The sight was foreign but necessary. Daniel Bard navigated the Red Sox clubhouse on a few occasions over the past week, wielding what seemed like a foreign implement.

For the first time in his professional career, Bard (barring something that would deny him the opportunity to get to the plate in the early innings) will hit during the coming interleague series in Philadelphia. And so, the pitcher took batting practice this week in anticipation of his responsibility, and on several occasions, dragged a bat with him to and from batting practice with his fellow rotation members.

The task is not altogether unfamiliar. In the fall of 2005, after a sophomore season when Bard logged more than 150 combined innings for the University of North Carolina and then his Wareham team in Cape Cod, the decision was made that Bard would not pitch in deference to his workload. But instead of just having the future first-round pick sit idly, the team kept him engaged in the intrasquad games by letting him serve as a designated hitter for about 15 contests.

At the time, Bard decided to approach his task with a simple directive.

“I was trying to hit homers,” said Bard. “Kept it simple.”

At times, he succeeded in the task. Bard recalls hitting “a couple” of homers that fall, including one off of A’s right-hander Andrew Carignan, a 2007 fifth-rounder who reached the majors last year.

“I always rub it in his face. I homered off a big leaguer,” Bard said. “To his credit, it was a 3-0 pitch. He was just trying to get back in the count. [But] he threw hard, over 90.”

In some respects, Bard’s approach as a hitter that fall was a prelude to his success at the start of his big league career as a pitcher. On the mound, he held little back, unleashing his high-90s fastball and a wipeout slider to attack opponents with the sort of blunt power achieved by few others.

The formula was as simple as it was successful. Yet Bard has had to refine his approach at the game’s highest level. That process has been accelerated this year out of necessity, as the grip-it-and-rip-it approach that suits a reliever is no longer viable in his new role as a member of the Red Sox rotation.

“I first got called up to the big leagues, I didn’t know how to pitch. I think I had a lot of God-given ability and confidence that allowed me to succeed out of the gate,” said Bard (now 2-4 with a 4.38 ERA in six starts). “Basically, I learned to pitch at this level. Pitching more innings as a starter has forced me to pitch. You see guys three times in one day, very few hitters in this league can you get out in the same way. It’s forced me to get a little creative.”

A lot of that creativity derives from the usual sorts of analytical conversations with a pitching coach and catchers. But from his new vantage point of watching games from the dugout, Bard realized that there was an entirely different category of player from whom he could learn.

Long before he started taking batting practice this season, Bard started to pick the brains of position players on the Red Sox. In order to understand how to attack hitters, he wanted to get inside the minds of hitters.

“I’ve learned more about hitting in the last two months than I had in the last five years,” Bard said. “I sit in the dugout and I talk to [Adrian Gonzalez], I talk to David [Ortiz], and I’m like, ‘What do you think if you see a first-pitch changeup? How does that affect the rest of the at-bat?’ Gonzo said, ‘It screws me up for the rest of the at-bat because I have to recognize that.’ …

“I’ve talked to [hitting coach Dave Magadan] some. We were watching some video. I’d thrown a pitch to a hitter, I don’t know who it was, but he took a really weak first-pitch swing. I turned from the computer to Mags and asked, ‘What is he thinking right there?’ He explained it to me.

“It just didn’t make sense to me. Why would a guy take such a feeble two-strike swing at a first-pitch fastball, a guy who was a home run hitter, a left-handed hitter? I had never really thought of that stuff before.”

Interestingly, Bard’s new role has exposed him to a different side of the game. The conversations with position players like Gonzalez and Ortiz were all but impossible in the past, since Bard would head to the bullpen at the start of the game with the rest of his fellow relievers.

In many ways, the bullpen is the most insular part of a team. It will interact with the members of the rotation in pre-series meetings to discuss the scouting reports on the opposing team as well as during the daily pitchers’ stretching sessions.

But for the most part, the opportunities for interacting with position players are few. And so the way in which relievers typically come to understand hitting is informed not by those who are expert at that task (hitters), but instead by those whose primary responsibility is to neutralize hitters in the late innings.

“Being in the bullpen, you’re only talking to pitchers. We all think very similarly. I think when you talk to hitters, it’s different,” said Bard. “[Sox catcher Kelly] Shoppach said he wishes pitchers could get a few at-bats every spring training just to realize how hard it is to hit a well-located fastball. Guys are afraid to throw their fastball down the middle at the knees, afraid it’s going to get whacked. No. You see 94 at the knees, it’s a difficult pitch to hit.

“Granted,” Bard added, “hitters are really good at it. But as a reliever, we don’t talk to hitters that way. We cross them in the clubhouse.”

No longer. For Bard, this season has offered a new role and a new group of teammates from whom to further his baseball education. That may influence the quality of his trips to the plate, but its significance will be ever greater on Friday as he tries to shut down the Phillies lineup from the mound.