Phillies Sacrifice Manager To Appease Vengeful Baseball Gods

Rob Thomson, the unlikely skipper of the 2022 National League Champion Philadelphia Phillies, has fulfilled his most important function as manager. The Phillies are 9-19, tied for last place not only in the division, but also in the entire league. That’s unacceptable for a team with championship aspirations. So overboard Thomson goes. Bench coach Don Mattingly, father of Phillies GM Preston Mattingly and an experienced big league manager in his own right, will take the tiller for the foreseeable future.

This is the second managerial firing in four days, after Alex Cora’s ouster in Boston. Both cases involved a well-regarded and successful bench boss paying for the sins of a flawed roster. And just as some wondered why Cora lost his job when Craig Breslow had put a losing team together, 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 depicted him as the hot dog suit guy from I Think You Should Leave. That said, as much as I think the Phillies are suffering for roster construction reasons that were both foreseeable and avoidable, they’re not on a 52-win pace because the whole team got the yips over the winter. They’ve had some bad luck, and some bad performances, and most of all the vibes just stink.

You can’t trade all these bums in April. Nor can you tear up the front office root and branch; even if you could, it wouldn’t make a difference. Managers were born to be thrown under the bus in moments like this. No one knows this better than Thomson, who got this job in the first place when Joe Girardi started 22-29 in 2022.

This is the move you make, 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 was foundering in a storm, and the crew tossed him overboard so God would calm the seas. It worked, by the way. (Jonah is considered a prophet in all Abrahamic religions, which means more than half the world’s population believes that if your ship is sinking and you think one guy is harshing the vibe, it’s OK to throw him in the drink.)

I joke, but this isn’t the ending Thomson deserved, or at least hoped for. In his brief career as manager — after a lifetime spent in supporting roles for various teams — Thomson had one of the best regular-season records in baseball history. At least, until the 10-game losing streak that hastened his departure.

That wasn’t something Thomson openly aspired to; he fell into this job because Girardi had botched things so badly, and as bench coach he was the next man up. Had the Phillies not gone on a tear down the stretch — or even if they had gone on a tear but failed to make that surprising run to the World Series — Thomson intended to retire at the end of 2022.

Instead, he turned out to be the perfect manager for an oddly constructed ballclub. This Phillies team is built around experienced veterans, with strong starting pitching and more power than athleticism. It’s the worst job in the world for a fidgeter or a micromanager; this roster needed a lighter touch, especially in a Philadelphia sports environment that can go from ecstatic to toxic in one pitch.

Nobody understood the importance of that difference better than Thomson; ironically, few groups of people understand it less than Phillies fans, who want a leader they’ve heard of, and a boss who’s quick to reflect their anger when the team’s play is not up to standard.

In 2001, the Phillies hired Larry Bowa as their manager. Bowa had spent 12 seasons in Philadelphia as a player. He was a fixture on the dominant clubs of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and a coach on the pennant-winning 1993 team. Bowa, small in stature but big in personality, could not have been a better cultural fit for the fans. But he was a disappointment as a manager.

His replacement was Charlie Manuel, a laconic, slow-moving giant from Appalachia. He understood that any lineup that hit Jimmy Rollins and Chase Utley in front of Ryan Howard would outscore its opponent more often than not. So he ran that lineup out there every day, used the same sequence of relievers to protect every lead, won a World Series, and became a folk hero.

Thomson was Manuel’s spiritual successor. Anyone who lives and dies with each bump in a baseball season simply won’t survive until October. For most of four years, he was a calming, positive presence, which frustrated the public to some extent, but kept the team pulling in the same direction. He defended his players, almost to a fault; the well-publicized falling out with Nick Castellanos was an exception, but it also came at least a year after a less-patient manager would’ve 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.

The Castellanos situation, though, was the first sign that Thomson’s inveterately even-keeled management style was no longer fit for purpose. A few other cracks started to show. He contributed to a loss in Game 2 of last year’s NLDS with an indefensible and shockingly uncharacteristic 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’s just posted a double-digit losing streak. In a situation like this, patience looks like complacency.

Mattingly, ironically, is a much more experienced major league manager than Thomson, having spent five years managing the Dodgers and another seven with the Marlins. His stature as a player surely commands respect even among a star-studded roster like Philadelphia’s. (Though one need only look back to the late Ryne Sandberg’s disastrous tenure to know that’s not the whole ballgame.)

Mattingly was not, however, the first choice. Dombrowski first reached out to the newly unemployed Cora, with whom he’d collaborated 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 so doing, I think Cora did his old boss a favor. I think he would’ve been too far a swing in the other direction, to say nothing of the fact that since 2018, his record has been lacking. Most of the shine around Cora comes from his involvement in two World Series-winning teams (the 2017 Astros and 2018 Red Sox) that used the replay room to steal signs. From 2019 on, his record as a manager is 512-487, and he hasn’t finished higher than third in the AL East since 2021. I’m not convinced this is an Earl Weaver-in-waiting.

Is Mattingly the right man for the job, then? Depends on what the job is. He got plenty of criticism toward the end of his tenure with the Dodgers, but ultimately he got fired for the same reason Thomson did: This expensive team can’t get over the hump, and axing the manager is the first step on the checklist. A decade has passed since Mattingly left Clayton Kershaw in too long; not only has the game changed immeasurably since then, so too has Mattingly, one would presume.

If “the job” is to come in like Alexander the Great and inspire his men to impossible feats, Mattingly might or might not be up to that challenge. But a more accurate characterization of “the job” is: Be anyone but Rob Thomson. Dombrowski fired his manager to get the team to wake up; if that has the desired effect on morale, even an average manager could get this team back to a respectable level of performance.

After the 2007 season, Joe Torre walked away from contract negotiations with the Yankees to take a better offer with the Dodgers. He’s the only manager to win a World Series since 1990 who did not see his tenure end in one of the following two fashions: firing (or not having his contract renewed) or retirement. When Thomson reversed course on his decision to retire in 2022, he all but guaranteed that he’d meet the other fate sooner or later.

It’s an unbecoming end to a brief but successful managerial tenure, but a team that starts 9-19 can’t afford to be sentimental.