HENDERSON, Nev. -- The Wonder Kid strides into the left batter's box without a helmet, without a cap, without a care.

He stands days away from becoming the first selection in baseball's June 7 draft, one of the most ballyhooed prospects in its 45-year history.

He stands, left elbow cocked as if pointing to the rear of the cage, bat upright, ready to take a final round of batting practice on a recent day. Just hacking.

And, at that exact moment, 17-year-old Bryce Harper is thinking: Pizza.

Brando's Pizza, to be precise. About 360 feet to right field is a sign hawking the Las Vegas area's own Chicago-style pie and video-poker parlor.

"Anybody want to bet I'm going to hit it over the Brando's sign?"

There were no takers, of course.

For on the first pitch, first swing, hands whipping that black, wooden bat to the ball, he delivered.

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The Pirates will pick No. 2 in the first round of the draft, but there is no guarantee Harper would be their choice, or that he would get past the Washington Nationals at No. 1.

The Nationals last year plunked down $15.1 million for Stephen Strasburg, celebrated as perhaps the draft's finest pitching prospect ever. Now they appear prepared to pony up for a power-hitting catcher -- celebrated by some as perhaps the draft's finest ever, too -- who could become the first junior-college player selected No. 1 in baseball. The team sent five members of its front office to his opener at the College of Southern Nevada in this southeast bedroom community.

Harper has done nothing with a bat to disappoint them since. The Scenic West Athletic Conference MVP broke a bevy of school and league records with gaudy statistics for a junior-college player of any age: 29 home runs, 89 RBIs and a .442 batting average, not to mention another team-high in steals, with 18 in 62 games.

His four-homer, 10-RBI performance in the regional championship game almost single-handedly propelled his College of Southern Nevada Coyotes (49-14) into the Junior College World Series, where they were scheduled to open Saturday night against Pitt (N.C.) Community College in Grand Junction, Colo. All that while he endured taunts from opposing dugouts, bore intense inspection almost daily, showed some baseball doubters he could hit in the wooden-bat league and play outfield instead of merely catcher, and, oh yeah, earned a 4.0 in his first semester at community college.

"I think I've gotten a lot older mentally," Harper said earlier this month in a rare interview. "That's the biggest part I think throughout the whole year, that I've grown up more mentally, matured a lot more "

"Nobody in America knows what it feels like to be him, because it's never been done," said Tim Chambers, his coach at College of Southern Nevada. "He's the baby. A junior in high school. He's got all the media eyes on him, the pressure. All eyes have been on him all the time, and he's been able to perform."

Still, even Chambers is surprised.

"I've known him almost his whole life, and I didn't think he'd do this."

Scouts, evaluators and critics will continue to nit-pick. There are his idiosyncrasies (the exaggerated eye black and the elaborate ritual before each at-bat) and his catching ability. But the hitting ability of this 6-foot-3, 205-pound young man is unquestioned and, in this draft, unparalleled. No wonder his adviser, agent Scott Boras, is expected to seek somewhere between Mark Texeira's $9.5 million draft bonus -- the record for a position player -- and Strasburg's unprecedented money.

"The bat plays," said one National League front-office type. "But somebody's going to have to pay."

"He's the best I've seen come out of here," said Manny Guerra, a 30-year scout for the St. Louis Cardinals. Based in Las Vegas, Guerra has witnessed up close and personal players ranging from former Pirates 10th-overall selection Chad Hermansen to future Hall of Famer Greg Maddux. "He's a good one," Guerra added of Harper. But how good? "Time will tell. . . . He's got a lot of work to do."

Pirates general manager Neal Huntington, who attended Southern Nevada's regular-season final home series against Eastern Utah April 30 and May 1, maintains part of his posture from PirateFest when he stirred some team followers and media by daring to find flaws with the Wonder Kid.

"While he has proven himself to be among the best in this year's draft class, he is not in the class of Strasburg and may not even have been drafted ahead of [Seattle's No. 2 Dustin] Ackley and/or some of the players in the 2008 draft. . ." Huntington wrote in an e-mail to the Post-Gazette this past week,. "It is completely unfair to expect him to live up to all of the hype surrounding him, and in many ways I feel for the young man.

"He has an intriguing tools package with a high upside. However, like every player in the draft, he does not come without the need for significant development and/or risk. We are about to begin our final meetings prior to the draft, and those meetings will determine our final preference list for the draft. We will select the highest-ranking player on our board when our name is called. And if that player is Bryce Harper, we will select him."

Though Harper would not talk about the draft in detail, he did let his words wander to the possibilities as he sat on a picnic bench at the stadium.

"Lord willing, if I get drafted. ..." Harper began. "I love to catch. I've caught my whole life. [But] I'll play anywhere, anywhere anybody needs me. I'll play the outfield, third, DH, whatever. Doesn't matter to me. As long as I make it."

Baseball was his destiny. He started T-ball at age 3, playing in an older age group even then, with big-brother Bryan three years his elder.

"He always used to play up -- like, two and three years up; he was still the best kid out there, even though he was younger than them all," said Tanner Chauncey, a pal and teammate from youth travel baseball -- where they won two national championships abroad -- through high school. "He was always that good."

Las Vegas High, under Sunset Mountain on the east side of Sin City and near the family's Church of Latter Day Saints, was his home away from home.

"He would come up here. . . at age 6, just to hit, mess around," recalled Sam Thomas, the Las Vegas High baseball coach with a far-away love for the Pirates and Steelers -- his father hailed from DuBois and raised his children in black and gold, a formula the son followed as well. Thomas continued, "A little pudgy kid. Him and his older brother, they'd always hang around."

Ron Harper, their father, is a steelworker who laid rebar on many of the hotels and casino's along the Strip. He worked his boys tirelessly on hitting and throwing. He took them to clinics in California, tournaments wherever, cages across the valley, and the back yard to hit bottle caps and red beans.

"I've never seen someone hit so much with his dad," Chauncey said. Bryce Harper still comes to the high school once a week to hit, either with the team or on his own. "Really hard worker."

"He's got the best work ethic I've seen out of a high school kid," Thomas said. "I get criticized 'cause we had four-hour practices out here. And this kid. . ., as soon as he's dismissed, will go on a dead sprint to his dad's truck because he's going to go hit for another hour and a half.

"This kid used to play in our intrasquad games and dominate as an eighth-grader. It took everything in me not to get on my hands and knees to beg the dad to keep him here and not take him to the private school." And when he did go to Las Vegas High, Thomas joked, "It was like winning the lottery."

The Wonder Kid appears on the verge of doing just that: winning the draft lottery.

"I was on the computer [one] morning. I typed in MLB.com, and I see his face pop up on the front page. I was sitting next to my friend, 'Man, this is so weird to me,' " Chauncey said. "Just last year, we were in high school, hanging out all the time. Now he's going on to make millions of dollars. He's still the same Bryce. Still the same old kid."

Thomas continued: "Not only does he play above his maturity level, but he acts above his maturity level. If you sit down and talk to him. . . , he has a passion for this game. He wants to be the best at it."

To prove his point, to improve his game, the Harpers attempted a bold move. Big-brother Bryan in spring 2009 decided to leave Cal State-Northridge after one year and return home to the junior-college program with the lofty reputation. It was coached by Tim Chambers, a longtime baseball friend of the family.

"When they figured out where I was going, it made everything easier," Bryan said. So Bryce passed the GED test to earn his high school equivalency diploma and started junior college, playing up yet again.

"It wasn't money-related. It wasn't draft-related completely," Chambers explained. "It was him wanting to be challenged and the shortened high school season -- they cut it back eight more games because of budgets this year -- and, to be honest, he was going to hurt somebody. With an aluminum bat in his hand, somebody was going to get hurt. A pitcher or somebody. So those are the three reasons he left.

"It was the right decision, obviously. You can see what he's done from a numbers standpoint: He just destroyed the league. Hell, our school record for home runs was 12 in 2001, and we swung aluminum back then. Yeah, 12. And he doubled it [with 23 in 55 regular-season games]. With wood."

Bryce Harper says he has no regrets about leaving high school.

"I love it; I've had a lot of fun. To have my brother out here is big," Harper said of this Coyotes season. "It crosses my mind where you miss [high school] and stuff. But I wouldn't take back anything. Living at home, having my mom's cooking every night, getting to sleep in my own bed and hanging out with my old friends, nothing has really changed. Except for the baseball part of my life. I've just grown up a little faster than everybody else."

Taunts came from opposing dugouts daily, but they have largely stopped.

"About seven weeks ago, we had a team meeting that we weren't going to bench-jockey back," Chambers said. "It's pretty limited now.

"All that stuff stems from jealousy."

Out of curiosity, record crowds came to Southern Nevada games. Every major league team sent a scouting representative, including roughly 10 general managers in all and 10 scouts per game on average. As with the Pirates, not every team nor every scout is fully enamored.

"Not everybody is going to sit there and want Bryce to succeed," said Thomas, the high school coach who remains a confidante. "There are going to be people who look for flaws. That's the irritating thing: Baseball's a game of failure, and everybody has flaws. Bryce does a really good job of handling it. But it's tough."

"I really don't care," Harper said from his picnic bench, adding a shrug. "People can talk."

People talk, all right. The tales some tell. ...

• You can watch it on YouTube.com: Harper clubbed a 502-foot homer in a home run derby at Tropicana Field. None of the Tampa Bay Rays or their major league competitors ever hit one that far. About 900,000 have watched it.

• Clint Huggins, a Las Vegas High assistant and mathematics teacher, measured this one himself: A homer by Harper when he was a 15-year-old freshman, traveled over the right-field fence, two trees, a 20-foot embankment, five lanes of Hollywood Boulevard and up a sandy foothill -- precisely 570 feet. Huggins knows. He saw it and verified it with the school custodian's tape measure. "I could figure out the plane for you," he offered. Thomas, the head coach, noted that they measured from where the ball was found midway up that hill. "So, in all actuality, it could have gone further and rolled back down," Thomas said.

• "He hit a bus one time," Thomas said. "Just during batting practice." Often during batting practice, Harper would hit balls to Hollywood Boulevard. "And the bus driver came into the main office and wanted the school to pay for the damages. Stuff like that. Every day he walked on the field out here, he would do something that would make you say, 'Wow.' It's unreal."

• Just last weekend, needing a victory in the Western District title game in Lamar, Colo., to reach the Junior College World Series, Harper went 6 for 6 with four homers and 10 RBIs, nearly outscoring Central Arizona by himself in a 25-11 romp. He hit for the cycle -- with six RBIs -- the night before in the semifinals, and after a double and a triple and homers in each of the second, fourth and fifth innings, he came to the plate in the seventh of the championship needing a single for another cycle game. Instead, he clobbered a two-run homer to center. "It was 20 to 40 mph, depending upon what inning it was," Chambers said of the gusting winds that day. "People say, 'Some of those home runs were wind-blown.' Yeah, but nobody else hit that many. Still gotta hit 'em."

• His favorite movie is "The Sandlot," where a bunch of pals bond over baseball, with one -- nicknamed "The Jet" -- becoming a hometown Los Angeles Dodgers star and another becoming the team's play-by-play announcer. So when Thomas watched a Southern Nevada home game where Bryce Harper, standing on third base, watched a pitcher throw to hold a teammate at first base not once, but twice, Thomas knew what would come next. Harper took off and scored on the second throw over to first. So Thomas texted him the final line of the movie: "The Jet stole home, The Jet stole home." Bryce texted back, "I was thinking about that."

Perhaps that's the wonder of it all. He is, deep down, still a kid.

"Forget the hype," said Guerra, the Cardinals' scout, referring to wherever the kid ends up. "Watch him."

Colin Dunlap's blog on the Pirates is featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.