The Philadelphia Phillies fired manager Rob Thomson on Tuesday, just 28 games into the season, after a 9-19 start dropped the team 10 games below .500 for the first time since 2017.
Bench coach Don Mattingly will serve as interim manager for the remainder of the season. The move came days after the Boston Red Sox dismissed Alex Cora and most of his coaching staff, making it a turbulent stretch for managers across the league.
"He's done so much for this organization and I thanked him for it," president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski said Tuesday. "He's a wonderful person who works hard, very conscientious, but at this time I felt that we needed a new voice in there, a little different feeling in the clubhouse at this point."
The firing caps a rapid collapse for a team that entered 2026 as a legitimate NL East contender. After opening 1-3, Philadelphia won five of six to reach 6-4. Then the losses piled up, including four defeats in six games before a 10-game losing streak that buried them in the division standings alongside the equally struggling New York Mets.
Twenty-eight games is among the quickest managerial dismissals in recent memory. The timing is made more striking by the contract extension the Phillies signed Thomson to in December, which ran through the 2027 season. They fired him less than a month into it.
The irony is considerable. Thomson, 62, took over midseason in 2022 after Joe Girardi was let go and promptly guided the team to the NL pennant, their first since 2009. They fell to the Houston Astros in six games in the World Series, but Thomson had arrived. Over the next three seasons, he won back-to-back NL East titles, made the playoffs in each of his first four years, and posted a 355-270 overall record. His 96 wins last season were the franchise's most since 2011. He finished third in Manager of the Year voting just last year.
Dombrowski also confirmed Tuesday that he had reached out to Cora about the job before the firing, offering him the position on Sunday. Cora declined, saying he wanted to stay home with his family. Dombrowski originally hired Cora to manage the Red Sox in 2017, and the two won a World Series together in 2018. The two are said to remain close.
Mattingly, 65, brings extensive managerial experience to the interim role. He went 889-950 across stints with the Los Angeles Dodgers from 2011 to 2015 and the Miami Marlins from 2016 to 2022. He spent the past three seasons as bench coach with the Toronto Blue Jays, including last year when Toronto won the AL pennant. Philadelphia also promoted third base coach Dusty Wathan to bench coach and elevated Triple-A manager Anthony Contreras to third base coach to fill out the staff.
The Phillies rotation still features Zack Wheeler and Bryce Harper remains in the lineup, making the 9-19 record difficult to fully explain on paper. Whether Mattingly can reverse the trajectory of a talented but underperforming roster will become clear quickly.
