PHILADELPHIA -- Somebody had to take the fall.
So, Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski called Rob Thomson early Tuesday morning and told him to stop by his office at Citizens Bank Park. Thomson knew then that he had lost his job. Thomson has been in baseball for more than 40 years. He knows the business. He might have had the highest winning percentage (.568) of any Phillies manager since 1900, he might have guided them to four consecutive postseasons, including the 2022 World Series, but this year’s team had a $300-million-plus payroll and a 9-19 record.
“This isn’t a blame game,” Dombrowski said. “You can blame whoever you choose. For us, we don’t really do that. Rob, like the rest of us, you bear responsibilities. Just the way things were going, they’re not going well enough. I don’t think we’re playing up to our capabilities. I think we’re a much better club than we played. And so you make some decisions that are tough at times.”
Dombrowski said last week he wasn’t thinking about a change. But on Sunday morning, just hours after the Phillies snapped a 10-game losing streak in Atlanta, he called former Boston manager Alex Cora and offered him Thomson’s job. They already had talked on Saturday night after Cora lost his job with Boston. Cora declined.
Dombrowski shifted to bench coach Don Mattingly, who was named interim manager. Mattingly, whose son Preston is the Phillies’ GM, kept Thomson’s coaching staff intact, including beleaguered hitting coach Kevin Long. Mattingly called Long “one of the best hitting coaches in baseball.” He promoted Dusty Wathan from third-base coach to bench coach. Triple-A Lehigh Valley manager Anthony Contreras was promoted to third-base coach.
“This time was the right time to get a different voice,” Dombrowski said.
Dombrowski made the same move in June 2022, when he fired Joe Girardi and replaced him with Thomson. The ’22 Phillies had a disconnect with Girardi. Thomson loosened up the clubhouse and the play improved. The Phils made the postseason for the first time since 2011. They won the NL pennant.
“Four years ago, he was the right voice for us,” Dombrowski said.
There wasn’t a disconnect between Thomson and his players -- certainly not compared to other managers over the years -- but this team played as poorly as any Phillies team in recent memory.
It was so bad that Dombrowski had three top advisors fly into Atlanta this weekend to help him assess the situation. It was highly unusual to have them together so early in the year.
“I said, I want to check myself,” Dombrowski said. “We have not played very well. Is this the type of club we are? Is this us?”
Dombrowski and his front office met at 1 p.m. Monday to talk more about it. They determined they had a talented team.
“It’s not age that has caught up to us,” he said. “Our guys are not aged out by any means.”
Dombrowski made the final decision to fire Thomson. He then offered the job to Mattingly.
Dombrowski said Phillies owner John Middleton played no role in the decision.
But it’s not just the manager, of course. There have been grumblings internally about the construction of the roster and its role in this. Rookie Felix Reyes hit cleanup in just his second game in the big leagues on April 21, an acknowledgment of how poorly the team’s right-handed-hitters have played.
It’s not a new issue. The Phillies tried to sign Bo Bichette in January to address it, but he landed with the Mets.
“Nobody’s performed as a cleanup hitter,” Dombrowski said. “We’ve had people that have performed in the past as cleanup hitters. They’re not doing that right now.”
But the Phillies also have been limited in what they can do because they had committed so much money to players like Nick Castellanos and Taijuan Walker, which had pushed them past the fourth luxury tax threshold. To sign Bichette, for example, the Phillies would have needed to clear payroll by not re-signing J.T. Realmuto and by trading Alec Bohm.
The Phillies released Castellanos in February. They’re paying him $19.2 million. The Phillies released Walker on Thursday. They’re paying him $15.3 million.
“No, I don’t have any regrets,” Dombrowski said about his roster construction. “I mean, if we play this way the rest of the year, I’ll have a lot of regrets at the end of the year. But I think we’re a lot better than this.”
Dombrowski said he feels great about the long-term future of the organization. Still, the Phillies’ farm system ranks among the bottom-third in baseball. The Phils have had only three players from the past five Drafts make MLB debuts with them: Justin Crawford, Orion Kerkering and Andrew Painter.
The average MLB team has had 8.9 players debut. Some of that is because the Phillies have had a World Series-caliber roster, making opportunities limited, while other teams like the White Sox are in a full rebuild.
But asked if the Phillies have the talent to fill a big need at the Trade Deadline, like a middle-of-the-order bat, Dombrowski said, “There’s no doubt that we do, yes. I get asked plenty about a lot of our players in the organization. ... There’s no question that we have that talent.”
But right now, it’s about the talent on the 26-man roster.
Can it bounce back under Mattingly? If so, how?
“It’s better baseball,” Mattingly said. “We haven’t been losing unluckily. We’ve contributed to that. We’ve got to play better baseball. ... This is a ‘we’ thing. This isn’t point-your-finger-at-one-thing and say, 'This is the solution.' The solution is play better than the other team.”