Bryce Harper is back with the Phillies. How long will it take for him to hit like Bryce Harper?

LOS ANGELES — As Bryce Harper went through his daily pregame workout at first base Monday — fielding ground balls and flipping them into a bucket, practicing his footwork around the bag, taking pickoff throws from a pitcher — Dodgers manager Dave Roberts shouted to him from across the field.

“Take three more days!” Roberts said.

“No,” Harper laughed. “I’m just going to [stink] for two days.”

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Harper does this. Self-deprecation can be a comfortable default mode, especially in the face of fairly remarkable circumstances. And so, as Harper prepared to return to the Phillies’ lineup as the designated hitter Tuesday night at Dodger Stadium — 160 days after the reconstruction of a ligament in his right elbow — he warned everyone that, well, he might be as rusty as a water pipe in the basement of a century-old house.

And if he hits a home run in his first game back? He can always tell everybody later that he wasn’t surprised.

“At any point that I come back during the season, it’s going to be an adjustment for me,” Harper said recently, sitting at his locker after a pregame workout. “I don’t have a spring training. I’m not going to see any pitching. I’ll see guys at the stadium, and I’m going to come back when I do. I feel like I’m just going to try to be as normal as possible.”

But this isn’t normal, and Harper knows it. He’s coming back from Tommy John surgery in half the time of the average position player from 2010-18, according to a study conducted in 2020 by the Rothman Orthopaedic Institute for the American Journal of Sports Medicine.

There are explanations for Harper’s warp-speed return. He may have what agent Scott Boras calls “super healing qualities,” but he also is coming back to a hitter-only role that didn’t exist in the National League until last year. Harper admits he never really liked the idea of the DH. Now? Let’s just say he couldn’t have played Tuesday night without it, no matter his anatomical gifts.

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And because Harper bats left-handed, the right elbow is his back, nondominant elbow. So, although he’s known for his ferocious swings, there’s still less strain on his new ligament than if he was a right-handed hitter.

But Harper also is back this quickly because he eschewed a minor league assignment. He got roughly 50 at-bats against live pitching over the last few weeks. The Phillies even brought minor league right-handers Victor Vargas and Tyler McKay on the road with them to pitch to Harper last weekend in Houston.

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“It’s not big league pitching,” manager Rob Thomson said. “It’s good pitching. It’s not big league pitching.”

But Phillies officials, including Thomson, didn’t see much sense in sending Harper to triple A for even a few games. Harper is using last season as a baseline for much of this. He tore the ulnar collateral ligament in his elbow in the middle of last April and was the DH from then on, using the same customized brace to protect his elbow that he will continue to wear for the time being.

And after he broke his left thumb last June, he missed two months and went to triple-A Lehigh Valley for a two-game tune-up. He went 5-for-8 with two doubles and two home runs, prompting expectations that he would torch major league pitching, too.

It didn’t happen. He went 20-for-93 with 30 strikeouts in his first 26 games. Looking back, Harper said he saw mostly fastballs and changeups in triple A and not as many curveballs and sliders. Certainly there was nothing like the “slurve” with which Dodgers ace lefty Julio Urías figured to attack him Tuesday night.

“It’s going to take me some time to see pitching,” Harper said. “It’s going to feel probably like spring training for the first month that I do come back. Because I know how my body works. It takes usually 65-70 at-bats for me to get going. You kind of saw that in September last year.”

Regardless, Thomson wasn’t planning to ease No. 3 back into the lineup by batting him lower than in the order than his usual No. 3 spot. Instead, the manager intended to drop down other hitters, while acknowledging that it may take time for Harper to regain his timing.

It’s a process the Phillies are willing to endure if it means having their star slugger and face of the franchise back in the lineup. As former outfielder Luis Gonzalez, a Tommy John surgery patient in 2004, put it: “I think there’s a huge majority of teams that would take a 70% Bryce Harper. This guy makes an impact not just by what he does on the plate but just being in the lineup.”

“He feels really, really good and comfortable with where he’s at, what he’s doing,” Phillies hitting coach Kevin Long said. “There’s no pain issues; there’s no stamina issues. I feel comfortable where his swing’s at.”

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And if he hits right away?

“I’ve seen him in spring training,” Long said, “in his first at-bat, hit a homer.”

Nobody, least of all the Dodgers, would be surprised by that.