SAN DIEGO — Bryce Harper sat alone in the manager’s office that night.
It was June 25 at Petco Park, and Harper had been hit on his left thumb by a 97.2 mph fastball. The thumb was broken. The thought crossed Harper’s mind that his season might be finished. Phillies president of baseball operations David Dombrowski had been watching the game with Jimmy Rollins from the team’s front office suite. Dombrowski excused himself and made his way to the clubhouse.
Dombrowski found Harper in Rob Thomson’s office.
Harper apologized for getting hurt.
It was a dark day for the Phillies, but it could have been worse. The Phillies could have floundered in Harper’s absence. Instead, they met the challenge of losing one of the best hitters in baseball. They won without Harper, who rejoined the Phillies in late August. And because the Phillies won without Harper for two months, they put themselves in position to clinch the third NL Wild Card. And because they clinched the third NL Wild Card, they find themselves four victories away from playing in the World Series.
Game 1 of the National League Championship Series against the Padres is Tuesday night. It is the Phillies’ first time back in San Diego since Harper broke his thumb.
“Any time you get hit or break a bone or anything like that, those doubts creep into your mind, you might not come back this year,” Harper said. “What’s going to happen, how is the team going to react? The team reacted great, right? And I got news that I’d be back in six to eight weeks and I’d be ready to go for September and the postseason. The way they picked up the slack from me being hurt was incredible. They had a great run when I was gone and they played great, and that’s why we’re here with this opportunity right now.”
It would have been cool to hear that Harper’s teammates called a team meeting that night, but they never did.
Instead, they just talked.
Several players after the game sat at a table in the clubhouse and played cards. They talked about what they needed to do to win.
“We knew who we lost,” Rhys Hoskins said. “We knew the type of player we weren’t going to have. It was just about everybody stepping up to be themselves. You can’t replace him. There are three or four players in the whole league who can give us the production that he gives us on a daily basis. Guys were going to be thrust into roles they weren’t planning to have. Just be yourself. It’s easy to think, I’ve got to do more and so does he. That’s the beauty of having a deep roster.”
“Nobody freaked out,” Matt Vierling said. “It was great leadership.”
Thomson and hitting coach Kevin Long met after the game to discuss their options.
“It starts with the players that you’ve got now, and then you look beyond that to [Triple-A] Lehigh Valley,” Thomson said. “We were kind of mixing and matching and trying to piece together with the people we had at the time. Then all of a sudden Darick Hall is getting hot in Triple-A and we’re going, ‘OK, maybe this is the guy.’ We brought him, and he performed right away. We had a lot of that this year.”
Thomson could have dropped Kyle Schwarber or Hoskins into the No. 3 or 4 spot in the lineup. But Thomson kept them at the top because they were crushing the ball at the time.
“I didn’t really want to mess them up,” he said. “I didn’t want to overthink it. I wanted to keep them right where they’re at. They seemed very comfortable there, and it worked out. There’s ebbs and flows to the season, but we’ve been pretty consistent with that, and I think it’s worked out pretty well.”
Dombrowski could have gone outside the organization and tried to find somebody to help while Harper healed. He didn’t.
“After a couple days, I didn’t have anybody say he wasn’t coming back,” Dombrowski said. “So that was a big influence. And then when he came back, he’d be the DH. We already had Schwarber and [Nick] Castellanos, so what are you going to do? We just thought OK, we’ll just mix and match and see how guys did.”
The players never panicked. Don’t try to replace Harper. Be yourself.
Thomson and the coaching staff never panicked. Don’t shake up the lineup. Give some of the young kids a shot.
The front office never panicked. We don’t need to make a trade.
“It was an emotional day because it was Bryce,” Dombrowski said. “He was shattered. Sometimes the way your players, manager and staff handle things will tell you a lot about them. There are different ways to look at it. I know publicly, I saw on MLB Network that the Phillies are done. The season is done. But I knew we had a resilient group of players.”
“I don’t think there was any doubt when I went down that we were going to do what we needed to do to get here,” Harper said.