Can AI pitching technology help Bryce Harper return to the Phillies even sooner?

Bryce Harper stood on the grass in foul territory, 60 feet up the first base line from his target, and stepped into his first throw since last summer.

That was Thursday, 148 days after he had Tommy John elbow surgery.

It’s all happening so fast. Harper knows this. Research shows that six months is the soonest a non-pitcher has returned from an elbow ligament reconstruction to play in the majors (infielder Tony Womack in 2004). Yet here’s Harper, who began taking batting practice 4½ months after his Nov. 23 surgery. He faced live pitching and initiated a feet-first sliding program, all before the five-month mark. He will see his surgeon at the beginning of May and may be cleared to join the Phillies lineup as the designated hitter shortly thereafter.

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There isn’t precedent for this. Maybe Harper really is a medical marvel.

Here, though, is something that he’s not: reckless. Every move Harper makes, every step he takes is watched by Phillies head athletic trainer Paul Buchheit. When Harper slides feet-first into second base, Buchheit is nearby. When he plays catch, Buchheit is alongside. Boxes are being checked, the Phillies insist. Progress has been swift, but also incremental. There’s too much at stake to skip any steps.

“I’m not trying to just be the fastest guy coming back. That’s not what I want to do,” Harper said. “I want to be smart about it, too. I don’t want to be dumb. This isn’t just some rinky-dink surgery that I had. It’s a big-time surgery.”

But there is one corner that Harper does intend to cut. He isn’t interested in a minor league assignment. Manager Rob Thomson doesn’t see the sense in it, either. Never mind that Harper missed spring training. Why bother sending him to Lehigh Valley to face triple-A pitching when there’s a robotic major league pitcher in the bowels of Citizens Bank Park?

No joke. The Phillies are among a dozen teams this season that are using the Trajekt Arc, a next-gen pitching machine and video projection system that is programmable to replicate the pitch mix and delivery of every major league pitcher more accurately than any known baseball training tool.

“Nothing is ever going to be real life, but it’s about as close as you can get to it,” Phillies left fielder Kyle Schwarber said. “Say you want to see a guy’s breaking ball before a game. You can go in there and see his breaking ball. It’s pretty cool.”

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Lifelike, too, according to multiple players. Here’s how it works: Using data that is available through public-facing Statcast and proprietary sources such as Trackman, Rapsodo, and Hawk-Eye, teams upload metrics and video for opposing pitchers into Trajekt Arc’s software to form a Spotify-style playlist. Once a hitter selects a specific pitcher, a projection of that pitcher on the mound appears on a three-paneled screen.

The machine takes it from there. The screens roll horizontally and move vertically to reach the pitcher’s exact release point, while the pitching machine is calibrated to the speed and spin of each specific pitch. Hitters can opt to see the pitcher from the windup or the stretch. They can choose a pitch and location or randomize the pitches to simulate an actual at-bat. The machine is synced up with the video to release the ball through a window when the hand arrives there.

In spring training, Phillies second baseman Bryson Stott tested the Trajekt Arc by booting up Marlins ace Sandy Alcantara and standing in against the reigning National League Cy Young Award winner.

“It’s pretty accurate, actually,” Stott said. “The Sandy video, he was throwing his sinker. It spun how his sinker spins. The video’s clear, and it’s pretty much on time. It was really good.”

Good enough to, say, replace the need for a minor league assignment?

“I don’t see why not,” Stott said.

Joshua Pope’s coming of age as a baseball fan coincided with the dawning of the Statcast era.

Pope, who grew up playing baseball in the Toronto area, was watching a Blue Jays game in 2014 when the television broadcast showed a graphic with the metrics and trajectory of right-hander Marcus Stroman’s cutter and two-seam fastball. Armed with that newly available data, Pope and his friends started a running joke: “How many swings would it take to hit off Stroman?”

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But it also sparked an idea. Most pitchers are less effective each successive time through a batting order. Imagine, then, if a hitter was somehow able to face a pitcher before actually facing him?

“The batter learns from the visual stimulus that they get in the game,” Pope said by phone this week. “That’s why, the third time through the order, the starter is almost always pulled, especially in today’s game. They’ve seen him now 10 or 12 pitches, and they’re picking up all these cues and their brain is kind of dialed in, their timing is dialed in. What if you could get 100 looks on Stroman before the game? How valuable would that be?”

Pope attended the University of Waterloo — “kind of our version of MIT in Canada,” he said — in the fall of 2014 and studied biomedical engineering. He brought up the robotic pitcher concept to a professor. It didn’t go over well. How would he generate the gyro spin of the ball? How would he re-create what the professor called the “12 degrees of freedom” of human movement in throwing a pitch? There were too many questions.

“He’s like, ‘It’s not possible,’” Pope said. “They said it was too hard and not physically viable.”

Then, Pope met Rowan Ferrabee, a fellow undergraduate student whom he describes as Will Hunting-esque in “coming into class late with a skateboard and correcting high-level linear algebra problems that professors are putting on the board.” Ferrabee rejected the notion that the robotic pitcher was unachievable. He wrote equations, drew sketches, and solved the professor’s biggest question by replicating actual spin on pitches. With that, the experiment became a reality.

But what really sets Trajekt Arc apart from other high-tech pitching machines, according to Stott and Phillies hitting coach Kevin Long, is the video component. The videos are available to each team through batter’s eye footage taken from behind the left- and right-handed batter’s boxes in every major league ballpark and most in the minors.

“The video and the arm slot and then the spin rates are identical,” Long said. “So if a guy throws a fastball at 2,300 spin rate, that’s what it’s going to be. It’s simulating exactly what the pitcher does.”

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Pope took the early prototype to the winter meetings in 2019. He met with several teams and took feedback about improvements. Hitters identified a few initial glitches. It can be tricky to pick up the seams of the ball out of the projection of the pitcher’s hand. Stott said it took some time in spring training to get the video and the machine to sync up completely. Now, though, Stott said the “video is clear and it’s pretty much on time.”

The Cubs were the earliest adopter of the machine, in 2021. By the middle of last season, seven teams had signed multiyear deals to lease the Arc for a five-figure monthly fee and what Pope described as a “low six-figure value per year.” Meanwhile, Trajekt Sports, based in Toronto, has grown to 10 employees, including Pope and Ferrabee.

Collegiate, pro-summer, and recreational versions of the Arc are in development. Pope estimated he will be working with “almost all the [major league] clubs by 2025.” The Phillies were among a handful of teams that signed on before this season.

Just in time for Harper to make use of the machine.

Trajekt’s robotic pitcher falls under the same MLB rules that were implemented after the 2017 Astros used technology to steal signs. Like all electronics, it can be accessed before games but is off-limits once play begins to avoid creating an unfair advantage for the home team.

Thus far, Long said, Phillies hitters have used the Arc mostly to see pitches. Before facing Alcantara, for instance, on April 10 at Citizens Bank Park, many stood in against the robot simulation of him before getting into the batter’s box for real. Maybe it’s coincidental, and it’s definitely a small sample, but the Phillies were batting .284/.356/.519 in their first time through the order against a starting pitcher through 20 games this season. Last year, they batted .239/.304/.390 once through the order.

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“A lot of guys are going in there and they’re just tracking. They’re not even swinging,” Long said. “They’re tracking sequences and kind of what pitches the guy has. It gives them a pretty realistic feel before they go into that matchup of what that guy, at least his pitches are going to do. I think there’s an advantage to having it.”

There may be an even more practical use for Harper.

Last year, after Harper missed two months with a broken left thumb, he went 5-for-8 with two doubles and two homers in two triple-A games. But upon rejoining the Phillies, he said he saw more fastballs and changeups than curveballs and sliders. And in his first 103 plate appearances back in the lineup, he went only 19-for-88 (.216) with six doubles and two homers.

So, maybe Harper would benefit more from taking as many at-bats as he wants against a Virtual Sandy Alcantara or Robot Max Scherzer than a real triple-A pitcher — and seeing more breaking pitches with better spin.

“You can put any pitcher on the planet on video and replicate his stuff,” Thomson said. “The machine will mimic a pitcher’s stuff, velocity, movement, pitches. That’s like getting at-bats, you know?”

Other teams have made similar use of the machine. When Red Sox infielder Justin Turner got hit in the face by a pitch in spring training, he was cleared to track pitches in a controlled environment with the Trajekt system before facing an actual pitcher again. Pope said he has heard from teams that were able to eliminate the need for a minor league assignment for players coming back from injury.

“Being able to do this from the stadium is one of the things that teams are picking up on,” Pope said. “It’s valuable for the players. Less travel to an affiliate, less time between injury and [return to] play, and just overall well-being for the player. It’s amazing to see it with Bryce Harper because he’s one of the best players in the league.”

And just when you thought Harper’s return couldn’t get any faster.