Fire Rob Thomson. Now.
Back when I first came to Philadelphia 41 years ago, the fans wouldn’t have to wait a day – or a minute, really – to hear bold words like those in the headline from an arsenal of brilliant columnists and broadcasters.
Hell, the day I arrived here in that brutally hot summer of 1983, the Phillies fired Pat Corrales as their skipper.
His team was in first place at the time.
I was impressed.
Two generations later, where have all the backbones gone?
What we just witnessed in the Phillies division-series loss to the Mets was a case of managerial malpractice reminiscent of, well, Nick Sirianni’s similar spell of rank incompetence at the end of the 2023 Eagles season.
Rob Thomson stinks at his job. So does Nick Sirianni.
Any questions so far?
I already wrote about Thomson’s stupid – and ultimately fatal – decision in Game 1 to remove Zach Wheeler at the peak of the ace’s powers, tossing a one-hitter through seven innings against the Mets. Wheeler’s big mistake was throwing 110 pitches. Thomson, a human robot, is programmed to remove any and all starters, regardless of the situation, one they reach triple figures on his sacred pitch-count meter.
What even a pessimist like me couldn’t believe was that Wheeler – the Phillies best pitcher, and maybe the best in all of baseball – would never return to a pitching mound this season. Even with the season at stake in Game 4, Thomson chose to save Wheeler for a Game 5 that never happened and brought in his least effective reliever of the past month, Jeff Hoffman.
Just as he did in Game 1, the reliever breathed new life into the Mets offense by loading the bases in the sixth inning with the Phillies leading, 1-0, before his fellow bullpen fire-starter, Carlos Estevez, delivered the final blow, a grand slam to Francisco Lindor.
Thomson had the option of starting that sixth inning with his best chance to win the game, Wheeler, but he stuck instead with the omnipresent stat binder he inherited from his predecessor, Joe Girardi. Thomson had even hinted before the game that he would use Wheeler in Game 4, but only in an “emergency.”
If holding a precarious one-run lead in an elimination game is not an emergency, what is?
Could Wheeler have done it on three days’ rest, after Thomson had coddled him with strict pitch counts and a minimum of four days’ rest between starts all year? We will never know the answer to that question, but I think I can reword it to reveal a simple truth:
Who would you rather have had the ball in his hand with the game on the line, Zach Wheeler or Jeff Hoffman?
I will spare you the rest of the ugly details of Thomson’s terrible managing during the entire Mets series, but I do need to remind everyone that this is the third straight Phillies team that underperformed in the biggest moments.
Thomson undermined the lightning-in-a-bottle 2022 Phillies when he removed Wheeler after five innings, again with a 1-0 lead, in Game 6 of the World Series after the ace had thrown just 70 pitches. The manager liked the matchup of Carlos Alvarado against the Astros.
Houston liked it, too. Yordan Alvarez clocked a three-run homer off Alvarado that buried the Phillies.
After a similar fate with his bullpen ruined the NLCS series against Arizona last year – remember, the Phils blew the last two games at home against an inferior opponent – Thomson should have learned by now to burn the binder and go with his gut.
The truth is, one of the reasons he has felt the warm embrace of the Philadelphia media for three seasons now is because of his charming story, a baseball lifer finally given the chance to manage a big-league team for the first time at 58. He learned baseball long before the attack of the stat nerds. He should be smarter than this.
Why he continues to receive the media’s blind support now – with the notable exception of columnist Marcus Hayes – is a question no media dinosaur like me should be able to understand.
In my world, you lose, you leave.
In my world, there are no extenuating circumstances. This is the big leagues. Win now or find a more forgiving city to work in.
In my world, Rob Thomson’s time is up. He’s done.
What the Phillies have to decide is whether they need to see another prime season of their aging stars ruined by the gutless, ruinous decisions of their manager before they admit the obvious.
Rob Thomson should be fired. Now.