Phillies’ Bryce Harper Keeps Making Weirdest Mistake
· Yahoo Sports
Bryce Harper wants to be a tone setter for the Philadelphia Phillies.
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The way he’s going about doing that, though, is actually coming pretty close to being a total failure.
The root of Harper’s problem is the new ABS challenge system which allows hitters to contest calls made by the home plate umpire in an effort to change the ball-strike call. Of course, a hitter will always be trying to change a strike into a ball.
Harper has a tendency to use a challenge in the first inning, and the numbers behind it are pretty crazy.
Bryce Harper’s 1st-Inning Challenge Problem
Harper has challenged 14 pitches in the first innings of games.
He’s lost nine of those — and batting just 5-for-14 on successfully challenging pitches is not good.
The Athletic’s Matt Gelb reports that Harper has challenged more pitches in the first inning than 18 different MLB teams, as a whole, have challenged.
Bryce Harper has now lost 9 of his 14 challenges in the first innings of games. He’s challenged more first-inning calls as a batter than 18 *teams* have.
— Matt Gelb (@MattGelb) September 9, 2026
Interestingly, Harper hasn’t been terrible at challenges overall. He entered Wednesday night at 21-for-44, having lost 23 of his 44 challenges, almost a 50-50 split.
If you remove his first-inning woes and include Wednesday, he appears to be 16-15 on the season for challenges.
There’s something about the adrenaline of the first inning that appears to be getting to Harper when it comes to his challenges.
Why This Is a Mistake
There’s some level of intuitiveness to this being a mistake, but let’s break it down.
For one thing, getting challenges wrong at any point in a game is costly for a team, which gets two incorrect challenges for a game (whether on hitting or pitching/catching) and then cannot challenge again after getting two wrong.
So if Harper is chopping down one of those challenges immediately, it becomes very risky to use the second one the rest of the way.
The other reality is that the first inning is rarely the highest-leverage spot in the game. Sure, if you get the challenge right all the time in a low-leverage situation then it’s fine, because you maintain the challenge.
But if you’re losing challenges in the first inning with no one on base, and then don’t have them for a missed call in the seventh inning of a tie game with the bases loaded, it can certainly feel costly.
Interestingly, Baseball Savant has a stat called Expected Challenge Rate. It notes that Harper challenges at a rate of 17.1% of opportunities, but that based on where the pitches were and what the game leverage was, he would only have been expected to challenge 4.3% of the time (across all nine innings of his challenge data).
Maybe it’s just a bit of a statistical fluke in the first year of this system. Or maybe someone needs to chat with Harper a bit to make sure he’s being wise about the Phillies’ challenges.
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