The Phillies must protect Bryce Harper at all costs, even if it means more days off

Bryce Harper is not a man who enjoys the sidelines. You could see it on his face as he stood in the middle of the clubhouse on Sunday evening. Frustration? No, not really. More like under-stimulation. Boredom. A desire to get the day over with and get back to the ballpark and prepare to actually play. This is a man who runs into camera wells at full speed with little regard for how the physics will play out. Action is a fundamental part of his state of being.

“I’m definitely looking forward to getting back in there tomorrow,” Harper said.

A few hours earlier, there’d been some raised eyebrows when the lineup card went up without Harper’s name on it. The previous afternoon, the Phillies first baseman had taken a hard tumble into the aforementioned camera well, somersaulting over a railing and landing awkwardly on the concrete floor below. He suffered a cut on his finger, but otherwise appeared to emerge unscathed, and kept playing in the 12-4 loss to the Braves. Yet here we were, third game of the season, Phillies looking to avoid getting swept by their main competition in the NL East, and the team’s undisputed MVP was taking a day off.

Strange?

Well, no.

In fact, Rob Thomson shouldn’t hesitate to give Harper plenty more days off if he and his training staff think it will help keep his superstar healthy all season. They need to do everything in their power to avoid a recurrence of the back soreness that sidelined Harper late in spring training. They also need to make sure the rest of his body is not compromised by the lack of reps, the lack of conditioning, the lack of game strength.

No, it isn’t strange at all to schedule an off day for your most important player on the third day of the season. It is smart.

“We’re trying to take care of them,” Thomson said. “In the first month of the season, we have two days off. So it’s like spring training except without the extra 44 players.”

» READ MORE: On the mound in Year 10, Aaron Nola is exactly where he has always wanted to be

The Phillies’ No. 1 goal right now: protect Harper at all costs. Everything else flows from there. Last year, they were 72-54 when he was in the lineup and 18-18 when he wasn’t. They can win a game here and there without him. We saw that on Sunday, when Alec Bohm’s two-run single in the seventh inning helped lift the Phillies to a 5-4 win over the Braves. What they must avoid is needing to win without him for weeks at a time.

Ever since Harper’s back flared up in Clearwater, the Phillies have been focused on the long haul. They gave him a week off, eased him back into action, sent him over to the minor league side of the complex for at-bats in a controlled setting. He played in the Phillies’ last three Grapefruit League games but broke camp with only 25 official at-bats.

“Obviously, in spring training, I didn’t get the reps that I needed,” Harper said.

He knows his body better than anybody. No. 2 on that list is the Phillies training staff, followed by Thomson. If that group of minds thinks that Harper can benefit from a day off, how can anybody scoff or roll their eyes or argue otherwise? There is no more foolish endeavor then second-guessing people who have way more pertinent information at their disposal than you do.

The concept of load management has come under considerable fire in recent years, so much so that the NBA has taken steps to “encourage” its star players to eschew off days. The antipathy is understandable for folks who remember the days when the Michael Jordans of the world would play 82 games per season and, sometimes, 48 minutes per game. Baseball’s ethos still harbors much of that old-world attitude. The pride in the grind is real.

Harper’s day off doesn’t really fit the definition of load management in its pejorative sense. The guy had a bad back. The Phillies are proceeding with caution. At this point, that’s all there is to it.

But now that we mention it, maybe load management should be more of a thing in a sport that packs more games into fewer days than any other league on the planet. The human body did not evolve to withstand three hours a day of the sort of pounding that ballplayers inflict on their joints. A 162-game season can wreak particular havoc on preexisting conditions. In fact, Sunday’s win over the Braves was a shining testament.

Kyle Schwarber’s most conspicuous moment of the afternoon came on the second pitch he saw. The leadoff home run he cracked off Chris Sale in the first inning left the ballpark in as direct a route as geometrically possible. But his most telling moment came later, in the seventh inning, when he went first to third on a single by Trea Turner. This was not the same Schwarber who seemed to be moving in slow motion by the time last October arrived. Because he was healthy.

Schwarber spent all of last season battling through knee pain that cropped up shortly after spring training. You wouldn’t have known it by looking at the final numbers — 47 home runs, an .817 OPS, both nearly identical to his 2022 output. But you could see it on the base paths, and in the field, and you have to think it had some sort of impact at the plate.

» READ MORE: Philly Rob in Year 3: Still the man for the job, still amazed that he has it

“I feel good. I feel like I got in a good routine with the training staff and the strength coaches and put myself in a good position in the offseason,” Schwarber said. “I feel pretty good coming into the season bodywise, runningwise, things like that. It definitely feels a lot better. I’m happy about it. Just have to be able to keep that up throughout the course of the year. It’s such a long year, and things can happen, but if you keep putting yourself in a good position with those guys, you feel like you’re ready to go.”

Every year, the quest becomes more difficult. Such is the nature of aging. Like Schwarber, Harper’s body has endured plenty of unnatural pounding over the years. There is nothing shameful about prevention. And nobody says you have to like it.