Jake MintzSenior writerWed, April 29, 2026 at 2:23 AM UTC·6 min readPHILADELPHIA — Rob Thomson watched the Phillies on Tuesday.
For the 62-year-old baseball lifer, it was a familiar activity in an unfamiliar setting. Since 2018, no other human being on the planet has seen more of the Philadelphia Phillies in person. It’s 1,222 games to be exact — 38 more if you count the postseason, countless more if you include those humdrum, sun-drenched, spring training exhibitions.
He experienced all of those early afternoons and late nights — 597 as bench coach, 625 as manager — in more or less the same fashion: on the top step of a dugout, in baseball pants, with a focused scowl in his eyes and a lineup card in his back pocket.
But Tuesday was different because Thomson was at home, presumably not in baseball pants, following the Phillies on TV, with the NHL playoffs on a second screen like the Canadian he is.
Thomson was fired Tuesday morning, the only possible scapegoat for his now-former ballclub’s abysmal 9-19 start. The Phillies, participants in the past four Octobers, entered this season with expectations to match. Instead, the team got cold fast, trudging through an April from hell. At one point, they dropped 10 straight. Eventually, the losing became too much to bear, and president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski felt he had no other choice.
“He's a wonderful person,” Dombrowski gushed Tuesday about the man he’d fired earlier in the day. “Done a lot, works hard, very conscientious, but I think at this time, I thought that we needed a new voice in there.”
The six-time All-Star and 1985 AL MVP was brought in over the winter to serve as Thomson’s bench coach in part because Phillies brass thought his lengthy on-field résumé would earn him instant cache in a clubhouse of stars.
That Mattingly’s son, Preston, serves as GM under Dombrowski was more of a coincidence than anything else. During spring training, Mattingly told reporters that he didn’t have interest in managing again. But the circumstances changed at a pace no one could have foreseen, thrusting the 65-year-old into the interim manager role for the remainder of this season.
“Because Dave asked,” Mattingly replied when a reporter inquired why he took the job.
But if Dombrowski had gotten his way, Mattingly never would have gotten an offer.
That’s because the Phillies POBO had his sights set on recently fired Red Sox manager Alex Cora. The duo won a World Series together in Boston, with Dombrowski hiring Cora ahead of that magnificent 2018 season. They remain close. According to The Athletic’s Matt Gelb, Cora called Dombrowski on Saturday before news of the turmoil in Boston went public. On Sunday and Monday, the Phillies made a hard charge for Cora’s services. Cora ultimately declined the overtures, opting to spend this summer around family.
That leaves the Phillies in a fascinating situation, one oddly similar to what Thomson inherited almost four years ago. The 2022 Phillies were scuffling, an underwhelming amalgamation of superstars. In early June, manager Joe Girardi got the boot, with Thomson, his bench coach, taking over the job.
Thomson immediately earned respect — not for what he was but for what he wasn’t.
Girardi had been tightly wound, overly involved, omnipresent in a bad way. Thomson offered the opposite. He identified a veteran clubhouse that didn’t need his shadow lurking over their lives. And so, he took his hands off the wheel and kept things refreshingly simple.
“The one thing that I tried to do throughout my four years here is let the players play and let the talent take care of itself and try not to get in the way,” Thomson told reporters on a Tuesday zoom call.
Accordingly, the beginning of his tenure provided a much-needed exhale. The Phillies caught fire, authoring a storybook season that ended just two games shy of a World Series title. Thomson, who had intended to retire after 2022, stayed on as skipper. He went on to post the highest winning percentage of any full-time Phillies manager since the 19th century.
“We love Topper in here,” Phillies star Bryce Harper said Tuesday, referring to his former manager by his nickname. “Steady-eddie in here every day. Really good for the clubhouse, really good for the team.”
Other players expressed feelings of guilt. Many clearly understood the sobering reality that their poor play directly led to Thomson’s dismissal. They liked their skipper, respected him, wanted to win for him. Yet few were surprised by Tuesday’s news. While the Red Sox players, in the wake of Cora’s recent ouster, expressed a sense of furious shock, the Phillies spoke with a more mournful, solemn, almost remorseful tone.
“As a player, you take accountability,” injured catcher JT Realmuto told NBC Sports Philly’s John Clark. “We all feel responsible for what happened to him. We know we are the ones on the field not doing our job.”
Too little, too late perhaps, but the Phillies did their job Tuesday, besting the San Francisco Giants by a score of 7-0. Shortstop Trea Turner notched three hits. Struggling third baseman Alec Bohm had two. Starter Jesus Luzardo threw seven scoreless, dropping his ERA from 6.91 to 5.50. It was a thorough, orderly, balanced performance — the kind Thomson had led the Phillies to for years, the kind he believed would return at some point this season.