Phillies fire Rob Thomson after 9-19 start; Don Mattingly named interim manager

Rob Thomson is out as Phillies manager.

Four years after getting his long-awaited first chance to lead a team and steering the Phillies to a World Series, Thomson was fired Tuesday amid a 9-19 tailspin that included a 10-game skid and the worst overall run differential (minus-54) in baseball, all from a team with the sport’s fifth-highest payroll.

Don Mattingly, hired before this season as bench coach, will take over for Thomson on an interim basis through the 2026 season. The iconic former Yankees star has extensive managerial experience, most recently for the Marlins in 2022, but said in January that he wasn’t interested in managing again.

Speculation will persist, then, that Mattingly is merely keeping the seat warm for Alex Cora, who partnered with Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski to win the World Series in Boston in 2018 and got axed by the Red Sox on Saturday night.

» READ MORE: Hayes: Thank fired Phillies manager Rob Thomson for all the winning but don’t blame him for the flawed roster

But Cora isn’t interested in managing again this season, a source close to him said Tuesday. He prefers to spend the summer at home in Puerto Rico with his family, including twin sons who turn 9 in July.

Thomson, 62, a mild-mannered Canadian and baseball lifer — “Topper” to his players and staff — skippered the Phillies to a 355-270 record, four consecutive playoff appearances, and back-to-back National League East titles after replacing deposed Joe Girardi on June 3, 2022.

Last winter, the Phillies extended Thomson’s contract through 2027. He owns the highest winning percentage (.568) of any Phillies manager since 1900. Earlier this month, he reached 350 career wins faster than any manager in club history.

And his downfall happened just as quickly.

Two weeks ago, on April 13, the Phillies trounced the Cubs, 13-7, at Citizens Bank Park. They lost the next 10 games by a combined 69-26. Last Tuesday, in the midst of that skid, Dombrowski offered a vote of confidence for Thomson, saying there was “nothing to ponder at this point” about a managerial change.

But the losing continued. The Phillies are off to their worst 28-game start since 2002. They have dropped six consecutive series. After bowing again Sunday in Atlanta, they slid to 10½ games behind the NL East-leading Braves, their largest deficit in the division in April since 1997.

It wasn’t what anyone, least of all owner John Middleton, expected from a $317 million roster.

Something had to give.

But a managerial change still feels like whiplash for the Phillies, who leaned in to extreme continuity during Thomson’s tenure. The core of the roster — Bryce Harper, J.T. Realmuto, Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, Kyle Schwarber, and Trea Turner — hasn’t changed, even as the players aged into their 30s. Thomson’s coaching staff stayed intact, too, year after year, save for the addition of Mattingly.

The walls seemed to close in on Thomson over the weekend when Dombrowski invited three trusted lieutenants — pro scouts David Chadd, Charley Kerfeld, and Brad Sloan — to meet the team in Atlanta and encouraged them to spend time in the dugout and the clubhouse before and after games.

And the noise around Thomson only grew louder Saturday night after Cora got fired. Dombrowski hired Cora with the Red Sox in October 2017, and they remain close.

Thomson addressed speculation about his status after Sunday’s game in Atlanta.

“That’s natural, right?” he said. “It’s normal. I’ve never worried about that in my entire career. I worked for a guy [George Steinbrenner] for 28 years that, as the Seinfeld episode will tell you, he fires people like it’s a bodily function. And it never bothered me. It didn’t.

“I don’t have time to think about it. I’m a person that thinks about other people and what can I do to help them, and it’s out of my control. So, that’s where I’m at.”

» READ MORE: Dave Dombrowski is ‘responsible’ for this reeling Phillies roster. And these decisions helped get them here.

With Mattingly taking over for Thomson, Dusty Wathan will move from third-base coach to bench coach. Anthony Contreras, who managed in triple A since 2022, will take over the third-base coaching duties.

Mattingly, who turned 65 earlier this month, said in January that he believed his days as a manager “passed me by.” His son, Preston, is the Phillies’ general manager.

“I see the energy it takes to deal with the media twice a day, to have the conversations with players,” Mattingly said. “You’ve got the front office, dealing with that aspect. It just never really stops. I’m assuming Rob’s phone’s ringing when he’s home during the offseason.

“I look at myself and say, ‘I don’t think I have the energy for that anymore.’”

The Phillies’ stunning futility isn’t as much a reflection of Thomson’s ability to reach the players or devise solutions as an indictment of Dombrowski’s roster construction. Most notably, the Phillies rank 29th, 25th, and 27th in OPS from the Nos. 4, 5, and 6 spots in the lineup. Their right-handed hitters have a .505 OPS against left-handed pitching, which would be the lowest mark for any team since the 1918 Red Sox.

With the Phillies facing Braves ace lefty Chris Sale on Sunday, Thomson stacked the lineup with right-handed hitters, including rookie left fielder Felix Reyes and utility man Dylan Moore, who made his first start of the season in center field. The Phillies got only one hit against Sale and two hits in all.

It turned out to be Thomson’s last lineup.

Dombrowski signaled that he knew the Phillies needed a middle-of-the-order right-handed bat in January, when he threw $200 million at free agent Bo Bichette. Yet after Bichette took a shorter-term, higher-salary offer from the Mets, the Phillies simply re-signed Realmuto and stuck with third baseman Alec Bohm, both right-handed hitters.

Bohm, the opening-day cleanup hitter, has been especially brutal. He has barreled one ball all season and is batting .083 against fastballs. Righty-hitting Adolis Garcia strikes out almost one-third of the time. Top prospect Aidan Miller might have been a consideration to help the lineup, but he hasn’t swung a bat since February because of a lower back injury.

» READ MORE: The numbers show that the Phillies run of ‘bad luck’ is largely stemming from poor defense

The Phillies’ best attempt to add right-handed power came 10 days ago, when they called up Reyes. A 25-year-old late bloomer who doesn’t appear on many external prospect lists, Reyes homered in his first major league at-bat April 18 against Sale in Citizens Bank Park. Since then, he’s 2-for-17 with two singles.

After Sunday’s loss, Thomson acknowledged the weakness from the right side of the plate and said the Phillies must “fix that somehow.”

It’s no longer his problem.

“As a player, you feel responsible,” Schwarber said Sunday of the possibility that Thomson or others could lose their jobs. “We’re the ones who are out there. We’re taking at-bats, we’re playing defense, we’re pitching. We’re doing it all, and all of our coaches are here to support and to put us in the best positions that we can.”

Thomson’s dismissal after 28 games represents the earliest the Phillies have fired a manager since they dumped Nick Leyva after 13 games in 1991. Dombrowski waited 51 games in 2022 before replacing Girardi with Thomson. He said he typically takes until about the 40-game mark to make judgments about his personnel.

But the depth of the Phillies’ problems — and perhaps Cora’s unexpected availability — sped up the process.

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Hunter Pence's 368-day stint with the Phillies was a study in extremes. Acquired at the trade deadline in 2011 as the missing right-handed bat for a World Series contender, he got dealt a year later by an underachieving team. And with the Phillies in full-on crisis mode this week, Pence sits down with "Phillies Extra," the Inquirer's baseball podcast, to discuss how quickly a team's fortunes can change. Watch here.

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