The Philadelphia Phillies fired manager Rob Thomson on Tuesday, April 28, 2026, following the team’s 9-19 start to the season, tied for the worst record in Major League Baseball with the New York Mets.
Don Mattingly, the bench coach, has been named interim manager for the remainder of the 2026 season.
Thomson, 62, leaves as the winningest manager in Phillies history by winning percentage and the only man to guide the franchise to four consecutive postseason appearances.
He also leaves with the team 9.5 games out of first place in the National League East and having lost 11 of their last 12 games.
Thomson’s Carriage Turns Back Into A Pumpkin
Thomson took over in June 2022 when the Phillies were 22-29 under Joe Girardi. What followed was one of the more remarkable managerial runs in recent franchise history.
He went 65-46 the rest of that season, guided Philadelphia to the World Series, then made the playoffs in each of the three seasons that followed.
His overall record with the organization was 355-270 in the regular season with a .568 winning percentage, the highest of any Phillies manager in the modern era who managed at least 300 games. His 21 playoff wins are second in franchise history.
But the playoff runs progressively shortened. In 2022 he reached the World Series. In 2023 the Phillies blew a 3-2 NLCS lead at home against the Arizona Diamondbacks.
In 2024 they were beaten by the Mets in four games in the NLDS after earning a first-round bye. In 2025, with 96 regular season wins, they were beaten by the Dodgers in four games in the NLDS.
Four postseasons. Shorter each time. Then came 2026, a 9-19 start, a 10-game losing streak, the team’s longest since 1999, and a Sunday loss to the Braves that followed the one-game streak-ending win on Saturday.
Thomson is only the second manager in Phillies history to guide the team to four consecutive postseason appearances, but a 9-19 start this year doomed him.
What Is Wrong With The 2026 Philadelphia Phillies?
The Phillies’ problems in 2026 are not entirely, or even primarily, Thomson’s fault, and most serious analysts have been careful to say so.
The core issue is that an expensive, veteran-heavy roster has aged badly all at once.
Trea Turner, hitting .230, is 32. Schwarber, 33, is hitting .196. J.T. Realmuto, 35, is hitting .259, and he’s hurt. Aaron Nola, 32, is 1-3 with a 6.03 ERA. Wheeler, 35, coming off surgery, made his season debut Saturday.
That is $138 million in luxury-tax contracts collectively underperforming simultaneously.
The Phillies also released Nick Castellanos in February, paying him $19.2 million not to play.
They released Taijuan Walker on Thursday, paying him $15.3 million not to pitch. Cristopher Sánchez, the Cy Young Award runner-up last season, is being hit at a .310 clip, more than 80 points higher than 2025. Ranger Suárez left via free agency.
Kyle Schwarber pushed back against the idea that Thomson was the problem on Sunday. “You feel as a player, you feel responsible for that,” he said. “We’re the ones who are out there. All of our coaches are here to support and put us in the best positions that we can. Even though we’re not playing like we feel like we should be playing, that hasn’t changed their attitudes toward us.”
No manager wins with that much underproductive payroll. But the hard reality is that it was Thomson’s job to make the most of his roster, no matter how flawed it might be.
That is the essential tension in every managerial firing, the team’s problems may predate the manager and outlast him, but somebody has to be held accountable for the results on the field, and it is almost never the $138 million worth of veterans who are not hitting.
Dave Dombrowski, the Phillies’ president of baseball operations, told reporters in Chicago last Tuesday that a managerial change was “not being pondered at this point.”
The phrase “at this point” left him room.
Three of his top advisors flew to Atlanta on Friday to assess the team’s situation, an unusual enough move that it functioned as a public signal about what was being considered. By Tuesday morning the decision had been made.
Don Mattingly Takes Over
Mattingly has been named interim manager for the remainder of 2026. Dusty Wathan moves from third-base coach to bench coach. Anthony Contreras, who managed the Triple-A Lehigh Valley IronPigs, becomes the new third-base coach.
Mattingly is a respected baseball figure, a former MVP first baseman with the Yankees who managed the Dodgers and Marlins before becoming Thomson’s bench coach in Philadelphia.
Whether he becomes more than an interim is the question that will play out over the next several months.
The team’s first game under Mattingly is Tuesday night at Citizens Bank Park against the San Francisco Giants.
FanGraphs currently gives the Phillies a 33.9% chance to make the playoffs from a 9-19 record.
That number will need to move considerably before any conversation about a permanent managerial appointment becomes relevant.
The Alex Cora Question
The complicating factor in all of this is the man who was fired four days before Thomson.
The Boston Red Sox dismissed Alex Cora and several of his coaches on Saturday April 25, leaving one of the more accomplished active managers in baseball suddenly available.
Cora won the 2018 World Series with the Red Sox, the same year he was hired by Dave Dombrowski.
Both men have publicly praised each other’s abilities over the years. Jim Bowden, the former GM and baseball analyst, described the Phillies as Cora’s most likely landing spot, though he specified the connection was more likely to develop for 2027 than immediately.
Bob Nightengale of USA Today reported that Cora could be managing the Phillies as soon as this week when they returned home Tuesday, but also that the organization was committed to Mattingly for now and not planning to bring Cora in immediately.
Reports that Cora had shut down a Phillies approach also circulated Monday.
The situation is fluid. What is settled is that Rob Thomson, the man who took a 22-29 team and turned it into a World Series participant, who built the best win percentage of any manager in franchise history, who made the playoffs four years in a row, was fired with his team sitting at 9-19 in the last year of a contract that ran through 2027.
