Phillies Manager Sacrifices To Appease Avenging Baseball Gods

Rob Thomson, the captain of the expected 2022 National League champion Philadelphia Phillies, has accomplished his most important job as a manager. The Phillies are 9-19, tied for last place not only in the division, but in the entire league. That is unacceptable for a team with championship aspirations. So Thomson leaves. Bench coach Don Mattingly, who is the father of Phillies GM Preston Mattingly and an experienced major league manager himself, will take over as a farmhand for the foreseeable future.

This is the second sacking of managers in four days, after Alex Cora was fired in Boston. Both cases involved a well-regarded and successful bench manager paying for the sins of a flawed roster. And just as some were wondering why Cora lost his job while Craig Breslow put together a losing team, fingers across the Delaware Valley are pointing to president of baseball ops Dave Dombrowski as much as Thomson.

Including mine, for what it’s worth; just last week i showed him as the guy in the hot dog suit from I think you should go. That said, as much as I think the Phillies suffered due to unforeseen and avoidable roster reasons, they’re not at 52 wins because the rest of the team got the yips in the winter. They’ve had bad luck, and bad performances, and most of the vibes stink.

You can’t trade all these bombs in April. And you can’t cut through the root of the front office and the branch; even if you did, it wouldn’t make a difference. Managers are born to be thrown under the bus at times like this. No one knows this better than Thomson, who got the job originally when Joe Girardi went 22-29 in 2022.

This is the movement you are making, and has been for thousands of years. How did Jonah find himself in the belly of that whale in the first place? He was on a ship that created a storm, and the sailors threw him into the sea so that God would calm the sea. It worked, by the way. (Jonah is considered a prophet in all of the Abrahamic religions, which means that more than half of the world’s population believes that if your ship is sinking and you think there’s a guy who’s hurting the vibe, it’s okay to throw him in the drink.)

Just kidding, but this is not the end Thomson deserved, or at least the one we were hoping for. In his short career as a manager — after spending the rest of his career in supporting roles for various teams — Thomson had the best regular season record in baseball history. At least, until a 10-game losing streak hastened his departure.

That was not something Thomson openly desired; he fell into the job because Girardi had gotten things wrong, and as a bench coach he was the next man up. If the Phillies hadn’t continued to collapse — even if they had been on a tear but failed to make a spectacular run to the World Series — Thomson would have intended to retire at the end of 2022.

Instead, he became the perfect manager of an oddly structured ballclub. This Phillies team is built around experienced veterans, strong first basemen and more than athletic ability. It’s the worst job in the world for a fidgeter or a micromanager; this show needs a light touch, especially in a Philadelphia sports scene that can go from ecstatic to toxic in one place.

No one understood the importance of that distinction better than Thomson; ironically, there are few groups of people who understand it less than Phillies fans, who want a leader they’ve never heard of, and a manager who is quick to show his anger when the team’s play is not up to par.

In 2001, the Phillies hired Larry Bowa as their manager. Bowa spent 12 seasons in Philadelphia as a player. He was a dominant club player in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and coach of the 1993 penalty shootout team. Bowa, small in body but with a big personality, could not have been in a better culture for the fans. But he was disappointed as a manager.

In his place was Charlie Manuel, a laconic, slow-moving giant from Appalachia. You mean any system that has Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley in front of Ryan Howard will outscore their opponent over and over again. So he ran that lineup every day, used the same sequence of shortstops to protect every leadoff hitter, won the World Series, and became a folk hero.

Thomson was Manuel’s spiritual successor. Anyone who lives and dies by every bump in the baseball season just won’t live until October. For many four years, he was a calm, righteous person, who frustrated the public to some extent, but kept the group pulling in the same direction. He protected his players, it was almost a mistake; the well-publicized feud with Nick Castellanos was an exception, but it also came at least a year after the less-than-impatient manager had a public meltdown over the situation. And when the levee finally broke, it seemed like most of the clubhouse was on Thomson’s side.

Castellanos’ situation, however, was the first sign that Thomson’s long-range keeled management style was no longer effective. A few more cracks began to appear. He contributed to the loss in Game 2 of last year’s NLDS with an unguardable and shocking ninth-inning bunt call. It was the first time I’d seen him give in to the pressure to try something.

But after a 9-19 start, that pressure is irresistible. You can’t ask the public to have faith in a team that just posted a double-digit losing streak. In a situation like this, patience looks like complacency.

Surprisingly, ironically, he is a more experienced major league manager than Thomson, who has spent five years managing the Dodgers and seven with the Marlins. His stature as a player commands respect even among a star-studded roster like Philadelphia’s. (Though one need only look back at Ryne Sandberg’s disastrous tenure to know that it’s not all football.)

However, Mattingly was not the first choice. Dombrowski first contacted the recently out-of-work Cora, with whom he had partnered on the World Series-winning 2018 Red Sox. (Not that anyone asked, but the 2018 Red Sox were, for my money, the best team of the 21st Century.) Cora turned him down.

And in doing so, I think Cora is doing her old boss a favor. I think he would have gone too far in the other direction, to say nothing of the fact that as of 2018, his record has been lacking. Most of the light surrounding Cora comes from his involvement in two World Series winning teams (the 2017 Astros and the 2018 Red Sox) that used the playroom to steal signs. From 2019 onward, his record as a manager is 512-487, and he has not finished higher than third in the AL East since 2021. Not sure if this is Earl Weaver-in-waiting.

Is Mattingly the right man for the job? It depends on what the job is. He received a lot of criticism toward the end of his tenure with the Dodgers, but he was ultimately fired for the same reason Thomson was: This expensive team can’t get over the hump, and firing a manager is the first step on the checklist. It’s been a decade since Mattingly left Clayton Kershaw for so long; Not only has the game changed immeasurably since then, so has Mattingly, one would imagine.

If “the job” is to step in like Alexander the Great and motivate his men to do the impossible, Mattingly can or will rise to the challenge. But the more accurate aspect of “career” is: Be anyone but Rob Thomson. Dombrowski fired his manager so the team could wake up; if that has the necessary effect on morale, even a middle manager can restore this group to a respectable level of performance.

After the 2007 season, Joe Torre left contract negotiations with the Yankees to take a better offer with the Dodgers. He is the only World Series-winning manager since 1990 who did not see his tenure end in one of two fashions: firing (or not having his contract renewed) or retirement. When Thomson reversed his decision to retire in 2022, he ensured that he would meet another fate sooner or later.

It’s an unfortunate end to a short but successful tenure, but a team off to a 9-19 start can’t be complacent.