Bryce Harper’s absence helped the Phillies become a team that believes. His return will be another spark.

The real Bryce Harper was somewhere else, but a caricatured rendering of the man was surrounded by a crowd of cameras and notepads in front of Bryson Stott’s locker on Friday afternoon. Stott was there, too, and he was smiling because he’d reported for work wearing a crisp, white Bryce Harper T-shirt that made the reigning National League MVP look like a bit of a goof.

“It’s been hanging up for awhile,” said the Phillies’ rookie shortstop and resident mischief maker.

No more.

Two months and one day after Harper broke his thumb while protecting his face from a high fastball in San Diego, the Phillies welcomed their centerpiece back to the lineup for the start of a three-game series against the Pirates. In certain respects, it was a momentous occasion. When Harper first hit the injured list on June 26, many in the Phillies organization were quietly skeptical that he’d be fully recovered before Labor Day. Interim manager Rob Thomson admitted Thursday that he hadn’t expected his slugger to return so soon. First baseman Rhys Hoskins offered the most efficient summation of the mood in the clubhouse.

“It’s a great day to be a Phillie,” he said.

It most definitely was. When we last saw Harper, he was in the midst of a season that was every bit as impressive as his 2021 MVP campaign. He returns now as a potent late-season addition whose .318/.385/.599 batting line should go a long way in helping the Phillies protect the four-game Wild Card cushion they carried into Friday. There aren’t many seasons where a team that is already in playoff position gets to add an impact bat for the final 37 games of its schedule. The Phillies have a long road in front of them. But, yeah, this helps.

At the same time, the biggest story Friday afternoon wasn’t Harper’s return. Rather, it was the remarkable run of winning baseball that the Phillies managed to rattle off in the 52 games that they played without him.

32 wins. An average of 4.5 runs scored per game. An overall record that grew from 38-35 to 70-55 and left them one win away from moving 16 games above .500 for the first time in 11 years.

That was the story.

Think about it. If Harper’s return really is as impactful as the Phillies believe it will be, then shouldn’t we spend a little bit of time examining exactly how they managed to do what they did without him? Yes. I think we should.

Start with Stott. There’s an argument to be made that he was the real MVP of those 55 games. On the day Harper went down, Stott wasn’t even in the Phillies lineup, his 2-for-34 slump earning him a well-deserved day off. Truth be told, it wasn’t even that much of a slump. Through 45 games, the 24-year-old rookie was hitting just .161/.216/.273 with 38 strikeouts, 10 walks, and eight extra base hits in 153 plate appearances. He wasn’t just struggling. He was one of the least productive hitters in the majors.

And then everything changed. With Harper on the injured list and the Phillies insisting that all they needed to fill the void was a little bit more from everybody else, Stott contributed more than anybody to the mission. He played in 49 of the 52 games Harper missed, starting 46 of them. He cut his strikeout rate in half and doubled his extra base hit rate, giving the Phillies an above-league-average bat at a position where such things are at a premium. By the time Harper returned, he’d hit .287/.351/.439 and improved his season OPS from .488 to .653.

Suddenly, Stott has spent the better half of his rookie season as the player the Phillies hoped he would be when he was the top hitting prospect in their system. However their season ends, the next five years will look a heck of a lot brighter if they come out of 2022 knowing that they’ll be able to pencil in a positive-value bat at shortstop.

The situation is very much the same at catcher. In the 52 games that the Phillies played without Harper, veteran backstop J.T. Realmuto hit a blistering .329/.382/.617 with nine home runs, raising his season OPS from a dismal .680 to .803.

Nick Castellanos? His resurgence took a little longer to develop. But over the last 28 games before Harper’s return, he hit .333/.362/.496 with 10 extra base hits in 111 at-bats. The Phillies won 20 of those 28 games.

Sometimes, you need to lose your identity in order to find yourself. When Harper went down, the Phillies lost the piece of rock around which their entire universe orbited. But then a funny thing happened. Instead of spiraling off into the abyss, they began to develop into the sort of team that we have not seen around here since the 2008-11 glory days. Each time adversity struck, they found someone who stepped up to even the deficit. Blown leads, bum knees, that series sweep at the hands of the lowly Cubs — didn’t matter. Every time you swore the Phillies were about to transform into the team that they had so consistently been over the previous five seasons, they instead became more of a team that allows you to believe.

“It speaks to the growing confidence that I think this group has,” Hoskins said. “Not feeling like you are ever out of a game is something that is hard to come by but is extremely valuable. Because things aren’t going to go well every single day. That’s the nature of a 162-and-beyond season. But as long as you keep fighting and continue what you are doing, process-wise, we’re going to win more often than we haven’t. And that’s kind of what’s been going on.”

Turns out, the Phillies did not need their MVP. Which makes his return even more powerful.