Phillies rout Angels 10-0, hit five homers in interim manager Rob Thomson’s first game

Bryson Stott stutter-stepped across home plate. He gave a two-handed high five to Alec Bohm and elbow-bashed with Kyle Schwarber. Then, as Stott walked down into the dugout, he was met by Rhys Hoskins, arms aloft and jumping up and down.

By golly, the Phillies were actually having fun.

So, maybe it was all a coincidence. Or at least a confluence of events. But hours after seeing Joe Girardi get fired, the cold-blooded reality of a high-payroll team with a losing record, the Phillies welcomed the free-falling Los Angeles Angels to town and throttled them, 10-0, in their first game under interim manager Rob Thomson.

“I just thought we played the game well today,” said Bryce Harper, who smashed two of the Phillies’ season-high five homers. “I thought we went out there and played the game we were supposed to play.”

Kyle Schwarber homered twice, too, including on the first pitch of the game from Angels rookie starter Chase Silseth. Fill-in second baseman Nick Maton tripled and made a show-stopping catch. And then there was Stott, whose first major-league home run was a three-run shot off Silseth in the second inning to open a 4-0 lead for Zach Eflin, who went eight easy-breezy innings.

It took 52 games and cost the manager his job, but the Broad Street Bashers finally showed up.

Now, how long will they stick around?

“There was a lot of energy tonight,” said Thomson, the longtime coach who is getting his overdue opportunity to manage because president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski decided to dump Girardi. “A lot of it is coming off the off-day [Thursday]. Part of it is those three kids at the bottom of the lineup. They really spice things up. All in all, it was a good day.”

But it also came at the expense of Jersey Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, and the star-studded Angels, who dropped their ninth consecutive game after a 27-17 start. The Angels have been outscored 61-26 during their skid, proof that things could always be worse.

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“Aside from everything that happened today, we came out and we played hard, which is all that matters,” Eflin said. “It really was an awesome night.”

It will be weeks, maybe months, before we know whether the Phillies’ first in-season managerial change since 2015 is the defibrillator that shocks them back into playoff contention. More likely it will come down to other factors, such as shoring up baseball’s worst defense and protecting more late-inning leads.

The schedule will have something to do with it, too. After a brutal 31-game stretch in which they played 28 games against the New York Mets, Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres, Atlanta Braves, and San Francisco Giants, the Phillies face a much softer slate of upcoming opponents. Beginning with the swooning Angels, and save for a three-game series in Milwaukee next week against the NL Central-leading Brewers, they play 16 of the next 19 games against noncontenders.

But the Phillies will win when they hit, and did they ever hit in the opener against the Angels. How much? Try 1,960 feet of home runs.

“We need to be a good hitting club,” Dombrowski said earlier in the day. “That’s how we’re put together. We’re a top-10 team in the league. I think we can be better than that. That’s how we were constructed.”

As much as anything, the Phillies got a jolt from their youngest players.

Stott, whose first homer came in his 83rd major-league plate appearance, traded a bat and two signed baseballs to retrieve his first home-run ball, which he said he will almost certainly give to his mom.

» READ MORE: Phillies players Nick Castellanos, Bryce Harper share blame with fired manager Joe Girardi

In addition to Stott’s homer, center fielder Mickey Moniak singled in the second inning. Maton walked, tripled, and made a full-extension diving catch on a pop fly to shallow right field that forced him to leave with a sprained right shoulder.

Maton underwent X-rays after exiting the game and will get an MRI exam Saturday. It’s unclear whether he will be sidelined.

“I haven’t had anything with my shoulder ever, so I really have no idea,” said Maton, called up from triple A earlier in the week. “I don’t think it came out [of joint]. It’s painful, but we’ll work on it.”

Regardless, it will be interesting to see if the young players thrive more under Thomson than Girardi, whose unrelenting intensity didn’t always provide the most nurturing environment. If the first game was any indication, Thomson isn’t afraid to use them.

The bottom four hitters in the batting order were all homegrown: Bohm, Maton, Stott, and Moniak. They combined to go 4-for-14 with four RBIs.

“They’re doing a phenomenal job,” Schwarber said. “It’s kind of refreshing to see how these young guys are coming in. They’re just stepping up right away.”

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The Phillies’ defensive struggles are well-documented. But they played a clean, crisp game for Thomson, even mixing in a few highlight-reel plays.

Aside from Maton’s catch, maligned outfielder Odúbel Herrera entered late in the game and made a diving catch to snare a sinking liner from Trout to end the eighth inning.

Trout, who grew up in nearby Millville, N.J., went 0-for-4 with a strikeout in his first game in Philadelphia since 2014. His fellow superstar, Angels two-way sensation Shohei Ohtani, went 0-for-3 with two strikeouts.

And in an underrated key moment of the game, Eflin recorded back-to-back strikeouts of Ohtani and Trout in the first inning after giving up a leadoff single to Taylor Ward.

“Huge,” Thomson said. “Just to get those two guys out in the first inning and calm things down, that was huge.”