PHILADELPHIA — For a few minutes Monday afternoon, they all pretended it was normal still. Bryce Harper, standing near first base, fielded grounders and flipped them to interim manager Don Mattingly. Alec Bohm lunged for balls near the third base bag. Bryson Stott and Trea Turner practiced their double-play turns.Then, a little after 4 p.m. ET, they met as a group on the mound at an empty Citizens Bank Park. As the group dispersed, Harper found Stott and they slapped hands. He hugged him. Then, Stott sauntered over to third base.This was the last night it would look like it had for the last three and a half seasons. Beginning Tuesday, when Luis Arraez joins the Phillies, they will attempt a risky gambit with few comparisons. Three regulars will change positions midseason. Stott will play third, a position where he’s logged 83 innings in professional baseball. Harper will play the outfield for the first time in 1,571 days. And Bohm will go to first base, a somewhat familiar spot for him.It was a complicated maneuver at another Phillies trade deadline designed to undo mistakes from the previous offseason.“I mean, we all want to win,” Stott said. “So whatever’s asked of us is going to happen. It should not be lost that our superstar first baseman and two-time MVP is willing to move. When you’re on a team and you see a guy do that, what are you going to say? No, I’m not moving? So I think that just shows who we are as a team.”Who won and lost the MLB trade deadline?Andy McCullough and Johnny SweetOn the ground level, that was how the Phillies interpreted a weird trade deadline. Arraez is the best hitter the Phillies have added to a team midseason under president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski. He might have been the best hitter traded at this deadline. That counts for something.But the gymnastics — both physical and mental — required to believe in Arraez and the positional shifts as difference-making changes for the Phillies are daunting. It requires a modicum of faith to think that one of the worst defensive teams in the sport cannot be worse with a radical realignment. It requires all of the pitchers on the roster to remain healthy for the next few months because the Phillies did not augment their rotation and added two relievers who might help but don’t profile as late-inning October options.It requires Harper, who has long lobbied the front office for a midseason shift back to right field if the right conditions manifested, to handle a tougher position on his body. For years, Dombrowski had dismissed the idea of Harper leaving the dirt. “I know everybody thinks it’s crap when I say it,” Harper said, “but it’s not.” Harper probably did not envision it happening to accommodate the club’s longtime third baseman who is having a career-worst season.“We’ve never been in the position, really, to seriously consider it,” Dombrowski said. “Because it really hasn’t been a necessity. In this situation, his volunteering opened up the door for us to go ahead and get an infielder. If he didn’t want to go to the outfield, we wouldn’t have been able to add another infielder at this point.”It begs the question: What would Dombrowski have accomplished at the deadline had Harper not been willing to move?Monday afternoon, as everyone processed the widespread change, something unexpected emerged. Harper did early work in the infield and the outfield with pep. Shortstop Trea Turner stood beside Stott as he took six or so grounders at third base.“Did you see my first throw?” Stott said, excitedly.It was a decent one that the 65-year-old Mattingly snared before it touched dirt. Stott hadn’t made that throw in years.Bryce Harper takes infield practice Monday. He hasn’t played in the outfield since undergoing Tommy John surgery in 2022. (Trevor Hayes / MLB Photos via Getty Images)Within the organization, there was some thought to the newness positively affecting a group of players who sometimes appear to be going through the motions. The Phillies have tried the same thing again and again. It has resulted in a lot of success, but also so much pain.“There’s some energy,” Phillies infield coach Bobby Dickerson said. “It brings some new, added challenges. But great players love challenges.”Mattingly texted Stott Monday morning, within an hour of the Arraez trade being leaked, and told him how it would go. Stott might not have liked it. But he understood.Then he sent a text to Dickerson.“Let’s go to work,” Stott wrote.Harper walked onto the outfield grass at 3:25 p.m. to have a catch with Paco Figueroa, the team’s first-base coach who oversees the outfielders. They started at 60 feet, then 90 feet and all the way out to 120 feet. It lasted 10 minutes and it was the beginning of an experiment the Phillies will embark on with no way of knowing how it will go.Harper is the only one in this arrangement who is moving up the defensive spectrum. Stott and Bohm are moving to less strenuous spots. Bohm might need footwork improvement at first and doesn’t have the range Harper does there. But Harper has not played a great first base this season. Stott, whom the Phillies believe is far better than some of the defensive metrics that have dinged him, has regressed a tick or two.The Phillies can have reasonable expectations for what Stott and Bohm will do on the corners. But Harper in right field? Anyone’s guess. He will do it for the remainder of this season, then return to first base in 2027.For now, Dombrowski said the front office believes the Phillies “have a chance to be” better on defense. That is a bold proclamation.“Arraez, we think, is a pretty equal situation at second base,” Dombrowski said. “We like Stott at third base. He’s been a good third baseman when he’s played there before. It’ll take him a little while to get up to it. And we like Bohm at first base.”Dave Dombrowski gave Alec Bohm a vote of confidence in explaining the post-trade realignment. (Emilee Chinn / Getty Images)There is some irony in Harper moving to the outfield to keep Bohm in the lineup; the Phillies thought they were close to replacing Bohm in January when they were negotiating a massive contract with Bo Bichette before he signed with the New York Mets. They have floated Bohm in trade talks over the past two winters. The Phillies explored trading him again, said several league sources granted anonymity for their candor, in the days leading up to Monday’s deadline. They instead doubled down again on Bohm.Bohm was miscast as the team’s cleanup hitter. He will be a free agent after the season, and will likely be playing elsewhere in 2027. He’s had a disappointing season.“Well, he’s also got close to 60 RBIs and 13 or 14 homers,” Dombrowski said. “I know frustrations can rise when you see it. It was a good point from one of our scouts: When you see a player every day, you have a tendency to look at their downside. But if you compare his numbers, how many guys have more RBIs than he does? And that’s an important part of the club. So we think he’s a good player.”Bohm entered the day ranked 146th out of 150 qualified position players in FanGraphs’ WAR.They are who they are. The trade deadline wasn’t changing that. The club never discussed moving Turner from shortstop; that is a chat for the offseason. If anything, Dombrowski displayed an unusual level of creativity with the Arraez trade.Dombrowski read Harper’s comments, made to The Athletic and MLB.com early last week, about bringing his outfield glove with him on the road trip in case the Phillies made a trade. Dombrowski had Mattingly speak to Harper about it at some point during the road trip. Mattingly reported back to the front office something similar to what Harper had told the two reporters.He was serious about it.Harper texted Dombrowski on Sunday night to reiterate his stance with less than 24 hours until the deadline. The Phillies, at that point, were deep into negotiations with the San Francisco Giants for Arraez. Harper said he didn’t know that; Dombrowski said Harper mentioned Arraez’s name as part of his message saying that he’d move.“I’m in a spot in my career where, obviously, I don’t have to do that. Right?” Harper said. “I don’t have to go and play in a different position when I’m very comfortable at first base. I love first base. I love being on the infield. It’s something I’m doing just for the team. And that’s how I feel about that. … But I want to win. I want to win more than anybody. Hopefully it helps. I think it’s helped us obviously get the guy that we needed.”Derek Hill’s grand slam powered the Phillies to a comeback win on the night of the trade deadline. (Eric Hartline / Imagn Images)Harper will be the only everyday outfielder. The Phillies will run outfield platoons in left and center for the remainder of the season. Derek Hill, who will platoon with Justin Crawford in center, bashed a go-ahead grand slam in Monday night’s 6-3 win over the Washington Nationals and made an outstanding catch in the following inning.Hill was a solid trade acquisition in June. He is having a career season, and it’s hard to know how much longer that lasts. (Three months, or so, would be fine by the Phillies.) Bryan De La Cruz was in the minors for the first three months of this season, and he’s a well-traveled veteran with a middling career like Hill. But De La Cruz will figure prominently into the plans moving forward as the left fielder against lefty pitchers.“When we looked at it, we’ve been happy with the job that De La Cruz has done,” Dombrowski said. “We feel he’s earned that opportunity. And when we compared him to other people that would be out there and available, we like him.”There was only so much Dombrowski could say aloud after the deadline. The Phillies would have liked to make more improvements, but they were either unwilling or unable to meet the prices. “Both,” Dombrowski said. Other contenders made more aggressive moves. Some contenders were more passive than the Phillies.So Arraez, a polarizing player over the years, will join a polarizing roster that is pushing the same boulder up that same hill. Except, now, it’s going to look a little different.Maybe there is something to a new challenge. Harper, on his final night as a first baseman this season, smashed a two-run homer into the bushes beyond the center-field wall.“Any chance that we have an opportunity to win, I’d do anything for this organization,” Harper said. “And they know that.”