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I wrote up three teams playing badly last week, and two of them have fired their managers...just not the one I think should have.
The Phillies let go of Rob Thomson, who shepherded the team to four straight playoff appearances and a 96-66 record just one year ago, replacing him with bench coach Don Mattingly. Whereas I could see a number of reasons for the Red Sox to fire Alex Cora, few, if any, of those are in place in Philadelphia. Thomson had a long track record of success, going 346-251 in three-plus seasons running the Phils, with four playoff appearances. The team he has in place wasn’t much changed from the one he’s been handling for years, whereas Cora was navigating, and not well, an influx of young players. The Phillies, with their old core, are at the end of a successful arc, while the Red Sox, off their first playoff appearance since 2021, are starting theirs.
I just don’t see how fault for the Phillies’ slow start to the season should be placed on Thomson. The front office didn’t do much to build on last year’s core. Nick Castellanos was replaced by Adolis Garcia (87 OPS+), and Johan Rojas by Justin Crawford (81 OPS+), Zack Wheeler had Taijuan Walker (7.81 FIP) stand in for a month. Wheeler, J.T. Realmuto, and Jhoan Duran have all missed time, replaced by bad players. Alec Bohm and Bryson Stott played under Thomson from 2022 through 2025, and now we think their failure to hit for a month is on the manager?
It just seems like a panic move. Let me also circle back to something I wrote Sunday.
All too often when a team fires the manager, it hands the job to the guy sitting two feet to the left of the manager, and nothing much changes. I’ve never understood the idea that you want the manager gone but will gladly give the reins to the manager’s bobo.
Now, Don Mattingly hasn’t been in Philadelphia long enough to be considered Thomson’s bobo, but this is the same thinking, passing the job to the guy just down the bench. It kills me to write this, as he’s my favorite player ever, but there’s no reason to give Don Mattingly a managerial job in 2026. He had the Dodgers just as they were transitioning to being THE DODGERS. He was exposed as a poor tactician during the team’s playoff runs in the middle of the decade, then moved on to Miami, where his teams never reached 80 wins in a season and finished over .500 just once, in the pandemic year. He served in a variety of roles for the Blue Jays from 2023-25, including as bench coach during the team’s run to the World Series last year.
This is just a strange, underwhelming decision, change for the sake of change. Mattingly hasn’t run a good team in more than a decade (2020 never counts). He wasn’t a particularly good manager in either of his jobs. He’s replacing a manager who has basically never failed in the job. I’d be remiss to not mention that Mattingly’s son, Preston, is the Phillies’ general manager.
Now, that’s all analysis. Let me show you where we’re headed. The Phillies just got Zack Wheeler back and jettisoned Walker; Duran and Realmuto will be back soon. After playing the eighth-toughest schedule in baseball to date, they’ll now play the Giants, Marlins, A’s and Rockies, with three of those series at home. You can see the mid-May headlines now: “Phillies Surge Thanks To Donnie Baseball,” “Phils 11-2 Under New Management.” The Phillies were always going to regress towards their median, no matter the manager. Now? It will be a post hoc fallacy rumspringa.
