The Phillies are in a deep hole. But manager Don Mattingly has been here before — and thrived

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Mattingly has been there, done this. Only much worse. “Go back and look at the L.A. times when I was there,” Mattingly said, on his first day in a job he never expected to hold. So did I do that? Of course I did that. And what did I find? I found two seasons in a row — in 2013 and 2014 — that the Dodgers team Mattingly managed was sputtering along in June in big trouble. They were 9 1/2 games out of first place the first year, 10 games out the next. Want to guess where those teams finished? First place would be an excellent guess. According to Baseball Reference’s Kenny Jackelen, only one manager in history has brought his team back from 9 1/2 games behind or worse to finish first two seasons in a row. That manager’s name: Don Mattingly. And only two managers have done that twice in their entire managerial careers. If their names sound familiar, it’s because they both have their own Hall of Fame plaque: Bobby Cox (1991 and ’93 Braves) and Sparky Anderson (1973 Reds, 1987 Tigers). So now compare that to where Mattingly’s Phillies team sat Tuesday as he walked through the doors of Citizens Bank Park for his first day as manager: 10 1/2 games out of first and 10 games under .500 — and it wasn’t even May yet. The manager who was dealt those cards has dug out of deeper canyons than that. In 2013, his team was 12 games under .500, 9 1/2 games out of first place. That’s grim – in any month. But it wasn’t April at the time. It was the third week in June. So nobody was asking if the 2013 Dodgers were a legit playoff team. They were asking a very different question: When do they fire the manager, even though his name is Don Mattingly? One day, in the midst of all that, the general manager of that Dodgers team, Ned Colletti, was out watching one of his minor-league affiliates play when he got a phone call from an industrious baseball writer named Ken Rosenthal. Just checking to make sure the manager was going to survive the week. “I said, ‘Kenny, they’re going to have to fire me before they fire him,’” Colletti recalled Tuesday, “because I ain’t firing him.” Good call, because here’s how the Dodgers’ season went after that. At the time, they’d gone 30-42 in their first 72 games. Immediately afterward, they transformed into a whole different monster … and went: 27-6 in their next 33 games … and 42-8 in their next 50 … and 46-10 in their next 56 … and 53-13 in their next 66. The Dodgers won their division … by 11 games. Then they nearly duplicated the same magic trick the next year. In 2014, they were one game over .500 (32-31) on June 7. They went 25 games over the rest of the way, won 94 games and blew away the division by six games. One of the most important common denominators in those teams? The guy in the manager’s office. “You don’t come from that far back and that many games under .500 without outstanding leadership,” Colletti said. “It’s impossible to do that. The game is not meant to do that well. So when you do that, you have to look at the leadership, and that was him.” The manager also gets a bunch of bonus leadership points when his players know he was once the king of New York baseball for a decade or so. We’re talking about a man who seems likely to wind up in Cooperstown someday. And players tend to listen to managers like that, even though, as his friend Larry Bowa said Tuesday, “he never brags about anything. He’s so down to earth, you would never know if he hit .220 in the big leagues or .320.” There was more to what happened in 2013 than the manager, of course. There always is. Hanley Ramirez got healthy and fired off a .341/.398/.628 slash line from June on. Yasiel Puig arrived in the big leagues and put up a 143 OPS+ in the second half. Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke both spun sub-2.00 second-half ERAs. Funny how, if you give great players enough time and enough rope, they remind you that they’re great players. So it wasn’t just the manager. But when Colletti looks back on that miraculous U-turn, he is struck by one thought. It never could have happened without the manager. “From where we were at, it was phenomenal,” he said. “When guys are around Donnie, they believe. He doesn’t allow you not to believe. He doesn’t cast any doubt on what you do. He holds you accountable. And he’s got good patience to him — not beyond what he should, but his ability to manage situations and to manage people there was excellent. It could have all gone the wrong way, but he didn’t let it go the wrong way.” On Tuesday night, after a 7-0 Phillies’ wipeout of the Giants in Mattingly’s Philadelphia managerial debut, I thought Trea Turner might find the tale of the 2013 Dodgers to be at least slightly interesting, if not mildly inspirational. Before I could even tell him what I’d found, he stopped me. He knew all about it … because he’d heard it from Mattingly himself. “He told me that personally,” Turner said, after helping his new manager look good by lashing four hits in his first game of the Mattingly era. “Or maybe he told me and (Bryson) Stott, in Atlanta. But it was just about how it’s not really how you start. It’s how you finish. “He mentioned that they were down 10 games and they won the division by 10, something like that. So not saying that’s necessarily going to happen (here), but there’s no reason to quit.” I showed Turner the second-half record of that Dodgers team. He shook his head in amazement. But that’s not all he did. He peered into the future and envisioned a world in which the 2026 Phillies could do what those Dodgers did. “It’s not easy to do,” he said. “It’s going to be very, very hard to do. I don’t want to understate that. But I think we’ve got the pitching staff to do that and the lineup to do that, and there’s no reason why we can’t.” This would be a timely place to mention that the pitching staff and lineup of the team Rob Thomson managed this year weren’t giving off many miracle-comeback vibes. Before Tuesday, the Phillies’ once-untouchable starting rotation was dead last in baseball in ERA (5.80), and the once-feared lineup ranked 29th in OPS and 28th in runs scored. So if that version of the Phillies keeps showing up over the next five months, you can forget all of this. But history tells us that isn’t always how it works. And the new interim manager is living proof that a baseball season is a lonnng march that often leads to finishes you never saw coming in April. Then again, nobody needs to give Turner any history lessons about what can be done — because he could teach those lessons. After all, he played on a team that’s at the center of those history lessons. His 2019 Washington Nationals lost 31 of their first 50 games. But they’re not remembered for how they started. They’re remembered for that parade they rode in after winning the World Series. That’s how they finished — by going 74-38 after that ugly start … then blitzing past the Brewers, Dodgers, Cardinals and Astros in October. So what is possible when a team has more than 130 games of runway left? Many things are possible. Here are some of them: 17 teams have made the postseason after falling at least 10 games under .500 – and three of them even went on to win the World Series. Possum Whited’s 1914 “Miracle” Braves and Juan Pierre’s 2003 Marlins are two of them. The third: Turner’s 2019 Nats. Four teams have survived a 10-game losing streak (or worse) and made it to the postseason. That hasn’t happened since … um, last year, when the 2025 Guardians did it. The other three: Corey Seager’s 2017 Dodgers, Dale Murphy’s 1982 Braves and Bobby Thomson’s 1951 Giants. Those Giants also skidded through 10 losses in a row in April, by the way — in a world when MLB had zero wild cards, let alone three in each league. Three teams have fallen at least 10 games out of first place before their 30th game and still finished first. But if that’s supposed to be the good news for these Phillies, here comes the bad news: Only one team in the last 111 seasons has pulled that off. That would be Kirk Gibson’s 1987 Tigers. The other two to do it: Stuffy McInnis’ 1911 A’s and those “Miracle” Braves of 1914. The 2022 Phillies also could teach this history course. Remember, those 2022 Phillies that Thomson took over in early June were in even a worse mess than the 2026 Phillies, who were “only” 6 1/2 games back in the wild-card scramble before Tuesday. After 50 games, the 2022 Phillies had plummeted to 12 1/2 games out of first place and 7 1/2 out of the third and final National League wild-card spot. True, they were “only” eight games below sea level (21-29), but with much less runway. Five months later, they were playing in the World Series. And 12 members of this team were also members of that team. That Phillies team learned firsthand how the third wild-card spot, which was brand new in 2022, changed everything. Did you know that in all four seasons since, the third wild-card entry from one league has won at least one postseason series — and six series altogether? So let’s all understand the difference between what’s probable and what’s possible. If any Phillies dreamers out there are using that word, “probable,” good luck to you. According to FanGraphs, the Phillies postseason odds cliff-dived from roughly 77 percent to 37 percent between Opening Day and Firing Day. And frankly, it’s amazing to see it as high as 37 percent. But is it “possible” that Mattingly has one more shocking turnaround act in him? Ha. Are you familiar with baseball? Its best quality is how it makes no sense. And the team the new manager of the Phillies inherited has noticed that. “Crazy things happen in this game,” Turner said. “Every year, something wild happens. So just keep pushing. Keep playing. It’s not easy. We know that. But it’s baseball.” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms