Bryce Harper Is Finally Crushing the Ball Again

While Bryce Harper made the quickest return from Tommy John surgery of any position player on record, it came with a cost. Not surprisingly, he didn’t hit the ball as hard as usual in the early months of his return, or do as much damage because he wasn’t elevating it with consistency. At one point, he went 166 plate appearances without a home run, the longest drought of his career, but even then, he remained a reasonably productive hitter. Lately he’s been heating up, crushing the ball while helping the Phillies climb to the top of the NL Wild Card race.

In the fourth inning of Monday night’s game against the Angels in Philadelphia, Harper demolished a Lucas Giolito fastball that was playing in the middle of the road:

The homer — a 111.9-mph scorcher with a projected distance of 429 feet — was Harper’s fourth in a seven-game rampage, during which he’s hit .500/.613/1.037. It was his eighth homer of the month, his highest total since he hit nine in September/October 2021 (and 10 in August of the same season) en route to his second MVP award. He maxed out at seven homers in May of last season, the month he was diagnosed with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his right elbow.

To be fair, Harper’s August 21 homer, an inside-the-parker, probably should have been scored as a double or triple plus an error on Giants center fielder Wade Meckler:

Statcast says that given the basic specs on that shot — 101 mph off the bat at a 28-degree launch angle and a projected distance of 405 feet — it would have been a homer in 13 of the 30 ballparks, which is to say that he’s certainly hit cheaper ones. He now has 13 homers this year, with three coming in May but none in June and only two in July. After homering on May 25, he went 38 games (37 starts) before adding another in the nightcap of a July 15 doubleheader, 13 games more than his previous long set just last year in a streak bifurcated by his broken left thumb, which sidelined him for two months.

Harper underwent Tommy John surgery last November 23, having forestalled the inevitable for six months, long enough to produce some memorable moments while helping the Phillies reach the World Series for the first time since 2009. He returned to the lineup on May 2, 160 days after surgery. As best as anyone can tell, the position player he surpassed with his quick return was Tony Womack, who needed 182 days; he underwent the surgery on October 6, 2002, a week after the season ended, and was in the Diamondbacks’ Opening Day lineup on March 31, 2003.

Womack was a slap-hitting speedster who hit all of 36 homers in his 14-year major league career, but he was particularly terrible in his post-surgery season, batting .226/.251/.307 with two homers and a 35 wRC+ while getting traded twice. Harper is pretty much the antithesis of Womack as a hitter, but given his rapid return — which didn’t even include a rehab assignment, just around 50 at-bats worth of live batting practice against teammates — it wasn’t all that surprising that he wasn’t quite himself.

Harper wasn’t terrible in the early going; after going 0-for-4 with three strikeouts in his season debut, he went 3-for-3 with a double and a pair of walks the next night, homered off Boston’s Corey Kluber in his fourth game back, and again off Colorado’s Pierce Johnson in his ninth, by which point he was hitting an absurd .361/.439/.611. The hits soon slowed down, both literally and figuratively; as Leo Morgenstern pointed out in late June when Harper was more than a month into his home run drought, his exit velocity through his first 20 games was only in the 70th percentile, down from his typical spot in the 90s (he was in the 92nd percentile in each of the past two seasons).

Setting exit velocity and Statcast aside for a moment, it’s not hard to see that Harper was out of whack at the plate just by looking at his traditional batted ball stats:

Harper isn’t as extreme a fly baller as — to use an obvious point of comparison — Mike Trout. Trout owns a career groundball rate of 35.4% and a fly ball rate of 42.3%, for a 0.83 ratio. Harper’s career rates are almost the inverse, with a 41.4% groundball rate, a 36.7% fly ball rate, and a 1.13 ratio. As you can see from the table above, his rates were in the same ballpark as those career numbers in both 2021 and ’22, but through his first three months back, he was hitting far more grounders than flies; it’s only in August that he’s approximated his career fly ball rate.

Meanwhile, where Harper has pulled the ball at a 38.6% rate for his career, he was well below that in May and June (the only truly unproductive month here) but has been closer to his norm in July and August. With those patterns in mind, here’s a look at his monthly Statcast numbers:

As you can see, Harper was well below his usual average exit velocity, launch angle, and hard-hit rate until this month, though his barrel rate wasn’t far off from his Statcast-era average of 12.3%; he only fell below that mark in July. His Statcast expected numbers were actually quite respectable throughout those leaner months, but he fell significantly short of his xSLG and xwOBA in his homerless June, a month when his contact stats were solid if not up to his career standards. He put up just an 82 wRC+ in June, compared to 141 in May, 128 in July, and 212 so far in August.

Digging deeper, Harper pulled just nine fly balls from May through July (five in May, two apiece in June and July) and had just one double and three homers to show for it; all but one homer from that meager subset of extra-base hits was in May. By comparison, he’s pulled nine fly balls in August alone, resulting in four homers. His rate of pulled flies per batted ball has more than tripled, from 4.4% before August to 13.4% this month. His Statcast-era rate of pulled fly ball per batted ball is 8.7%, and he was at 8.6% in 2021, but slipped to 4.2% last year amid his injuries.

All of which is to say that Harper is looking much more like himself at the plate lately. His overall batting line (.307/.400/.486, 140 wRC+) isn’t out of place within the ups and downs of his 12-year career. He’s within one point of his career wRC+, even if his route there has been an unfamiliar one, driven by a career-high .381 BABIP but just a .180 ISO, his lowest mark since 2014. His overall average exit velocity (91.6 mph), barrel rate (13.9%) and hard-hit rate (41.6%) are within hairs of his career averages, though his 113.7 mph maximum exit velocity is down 2.6 mph from two years ago.

I went into this dig believing that Harper’s elbow had something to do with his lack of power, and maybe it was a contributing factor, but if so, we haven’t heard much about it. He’s missed just one game in each month he’s been back (more on which momentarily). Based upon his pattern of production, his improvement may owe more to better mechanics in his lower half, such as what NBC Sports Philadelphia’s Ricky Botallico recently highlighted in the wake of a two-homer game on August 17. But even that doesn’t explain Harper going on this tear while playing through back issues. He left the team’s August 10 game against the Twins after four innings due to back spasms, sat out the next day before returning to the lineup, and has DHed in 10 of his 13 games since his absence. As recently as August 23, he was still reporting back tightness.

When Harper hasn’t DHed, he’s played first base, a position he had previously never played professionally but one of clear need for the Phillies. Rhys Hoskins tore his left ACL during spring training, sidelining him for the season, and between Alec Bohm, Kody Clemens, and Darick Hall, the team’s production at first placed it on the Replacement Level Killers list just before the trade deadline. The Phillies began running Harper through first base drills while he was rehabbing, but he didn’t make his debut there until July 23, and still has only 15 games at the position. That’s too small a sample to get a true read on his skill, but for what little it’s worth, the metrics say he’s average there. The configuration — which made its first appearance since August 20 in Monday night’s game — allows the Phillies to put Kyle Schwarber at DH, something they intended to do with frequency when they signed him last year because, well, you’ve seen him play the outfield. Harper, whose own defensive metrics in right field have hardly been pristine, hasn’t played in the pasture since April 16, 2022, shortly after he came up in pain following a throw to the plate.

Harper the outfielder doesn’t appear to be in the team’s plans this year, but right now that’s of secondary importance to the Phillies, who are on a nice roll. They’ve won four straight, six of seven, and 16 of 25 in August. After posting a 25-30 record through the end of May, they’re 48-28 (.632) since, good for the majors’ third-best record behind the Braves (52-22, .703) and Dodgers (47-26, .644). At 73-58 overall, they have a four-game lead over the second NL Wild Card team, the Cubs (69-62), and that lead is important, because under the newish playoff format, the Phillies would play all three games of the best-of-three Wild Card Series at home.

Even while hitting .360/.448/.742 this month, Harper isn’t carrying the Phillies singlehandedly. Trea Turner (.313/.355/.606, 155 wRC+) has finally emerged from a season-long slump, Schwarber (.209/.378/.558, 148 wRC+) has been thumping, and every Phillie with at least 30 PA this month has a wRC+ of 100 or better. Still, it’s reassuring to see Harper resume his spot at the center of the excitement, because he’s as good when he’s in the spotlight as any hitter in the game.