PHILADELPHIA – Two days after the Phillies’ season ended on Oct. 1, Dave Dombrowski and Don Mattingly met in Dombrowski’s office at Citizens Bank Park to discuss the season and the future.
They talked for two hours.
Mattingly replaced Rob Thomson as the interim manager on April 28. He guided the Phils to the fourth-best record in MLB the rest of the season, and a fifth consecutive postseason appearance, despite a mediocre offense and a leaky bullpen and defense.
“One of the things I told him right off the bat is how good a job he did and how much I liked him, and that he was a leading candidate by all means to come back,” Dombrowski said on Thursday morning.
Mattingly is back, although he probably wasn’t the first choice.
Dombrowski first offered Thomson’s job to Alex Cora on April 26. Cora declined. Dombrowski contacted Cora again after the season, but Cora told Dombrowski he had no plans to manage in 2027. (No job offer was made, according to a source.) Dombrowski later contacted other managerial candidates, including former Phillies players Chase Utley and Raul Ibanez, according to The Athletic.
In the end, Dombrowski offered the job to Mattingly. He signed a two-year contract last Saturday.
“I never felt slighted,” Mattingly said.
Dombrowski said he contacted other candidates because MLB requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate for managerial and front office jobs. Dombrowski, however, asked the Commissioner’s Office to bypass that process in Oct. 2022, when he removed Thomson’s interim tag before the NL Division Series against Atlanta.
“If Dave thought that [another candidate] was the best moving forward, then I was going to be good with that,” Mattingly said. “I have a lot of confidence in myself. I don't talk like that, but I know inside how I handle the club, how I do things. I’m confident in the way I go about my business. Probably not always perfect, but I'm pretty confident. I don't have the ego that says I have to be whatever. I don't. I just don't need it. I was a 19th-round pick [in 1979]. I got passed over by a lot of guys before [the Yankees] drafted me. So there were a lot of players that I was behind.”
Now, Mattingly will try to make his own mark on the Phillies.
“Last year really wasn't my team,” he said.
Per multiple sources, he and Dombrowski agreed to dismiss hitting coach Kevin Long and infield coach Bobby Dickerson, hoping new voices will help. The Phillies hired former Mets manager Carlos Mendoza to be the new third-base coach and infield coach. They’re still looking for a hitting coach.
“I think August tells you what we can be, and I hate that it was an outlier because you feel like it could be all the time,” said Mattingly, referring to a month in which the Phillies ranked as one of the best teams in baseball with a 21-7 record. “That month showed that we can control the zone. We can swing at strikes. We can take our walks. We can we can do team-wide damage that way.
“If you said, ‘What do you want to be?’ That's what I want to be.”
Mattingly said he wants to put an emphasis on defense, baserunning and the “little things” that win games.
“Playing the game clean, playing it right, doing all the little things,” he said. “Those are things that you get a chance to really push on in Spring Training and try to get your message across through your work and how you go about it. … If you ask me what kind of club, I want a club that plays faster. I think we have speed that we don't use. I feel like we play a little cautious.
“I think part of that is the offensive side. It creates an identity of what we can be in different areas. So, do we need to score in different ways? Does it just have to be hard from [Kyle Schwarber], hitting a homer, driving in runs? I think we can do it a lot of different ways. It's nice when you get the homer and you drive in runs like that, but I feel like to be sustainable throughout the course of the year and into the playoffs, you’ve got to be able to find different ways to score.
"When watching playoff games, you're seeing the teams, they fight, they foul off balls, they create more opportunity and then they break through. So I feel like that's what I would want us to be. Can we be that? We'll see.”