The Phillies’ Harrison Bader has been painting since he was a kid. And it has helped shape his game.

The 2021 season was difficult for Harrison Bader. He missed nearly all of April with right forearm soreness. Then, in May, while diving for a line drive, the outfielder suffered a right rib hairline fracture — sitting another 34 games as a result.

Bader, then with the St. Louis Cardinals, had never been on the injured list for an extended stretch before. He didn’t know when he would come back, or how the fracture would impact his standing with the team.

So, he turned to something familiar.

“I painted the entire time,” Bader said. “It was great.”

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His paintings — most of them portraits and self-portraits — reflected how he was feeling throughout his rehabilitation. There was a lot of frustration. A bit of anger, and some uncertainty, too. His colors were dark. His brush strokes were heavy.

But Bader’s art didn’t always look this way. When he was in St. Louis, he would paint during the season, in good times and bad. It was a mindfulness exercise, as much as anything else; a chance for him to disconnect.

Bader, 31, picked up the practice when he was a teenager at Horace Mann School, a college-preparatory school in the Bronx. In 2010, his sophomore year, he took advanced placement art history and was immediately hooked.

He loved it so much that he signed up for the course his junior and senior year, too. He tried to study art history at the University of Florida, where he played Division I baseball, but an academic adviser encouraged him not to (a decision he came to regret).

Nevertheless, amid his big-league career, Bader always found time for art. He’d go to galleries and exhibitions during his off days. He stayed in touch with his former art teachers at Horace Mann and worked on his portraits during the season.

After a few years of trade-deadline moves — including this summer, when he was sent from the Minnesota Twins to the Phillies on July 31 — painting became an offseason activity. But Bader still believes that it has shaped him, both as a player and a person.

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“I think that’s what makes good athletes: being themselves in the present moment,” he said. “And with painting, whatever comes out, comes out. It’s not even up for judgment. It’s more just about the present, and getting through it.”

Bader said the only subject he really excelled in at Horace Mann was art history. It was taught by a teacher who had been at the school for years, Avram Schlesinger.

Schlesinger made his class interactive. Instead of confining students to a classroom, he took them to museums and exhibitions around New York City.

They’d stand in front of a painting or a statue, analyze it, and draw what they saw, even if it was just a rudimentary sketch. The goal was to show how art could be interpreted in different ways, to different people.

Bader experienced this first hand. In 2009, when he was taking Schlesinger’s class on the history of contemporary art, he went on a field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The students were there to view a retrospective of Francis Bacon, an Irish-born British artist known for his haunting portraits. Bacon’s paintings didn’t resonate with everyone, but Bader was captivated.

“Even to this day, that [exhibition] just really stuck with me,” he said. “The colors he used, his content, his style. It’s the type of work you could stand in front of for a really long period of time and kind of soak it all in. And I just enjoy art that makes you ask questions.

“There’s an appeal with the different colors, the content of it, things that send you in different directions. Trying to decipher what it means, or why, or if you could picture the artist painting it at the time. It was just all very fascinating to me. There was a lot there.”

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Bader was a highly-touted high school baseball player who earned first-team all-state honors. But Schlesinger could tell early on that his pupil’s identity didn’t revolve around sports.

In fact, baseball rarely came up in conversation (aside from one project in which he compared the architecture of different ballparks).

“Harrison was deeply interested in the topic,” Schlesinger said. “He was engaged. I remember [A.P. Art History] being a very vocal and excited class, and he was in the center of all of that.”

Bader’s ceramics teacher at Horace Mann, Keith Renner, felt the same way. The future big-league outfielder took three of Renner’s classes, culminating with an advanced ceramics course his senior year in 2012.

Just as he did with art history, Bader immersed himself in the pottery wheel.

“He really took to it,” Renner said. “Which made total sense to me, because pottery is a skill. It’s a challenge. And Harrison is a competitor, and he loves a challenge.

“He was one of the kids that wanted to learn how to throw with more and more clay. And he was really into getting precise and accurate contours on his pots. Trying that over and over again, and refining his technique.”

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Bader continued painting after high school and college, as he embarked on his professional baseball career. He found it to be a challenging but peaceful practice, one that helped keep him grounded.

He would experiment with different types of pigments and oils, to “manipulate the paint and its viscosity.”

He’d try self-portraits, and portraits of people he loved, like family members and friends. The canvas became a place where he could express himself, far away from the field.

“I’ve had times where I’ve played extremely well, and the colors are lighter, and the strokes are lighter,” Bader said. “The content is not as disturbing [as it was in 2021]. It’s all a documentation of where you are in your present.

“People who write every day, they’d look back at their journal entries and say, ‘Wow, for this period of time, I was probably going through some things.’ Or they might look back and say, ‘Oh, this is a very happy time.’ Based on how they’re writing, they can just kind of tell.

“And I think artwork is the same exact way. We see it, not only with amateur painters like myself, but people who have made painting a profession. It’s just a great way to capture how you’re feeling.”

Bader has played for five other organizations since he was called up eight years ago. The Cardinals, who drafted him in the third round in 2015, traded him to the New York Yankees in 2022, and the Cincinnati Reds selected him off waivers in 2023.

He signed a one-year deal with the New York Mets in 2024, and another with the Twins in 2025, before he was dealt to the Phillies this summer.

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All of this shuffling has made it difficult for him to paint in-season, but Bader has perfected his offseason artistic setup: a big studio, in his house, with a view of the sunset.

“I think everything we do in this game is connected,” he said. “Everything in life is connected. Compartmentalizing tough times on the field, off the field, and then playing well on the field, I think is possible, but I don’t think it has a sustainable shelf life.

“And it’s so easy to be connected with social media and everything. So, painting is an escape. It gives me time to just unplug from the world.”

Schlesinger and Renner aren’t big baseball fans (or sports fans), but they follow Bader’s career.

Schlesinger, who now works at the Fieldston School in New York, keeps a close eye on his pupil’s highlights.

For about two months, Renner, a native of Narberth, Pa., has gotten his Harrison Bader updates from family members in the Philadelphia area.

“My brothers and my father are huge Phillies fans,” he said. “And they were amazed to learn that I taught Harrison Bader.

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“My brother actually called me and said, ‘Look, I just want to tell you that your former student, Harrison, has quickly become a Philly fan favorite. People love him.’”

Bader is still in touch with both teachers, but neither has seen his art. He has not shared it publicly. He joked that he’s “too scared to show” it to Schlesinger, because he has seen some “pretty good artists.”

“But that’s not what art is about,” Bader added. “Art isn’t about comparison. It’s about the joy of putting something to canvas.”