Andrew Painter is healthy and pitching again. Here’s how the Phillies are planning for his return in 2025.

Aaron Barrett still has the screenshot saved on his phone.

It shows a plot of 15 pitches thrown by a Phillies starter during a bullpen session in June. One fastball went astray. The others were dotted within a box that marked the strike zone, but none was down the middle or over the heart of the plate.

And if you didn’t know that it was Andrew Painter’s first time on a mound since elbow surgery 11 months earlier, well, you wouldn’t know.

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“I’ve seen a lot of bullpens, and for his first bullpen to be that specific on location, I was pretty blown away,” said Barrett, a former major league reliever who helps oversee the recoveries of injured Phillies pitchers. “I made a point to highlight that in our meetings with all the coordinators and everybody in the organization. I said, ‘This is special. I’ve never seen someone command the baseball like this in their first bullpen.’”

So, yes, Painter aced even his comeback from Tommy John surgery.

The road was longer than I-95 from here to the top prospect’s home in South Florida. He first reported soreness in his right elbow after a spring-training start on March 1, 2023, and a tear was diagnosed in the ulnar collateral ligament. Doctors and surgeons recommended rest and rehabilitation. It didn’t work, and Painter eventually succumbed to a ligament reconstruction.

That was July 25, 2023. He didn’t pitch in a game for 445 days.

Painter hasn’t reached his destination yet, either. He’s on course to make his major league debut in 2025, two years later than expected, but the Phillies are still formulating a plan. It’s less likely to be before his 22nd birthday, in April, than closer to the All-Star break, when he would still be the youngest pitcher to start a game for the Phillies since Zach Eflin in 2016.

But the last six weeks represented a milestone for Painter. He returned to competition in the Arizona Fall League and allowed four runs in 15⅔ innings for a 2.30 ERA over six starts. He struck out 18 batters, walked four, and threw 150 of 219 pitches for strikes. For context, his 68.5% strike rate was in line with his 69% mark in the minors in 2022.

A half-dozen Phillies officials, including manager Rob Thomson and pitching coach Caleb Cotham, dropped in to monitor Painter’s progress. By all accounts, he picked up where he left off — on the cusp of being an impact starter in the majors.

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“From the time he got out here, you could tell he was ready to compete and ready to get back on the field,” said Phillies minor league manager Greg Brodzinski, who coached in Arizona. “The thing that stood out most to me was Andrew’s healthy. And he looks like himself. He looks 100%. He still has that fire in him where he wants to be the best on the planet.”

Maybe someday. The Phillies are bullish as ever. Painter is considered all but untouchable in trade talks, according to multiple major league executives. President of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski gushes over Painter as he did 20 years ago about a Tigers prospect named Justin Verlander. Barrett likens Painter’s talent to that of two former teammates: Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg.

The Phillies will be tempted to include Painter on the opening-day roster after auditioning him for the fifth-starter vacancy in spring training. But they didn’t press the accelerator on his recovery, never skipping steps along the way.

Surely, they won’t start now.

For pitchers, it typically takes 12 to 18 months to return to game action after Tommy John surgery. But the Phillies set expectations from the start: Painter wasn’t going to pitch this past season.

The 6-foot-7 righty reported to the spring training facility in Clearwater, Fla., on Jan. 8 and resumed playing catch, initially from 45 feet, then from 60, then 75, and so on. As his elbow healed, he did exercises in the weight room to strengthen his shoulder. Everything was gradual.

Once spring training began, Painter’s work was confined mostly to the minor-league side of the complex. Most days, he arrived by 10 a.m. and didn’t leave until after 3 p.m. He worked as much with rehab coordinator Justin Tallard, physical therapist Brittany Gooch, strength coach Dan Liburd, and mental skills coach Traci Statler as any pitching personnel.

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The whole thing is tedious. Take it from Barrett, who missed most of four seasons after Tommy John surgery and fracturing the humerus bone in his arm during his comeback.

“Until you have a significant injury and have to miss the game for an extended period of time, you really don’t know what that’s like,” he said by phone. “And I don’t necessarily wish that upon anybody. Andy has done an awesome job handling all the ups and downs. He’s a premier talent, so my push for him was, ‘I’m going to hold you to even higher standards than everybody else because I know what kind of level of ability you’re capable of.’”

Painter didn’t throw a bullpen session until June. It wasn’t until August that he faced hitters in live batting practice. The Phillies tried to simulate competition by moving his throwing sessions to the mound at BayCare Ballpark, the main stadium in the complex. But he didn’t pitch in an actual game until the Fall League.

“He was just ready,” said Phillies minor league catcher Jordan Dissin, Painter’s roommate in Arizona. “He was bored of all the rehab stuff, the laying on the table, getting his arm done, and then doing therapy, and then going to the gym. He was getting sick of that. More than anything, he was just happy to go out there and play baseball again.”

It showed in Painter’s fastball velocity. He reached 100 mph three times in his first start, on Oct. 12 in Scottsdale, Ariz. But once he allowed a hit — a leadoff homer by Tigers prospect Josue Briceño in the second inning — Brodzinski sensed that Painter finally exhaled.

“Going into that first [start], it could have been the best All-Star team of MLB players you ever put together that he was pitching against, and it wouldn’t have mattered,” Brodzinski said. “Because you could tell that he locked it in. He gave up a barrel [to Briceño], and you just saw him go like, ‘All right, I’m back.’ It ticked up to that next level where the hitters after that guy really didn’t stand much of a chance.”

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Dissin said Painter felt “beat up” after two innings in his first start but built stamina throughout the fall. In his third start, on Oct. 24, Painter mowed down nine batters in 32 pitches, including a five-pitch first inning. When he came into the dugout after three innings, he approached Phillies minor league pitching coordinator Travis Hergert.

“Let’s go four today,” Painter said, while Brodzinski joked that he looked like he could go seven innings.

But there was no deviation from the plan.

“He knows that he’s in a really good spot, he knows he’s healthy, and he also understands that there is a process in this whole thing,” Brodzinski said. “It’s the understanding of, ‘We’re going to do this right,' so that he can have an impact on this organization for a long time coming.”

Painter sharpened his curveball and incorporated his changeup in his ensuing starts. The changeup helps him against left-handed hitters, especially when he’s able to locate it on the outer half of the zone.

It’s nearly an identical repertoire as before surgery, with one notable difference. Rather than throwing a sweeper and the cutter that he developed in the 2022-23 offseason and used heavily in his ill-fated spring-training start against the Twins, Painter combined the two pitches into one: a traditional slider that is harder with later action.

“Just calling it a slider, because it was never really a true cutter,” Painter told reporters in Arizona after a recent start. “We’re looking for upper-80s on it, but really it’s just the shape. It looks more like the heater for 50 feet.”

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Call it whatever you like. Brodzinski has one word for it: “It’s nasty.”

It’s also refreshing for Painter to focus on pitching rather than health. His goals in Arizona: “Compete, get a feel for my stuff, feel confident going into ‘25, and walk out healthy.”

Consider those boxes checked.

“Andrew looked great,” agent Scott Boras said last week. “His rehab is complete, and we’re pretty excited about the ‘25 season for him.”

Painter will return to Florida to train and begin an offseason throwing program. Over the next few months, the Phillies will treat him like any healthy pitcher.

But after two lost seasons, they’ll bring him back gradually in 2025.

“The discussion is, ‘What vicinity of innings do we think we have and how do we want to use those innings?’” Dombrowski said. “That’s really what it comes down to. Because you know it’s not going to be 180. Right? My instincts tell me you really want him available later in the year to pitch because he’s so important for you in that regard.”

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Dombrowski used the Pirates’ handling of Paul Skenes this season as an example. It isn’t apples-to-apples, because Skenes wasn’t coming off surgery. But the flamethrowing 22-year-old did face an innings limit in his first full pro season and made it to the finish line without being shut down.

The Pirates’ strategy involved having Skenes open the season in triple A, where he averaged 60 pitches over seven starts and went beyond the fifth inning only once. He made his major-league debut on May 11, and, other than an 11-day respite around the All-Star break, pitched with mostly five days’ rest. He topped 90 pitches in 18 of 23 starts and threw at least 100 nine times.

Oh, and he posted a 1.96 ERA and was a Cy Young Award finalist.

Skenes’ final tally: 27⅓ innings in triple A, 133 in the majors, which lined up with the Pirates’ plan before the season.

“The goal was that we wanted him to debut in 2025, and we wanted him to be in a position to be pitching at the end of the season,” Pirates general manager Ben Cherington said last week. “With those constraints, we decided that the only way to do that successfully was to slow-ramp it into the season.

“It wasn’t like, ‘It can be 150 [innings], but it can’t be 153.’ It was never like that. There was a range. He fell in that range. We don’t regret anything. In terms of what happened with Paul, it worked well, and he’s in a good spot going forward.”

In devising a plan for Painter, general manager Preston Mattingly said the Phillies are studying the comebacks of pitchers who had Tommy John surgery at a similar age and time of year.

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One example: Marlins righty Max Meyer. He had surgery on Aug. 9, 2022, at age 23 after two major-league starts, and missed the 2023 season. He worked 115 innings this past season between triple A and the majors but was shut down in September with shoulder bursitis.

Another: Rays righty Shane Baz. He had Tommy John surgery on Sept. 28, 2022, at age 23 after nine major-league starts, and missed the 2023 season. He didn’t return until May but pitched 118⅔ innings this past season, including 79⅓ in the majors.

“Everybody’s looking at the research that’s available,” Mattingly said. “It’s also a case-by-case basis. You see how Andy’s body moves, how he responds. I think it’s a little bit of everything.”

And it’s precisely the conversation the Phillies hoped to be having after Painter emerged from a recovery process that, as Mattingly put it, “went pretty much as we scripted it.”

“He’s had so much fun out here,” Brodzinski said. “He did all the bullpens and the live BPs, and that’s great. But the way it was able to line up that he was 100% ready to pitch in this environment, there’s a lot of confidence in the process that he went through and what he did to be healthy and ready to go into next season.

“I think he feels like, ‘Hey, I’m back.’”