Is it 2012 or 2022 for Phillies? In firing Rob Thomson, they give us their answer

AL EastBlue JaysOriolesRaysRed SoxYankeesAL CentralGuardiansRoyalsTigersTwinsWhite SoxAL WestAngelsAstrosAthleticsMarinersRangersNL EastBravesMarlinsMetsNationalsPhilliesNL CentralBrewersCardinalsCubsPiratesRedsNL WestDiamondbacksDodgersGiantsPadresRockiesScores & ScheduleStandingsPodcastsThe Windup NewsletterFantasyMLB ProspectsMLB OddsMLB PicksPower RankingsFans Speak UpMLB Season 2012 was the beginning of the end of an amazing era. 2022 was a group that needed a jump-start. So, what about these Phillies? Mitchell Leff / Getty Images Share articleIt’s too simple to say that Rob Thomson got “fired” as manager by the Phillies on Tuesday. He just got caught up on the wrong end of the baseball time machine. In 2022, when the Phillies pulled the plug on Joe Girardi as their manager after 51 games, Thomson wasn’t just the replacement. He was the answer. Four years later, his team found itself thinking back to that decision — but through a whole different prism. Here, essentially, is the question that the Phillies’ president of baseball operations, Dave Dombrowski, and their principal owner, John Middleton, had to answer: Was it 2022 all over again? Or was it 2012? 2012, of course, was the beginning of the end for the previous generation of glory-days Phillies — the Jimmy Rollins/Chase Utley/Ryan Howard Phillies. They’d ripped off five straight seasons of greatness. Then, in 2012, the unraveling began. It would never be the same again. 2022 was something entirely different. The 2022 Phillies were built to win. Finally. But the manager got fired because that was the opposite of what the owner and the architect of that roster were seeing. Why does any manager get fired in midseason? When his bosses see talent … and what the record projects is underachievement. That always covers it. So after watching Girardi’s 2022 team bumble through a 4-12 late-May nosedive that dropped it to eight games under .500 and 12 1/2 games out of first place, Dombrowski did what he thought he had to do. It was a decision that saved a season and ended in a magical run to a World Series. All right then. We’re back here in 2026 after that little excursion on the Phillies’ Wayback Machine. Why, four years later, did Dombrowski decide that Thomson was no longer the answer, even though he was good enough at this job to exit with the highest winning percentage (355-270, .568) of any manager in Phillies history? Re-read those last three paragraphs. You don’t need to be a descendant of Paul Owens or Dallas Green to understand the message Dombrowski was sending by evicting Thomson from the manager’s office and handing the keys to Don Mattingly, who was elevated from bench coach to interim manager. What the president of baseball ops believes couldn’t be more clear now: This team isn’t over the hill. It’s under water. Think about the parallels. The 2022 Phillies had the fifth highest payroll in MLB. They had Bryce Harper, Kyle Schwarber and Zack Wheeler on their roster. They had big dreams, and big bucks invested in those dreams. And Dombrowski was in no mood to sit back and watch that group stagger through a lost season. These 2026 Phillies also had the fifth highest Opening Day payroll in baseball. They still have Harper and Schwarber on the roster, though with four more years of mileage on their odometers. And now Wheeler is back, projecting hope after missing the first four weeks following thoracic outlet compression surgery. So the dreams are just as big. The payroll is even bigger. And once again, Dombrowski decided he’s not interested in watching a pivotal season drift into irrelevance. OK, so did he just make the right call? Get back to us in 134 games. We’re about to find out. His team has certainly flashed those 2012 vibes for the last month. So you could understand why literally anybody — sitting in the seats of Citizens Bank Park or watching from afar in other baseball front offices — might conclude that this Phillies team isn’t just slumping. It’s aging. As I wrote this spring, Harper, Schwarber, Trea Turner and J.T. Realmuto will all play this season at age 33 or older. Only two teams have won a World Series with that many regulars 33 or older: Derek Jeter’s 2009 Yankees and Luis Gonzalez’s 2001 Diamondbacks. (Our definition of a regular player: 425 plate appearances or more.) That stunning factoid alone tells us this team has concocted a precarious formula. On the other hand … It’s only about six months since last season ended. Did that 2025 core look like it was a few months away from being ready for a trip to the baseball assisted-living center? Schwarber hit 56 homers last year. Turner had the best batting average in the National League. Even in a down year (by his standards), Harper finished 11th in the league in OPS. Realmuto was the grand conductor of a pitching orchestra that led the major leagues in FanGraphs WAR. Their team won 96 games. Did it really get old and decrepit in six months? That’s not what Dombrowski sees. “We have a gifted group of individuals,” he told The Athletic this spring. “And the Dodgers’ core is older than ours.” That’s true, actually. According to Baseball Reference, the average age of the Phillies’ position players this year is 30.2 years old. That team in L.A., that won the World Series six months ago, had an average position-player age of 30.7. — and is at 30.6 this year. Also … Alec Bohm isn’t one of the Phillies’ “old guys.” He has an OPS+ of 15 — the lowest mark of any regular in the sport. Bryson Stott isn’t one of those “old guys.” He’s currently carrying a .221/.268/.273 slash line. So that “feeling their age” hot take sounds good. But does it match what’s really happening? Not in the eyes of the president of baseball ops. And not in the eyes of some of the talent evaluators who have watched this team. “I don’t see their core (aging) quite at the same point as the 2012 Phillies,” said one scout who also saw a lot of that previous generation of Phillies. “If the Phillies don’t slug, they aren’t very good.  They don’t really play great baseball.” That doesn’t sound like a chorus of oh well, they’re washed up and everyone knows it. That sounds more like an indictment of the sloppy way they’ve gone about playing baseball this year. And managers get fired when teams lead the league in that — let’s call it Weighted Sloppiness Created Plus. The 2012 Phillies had different issues than this team. Ryan Howard had entered the post-torn-Achilles phase of his career. So he wasn’t physically capable of being the same feared masher he’d always been. Roy Halladay had emptied his tank in his epic pitcher’s duel with Cris Carpenter in the 2011 Division Series — and came out “firing” at 84 mph in the spring of 2012. Let’s say this again: Even with Realmuto and the closer, Jhoan Duran, lost to the injured list, there’s no equivalent of those team-changing body blows hitting the Phillies so far this season. All right, now that we’ve got that out of the way, there’s also this: This team could still be in big trouble. For all sorts of reasons. There are many questions. Here’s just a sampling: • Has the Phillies’ long-elite rotation taken a major step downward? It’s currently 30th in the major leagues in starting pitching ERA (5.80). • Is this bullpen good enough, especially with Duran missing in action? The two primary late-inning left-handers, José Alvarado and Tanner Banks, have allowed 32 hits and 18 runs in 19 2/3 innings. • Is Bohm so swallowed up in off-the-field crises that he could lose his job to Edmundo Sosa? Two years ago, Bohm lashed 44 doubles. In the first month this year, he had only three extra-base hits. • Is there a right-handed bat somewhere/anywhere who could balance out this lineup? Bo Bichette isn’t walking through that door. • And when a team is allowing a .354 average on balls in play — the worst BABIP by any team since the 1899 Cleveland Spiders — what is that telling us about its ability to make the plays that good teams make? You know where to drop your comments. Then, of course, there’s this not so academic question: Was “running it back” this offseason a massive miscalculation by this front office? There are lots of ways to look at that. But one scout who covers this team fired a word at us, when describing what he’s seen, that should get the Phillies’ attention: He’s not wrong. It’s certainly looked that way, because never in the history of baseball has there been a team this “good” that endured a double-digit losing streak before it even flipped the calendar to May. And yes, that word was never. Here are those facts, courtesy of Baseball Reference’s Katie Sharp: In the division-play era, which goes back 58 seasons, only two previous teams had ever won at least 90 games one year, then started a losing streak of at least 10 games in a row the following April: There was Luis Tiant’s 95-win 1975-76 Red Sox (who fired the manager, Darrell Johnson, in July) … and there was Cliff Floyd’s 92-win 1997-98 Marlins (whose general manager was … whaddayaknow … Dave Dombrowski). In fairness to Dombrowski, he was ordered to hold a fire sale that winter by his penurious owner, Wayne Huizenga. So he’s off the hook for just about anything that happened to the Marlins in ’98. On the other hand … Neither of those teams won 96 games. So there’s that. But what about … 96-win teams that lost 10 in a row at any point the next year — The Phillies are only the ninth team to add their name to that list. Here are the others: • 2013-14 Red Sox • 2008-09 Rays • 2007-08 Indians • 1997-98 Orioles • 1984-85 Cubs • 1942-43 Dodgers • 1920-21 White Sox • 1914-15 Athletics All of those teams at least made it into mid-May before they started going south. So by either measure, these Phillies still stand alone. But in a related development, this Phillies losing streak also dropped them 10 1/2 games out of first place by April 24. Let’s also dig in on that. Fell 10+ back before April after winning 96-plus — Only three other teams in history have matched that aspect of this Phillies slide: • The 2002-03 Diamondbacks • The 1983-84 Orioles • The 1980-81 Royals If you study each of those last two lists, you might notice something: The Phillies are the only team in history that’s on both of them! In other words, this team is already in historically ominous territory — in multiple ways. But is that because these Phillies “ran it back?” Hmmm. The Mets blew up their team — and they’re a mess. The Yankees “ran it back” — and they’ve been the best team in the American League. The Phillies “ran it back” — and they just fired the manager. So what’s the true magic formula? Whatever the standings say it is! But clearly, those standings weren’t detecting any magic in Philadelphia in 2026. And Rob Thomson just became the man who paid the price. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms