Bryce Harper’s moon-shot homer for the Phillies puts his power outage in the past

MILWAUKEE — Bryce Harper’s towering home run on Tuesday night hung in the air for ages.

Off the bat, it seemed as if Brewers center fielder Garrett Mitchell might have a shot at it. Harper hit it sky-high, with a launch angle of 36 degrees. The highest proportion of home runs in the majors this season have had launch angles within the range of 24 and 31 degrees.

But Harper has enough power to overcome the odds, and an exit velocity of 104 mph off the bat was enough to carry the ball 394 feet over the center-field wall and into the Brewers’ bullpen. According to Statcast data, it would have been a home run in 13 out of 30 major league ballparks.

Still, it was the type of hit that probably wouldn’t have left the yard for Harper even just last week. Throughout his homer drought that lasted from Aug. 9 until Saturday, Harper had been making solid contact and was hitting the ball well as he dealt with a sore wrist and elbow irritation in his right arm. He had 11 doubles in August, his highest total in any month this season.

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After a few almost-homers that just stayed inside the fence during the Phillies’ last homestand, Harper expressed some confusion.

“I feel like I’m right there; I don’t think I missed anything,” he said Sept. 10. “I don’t understand how the ball is not going out. You hit it at 108 [mph], at 20 or 22 [degree launch angle], it’s not going out of the yard. I’ve never seen that at the Bank.”

Four days after those comments, he finally ended the drought with a pair of homers against the Mets. Phillies manager Rob Thomson said he expected more would follow.

“Those guys, the big-time power guys, [the home runs] come in bunches,” he said.

It’s a small sample size, but Thomson appears to be right. Tuesday’s two-run shot marked Harper’s third homer in four games. Harper said postgame that he knew it was gone right off the bat — no more confusion.

And it was even sweeter coming off Brewers starter Frankie Montas, who struck out 10 Phillies on Tuesday night, including Harper twice.

“I was pumped that I got it,” Harper said. “We talked about it before that at-bat, and I finally went up there and got him. So just pretty fired-up situation.”

Over the last 13 games, Harper is hitting .362 with a 1.104 OPS. It seems like things are coming together for him at just the right time, with the regular season winding down and that magic number continually shrinking. The key will be to parlay that success into the playoffs.

“The postseason is a different animal,” Harper said. “It’s always fun. It excites me. I think every guy in this clubhouse is kind of that same demeanor. So I know as a team, we just want to be healthy going in and then try to do the job we can in the postseason.”

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Zack Wheeler, whose performance also was crucial in Tuesday’s win to secure the tiebreaker over the Brewers, was not surprised to see some balls start to go over the fence for his first baseman. The stars heaped praise on each other after the game, with Harper calling Wheeler “a Cy Young.”

Wheeler said he talked to Harper last week before he’d broken out of the homer slump and told him just to keep at it.

“I feel like he’s been swinging it well,” Wheeler said. “The home runs necessarily haven’t been there, but he doesn’t always need to hit home runs.”

It’s true that even when the long ball wasn’t working for him, Harper was contributing in other ways. But if he does keep hitting home runs like the one on Tuesday, the Phillies certainly will take that, too.