Bryce Harper's Historic Injury Comeback Could Make the Phillies—or Break Them

Through Monday, the Philadelphia Phillies had at least one good excuse for their mediocre 15-15 start. I mean, you try playing 30 games without a two-time MVP and see how it goes.

But with Bryce Harper's return on Tuesday, the defending National League champion's fortunes for the rest of 2023 took a turn. For good? For ill? They're going to find out.

What's certain for now is that Tuesday saw Harper suit up for the Phillies just 160 days after undergoing Tommy John surgery on Nov. 23, 2022. And also that it didn't go great. He started at designated hitter but didn't do much hitting in going 0-for-4 with three strikeouts in a 13-1 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Harper looked not quite ready for primetime. His lone batted ball was a check-swing dribbler to third base, while seven of his 13 swings came up empty.

"I understand it's going to take me a minute," Harper told reporters, including Todd Zolecki of MLB.com. "You're never excited for what just happened. You don't want that to happen. I want the results to be better."

Rightfully, though, he also added: "Granted, I'm excited to be back, going through six months of grinding and hard work. To be able to get back today, I was extremely excited. Now we're just rolling into a season and playing as many games as I can."

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Harper's Return Is His Latest Incredible Feat

Nearly 150 years into its existence, there aren't many things that have never happened before in Major League Baseball. But a return as quick as Harper's is indeed one of those.

When the 30-year-old originally went under the knife, the expectation was that he wouldn't return until the All-Star break in July. May was supposed to be the month that he would merely start hitting, effectively marking the beginning of his spring training.

According to Zolecki, though, Harper had been eyeing the Phillies' series against the Dodgers for months before he joined in. An overly optimistic goal for anyone else, perhaps, but orthopedist Dr. Neal ElAttrache confirmed it as a realistic one for Harper as soon as he cleared the slugger for duty on Monday.

As noted by MLB.com's Sarah Langs—with an assist from Jon Roegele's database—Harper broke Tony Womack's record for the fastest ever return ever from Tommy John surgery with room to spare:

This might not be an accomplishment worthy of, say, a mention on a Hall of Fame plaque, but it's still a noteworthy chapter in one of the more legendary baseball stories in recent memory. Which, of course, began with Harper gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated as a teenager in 2009 and going No. 1 in the 2010 draft and has since seen him claim seven All-Star selections, the two MVPs and, most recently, the NLCS MVP.

If they ever come up with a statistic for players' healing abilities—HPAR, or "Healing Powers Above Replacement," has a nice ring to it—maybe that will be when we find out that Scott Boras was right all along about him having "super healing qualities." But for now, it sounds like he's back so soon because he was determined to be.

"Standard," right fielder Nick Castellanos said, per Matt Gelb of The Athletic. "I mean, Bryce went about this as Bryce Harper goes about anything. You know? Extremely focused, extremely meticulous, extremely dedicated. You mix in natural talent with all those things and you get No. 3."

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There Are Lingering Questions That Can't Be Ignored

Ah, but did Harper return too soon?

It seems a fair question, but the only opinion that really matters is ElAttrache's medical opinion. It's not one we care to contradict. And for what it's worth, Scott Lauber of the Philadelphia Inquirer spoke to experts who didn't contradict it either.

"If you have a good hitter who's an outfielder and it's the nondominant [front] elbow, that's the best-case scenario for him getting back sooner than some of the traditional timelines," Marcus Rothermich, an orthopedic surgeon at Andrews Sports Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama told Lauber. "It would be the absolute earliest on the timeline."

But even if that question has a satisfying answer, whether the Phillies can reasonably expect Harper to be their savior is another question altogether.

It was hard enough to set expectations for Fernando Tatis Jr.'s return to the San Diego Padres on April 20, as nobody had ever come back from an 80-game performance-enhancing drug suspension and shoulder surgery and two wrist surgeries before. But at least in his case, there was compelling data from his minor league rehab assignment to go off of.

Not so with Harper. Gelb wrote on April 25 about how the slugger and the Phillies generally didn't see much value in a rehab assignment, hence why he skipped right to being back in the big club's starting lineup.

If there's a reason to have high hopes for Harper, it emanates from Shohei Ohtani. He was back in the Los Angeles Angels lineup just 218 days after he had Tommy John on Oct. 1, 2018, and his eventual .286/.343/.505 slash line and 18 home runs for 2019 were comparable to what he had done in 2018.

But as relevant and hopeful narratives go, that's really it. Because while Paul Molitor, Jose Canseco, Luis Gonzalez, Corey Seager and Salvador Perez are other examples of star hitters who had Tommy John in their prime and quickly reclaimed their stardom, each took over 240 days to recover.

For his part, Harper did raise a fair point about having proved in 2022 that he can hit just fine even with his right elbow not at 100 percent.

"I can't really sit here and say I am going to feel the same," he said, according to Gelb. "But [last year] definitely gave me a sense of how I'm going to feel when I play."

To the extent that Harper put up a 147 OPS+ even before he came up with huge hits during the Phillies' run to the World Series, this is true. Yet it also obscures the other threat to his return to excellence that was very much evident on Tuesday: rust.

Though Harper did well overall last year, he hit at .227 with three home runs in his last 35 regular-season games after missing two months following thumb surgery. Similarly in 2017, he hit just .159 with one home run in 10 games after he missed about six weeks with a knee injury. His teams went 19-26 in those 45 games.

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One Thing's for Sure: The Phillies Need Harper

The Phillies may have won 10 out of 15 leading up to Harper's return, but that's no excuse to think his presence is more luxury than necessity.

They're 5.5 games behind Atlanta in the NL East and 1.5 games out in the race for the NL's two wild cards, and their remaining schedule is on the difficult side. It's thus little wonder that FanGraphs puts the club's playoffs odds lower now than they were on Opening Day.

The Phillies are in this spot in large because their offense has underperformed. Its .271 team average is nice but it's not really translating to runs scored. They ranked fifth in the NL in runs per game in 2022. Now they rank 10th.

The ideal scenario for the Phillies is Harper eventually making good on his work at first base, where they're getting minus-0.6 rWAR in the wake of Rhys Hoskins' late-spring ACL tear. In the meantime, they need him to use his regular DH gig to boost what's been lackluster production from the left side of the plate.

To the latter end, a cold version of Harper won't necessarily hurt the Phillies offense, but their defense would suffer from Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos having to play the field on a daily basis. They're already in the red for Outs Above Average.

And then there's the non-zero possibility that Harper's elbow won't survive his quick comeback or an eventual move to first base. In either case, the Phillies would be left with no version of him whatsoever.

Then there's the other, more optimistic possibility: What if Bryce Harper is Bryce Harper?

You know, as in the guy who's one of only four hitters with at least a 140 OPS+ and 285 home runs since 2012. The guy who's thrice done better than a 1.000 OPS in a season. The guy who's a good hitter in basically every clutch situation. The guy who's generally building a strong Hall of Fame case.

Best guess? This version of Harper will show up in, oh, let's say a month. A spring training's worth of games, in other words. Just enough for him to shake the rust off, and then he'll have four months to buoy the Phillies with his typical brand of high-OBP, high-SLG hitting.

That version of Harper would really get this Phillies lineup going. It's that simple, and they know it.

"It really creates a long lineup," manager Rob Thomson said of Harper's return on Monday, via Gelb. "When you see the lineup, you're going to see some pretty good hitters way down there because (Harper) is back. Once he gets hot, we're going to be a handful."

Of that, there's little doubt. All Harper has to do now is make it happen.

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Stats courtesy of Baseball Reference, FanGraphs and Baseball Savant.