Phillies get back to 'better baseball' with interim skip Mattingly at helm

PHILADELPHIA -- Don Mattingly said in January that he had no desire to manage a baseball team again.

That changed this week.

“Because, Dave asked,” Mattingly said before the Phillies' 7-0 victory over the Giants on Tuesday night at Citizens Bank Park.

Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski dismissed Rob Thomson as manager on Tuesday morning, replacing him with Mattingly. He will be the interim manager through the end of the season.

• Interim manager and ... father of the GM? Mattinglys form historical combo for Phils

Mattingly used the phrase “better baseball” several times on Tuesday afternoon in his first public comments following Dombrowski’s decision to shake up a 9-19 team into playing better baseball.

“It’s all coming back to what?” Mattingly said. “Better baseball.”

The Phillies played better baseball that night. Jesús Luzardo entered the game with a 6.91 ERA, but he pitched seven scoreless innings, allowing two hits and striking out eight. He is the first Phillies’ pitcher to complete seven innings this season.

Bryce Harper, Adolis García and Alec Bohm each doubled. Bohm had two hits. He entered the game with the lowest OPS (.412) in the Majors. Trea Turner logged his first four-hit game of the season as the 2025 National League batting champ entered the game batting .230 with a .658 OPS.

The Phils played clean defense.

“You know, when you have this type of talent, it’s there and it’s coming,” Mattingly said. “You could feel this coming.”

It was fun. It was needed. But it wasn’t an easy day.

“It’s tough, man,” Turner said. “I know Rob's in charge of us and he's managing us, but we’ve got to go out there and play baseball. He's not the one fielding ground balls, making pitches. He’s not losing those games out there. It's us, and we’ve got to play better. I guess that's the business side or how it works. But it's not fun to be a part of this. Nobody wanted this. But sometimes change could be a good thing, and hopefully we roll with it and play a lot better baseball."

This whole experience is new for Turner and Luzardo. They’ve never had a manager fired in-season before.

“It’s definitely tough to see Topper go,” Luzardo said.

Schwarber has experienced this, of course. He was here when Dombrowski fired Joe Girardi and replaced him with Thomson in June 2022.

“We feel responsible, obviously,” Schwarber said. “I think that he should be remembered for a lot of great things that went on here, for taking us to the World Series, bringing us to the playoffs every single year and being a really good person, a really good manager. So we feel awful.”

Mattingly has experienced these feelings as a player, too. He played for the Yankees for 14 years. He played for nine managers, including four in-season changes. The Yankees fired Dallas Green, who led the Phils to the 1980 World Series, in the middle of the ‘89 campaign.

“I think if you’re realistic and you look in the mirror,” Mattingly said, “you know you haven’t performed. And I think whatever the situation with the manager, when this happens, I don’t know if you feel guilt, but you know you haven’t performed. Especially if you’re a team that I think you know you can perform. If you’re a team that’s not that caliber, then it may be different. But I think if you truly look in the mirror at this club, we know we haven't performed to what we're capable of to this point.”

Tuesday, the Phillies hit the reset button. Nobody knows where they will go from here, but Mattingly believes they can turn this thing around. He managed the Dodgers in 2013. They were 31-42 and 9 1/2 games out of first place on June 22. They went 61-28 the rest of the way to win the NL West by 11 games over the D-backs.

“We have that kind of talent,” he said.