazy in baseball, and subtraction can turn into addition.

Could it happen with the Nationals this season? Could the way general manager Mike Rizzo has retooled -- even after the Nats reportedly made a $300 million offer of their own to Harper -- not just put them back in the postseason, but maybe put them in the World Series at last? We’ll find out, if Harper does move on from the only team he’s known since he broke into the big leagues as a teenager.

Not only did Alex Rodriguez not take the Rangers anywhere, three years after they signed him they were desperate to get out from under his contract, and paid off some of it when they traded him to the Yankees. When Rodriguez struck out to end the 2011 ALCS against the Rangers, the veteran baseball writer Gerry Fraley said in the press box that night, “The Rangers wanted Alex to put them in the World Series. And now he has.”

After the 2001 World Series, one in which the Yankees managed to score just 14 runs against the D-backs in seven games, they went out and signed the big free-agent star of that season, Jason Giambi. Giambi had been the AL’s Most Valuable Player Award winner in '00 for the A’s. He was runner-up in 2001. By the time he got to New York, Giambi was five years older than Harper is now, but had hit more home runs in a single season than Harper has so far for the Nationals, and knocked in a lot more runs.

The Yankees, bidding against themselves for Giambi, signed him for $119 million. He put up some pretty big numbers for the Yanks as he played out that contract. But they’d thought he was going to put them back on top. He never did. Rodriguez would finally do that in 2009 after the Yankees took on the last seven years of that Rangers contract. He eventually played 12 seasons for the Yankees, and was a part of just that one World Series championship team.

“It’s an extraordinary contract for an extraordinary player,” Steve Phillips, then the GM of the Mets, said when Rodriguez signed his $252 million deal with the Rangers in December of 2000.

Whenever Harper signs, wherever he signs, we will likely read and hear the same kind of comments. Or maybe he will decide that where he plays -- and the guys with whom he plays -- is more important to him than breaking a record simply by signing his name to a contract bigger than Machado’s.  

  If Harper wants to do what’s best for his career, he ought to go play in Los Angeles, and make him part of the sporting renaissance there. Or stay where he is.