Phillies Fire Manager Rob Thomson After 9-19 Start; Don Mattingly Named Interim

The Philadelphia Phillies parted ways with manager Rob Thomson on Tuesday after a 9-19 start to the 2026 season, the club announced, and named bench coach Don Mattingly as interim manager.

The Phillies also reshuffled their coaching staff, promoting Dusty Wathan to bench coach and naming Anthony Contreras, the manager at Triple-A Lehigh Valley, as the major league club’s third-base coach.

The move is a sharp early-season reversal for a club that had recently reaffirmed its commitment to Thomson. He originally took over on an interim basis on June 3, 2022, after Joe Girardi was dismissed, and went on to lead Philadelphia to four straight postseason appearances from 2022 through 2025. On Dec. 9, 2025, the Phillies announced that Thomson’s contract had been extended through the 2027 season.

Still, the Phillies’ poor start quickly changed the tenor of the season. Philadelphia was 9-19 at the time of the move and had already endured a 10-game losing streak earlier this month. According to MLB.com, it was the franchise’s longest skid since an 11-game losing streak in September 1999.

What makes the timing more striking is how recently the organization had publicly dismissed the idea of a managerial change. On April 22 in Chicago, Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski said such a move was “not being pondered at this point,” according to the Phillies’ MLB.com coverage.

“I’m not worried about the hole,” Dombrowski said then. “Rob Thompson’s been a good manager for us for since [2022] … that’s not being pondered at this point.”

Thomson was far from a short-term caretaker. After replacing Girardi in 2022, he stabilized the club and oversaw the most sustained run of success the Phillies had enjoyed in years. MLB.com said Thomson leaves with the highest winning percentage in franchise history in the Modern Era, at .568. Tuesday’s announcement, coming less than five months after his extension, underscored how quickly the organization’s public position changed as the losses mounted.