Rob Thomson needs to be held accountable for the Phillies’ recent struggles
He's watching blunders on the basepaths, mental mistakes in the field, and making inexplicable decisions with pitchers. Rob Thomson needs to get himself and his team back to the basics.
The Phillies are playing ugly, dumb baseball. They’re doing it over and over and over. Dropped fly balls. Elementary base-running mistakes. And the manager ... Oy.
The team gave away the worst loss of the season Sunday and lost their three-game series in Pittsburgh. They started a four-game set Monday at Miami against the Marlins, whom they trailed by a half-game in the wild-card standings going into the series.
The trade deadline is 6 p.m. Tuesday. They’d lost seven of 11 entering Monday. Trea Turner and Nick Castellanos stunk like a fish-market dumpster in July, and the bullpen isn’t healthy, so president Dave Dombrowski will be hunting a right-handed bat and an eighth-inning arm.
» READ MORE: Phillies trade deadline: Pitching is a need, not a reality after Max Scherzer/David Robertson deals
But unless Rob Thomson starts managing with more common sense, and unless he gets his players to start playing fundamentally sound baseball, it won’t matter if Dombrowski convinces the Angels to trade Shohei Ohtani for Scott Kingery. They’re playing losing baseball, and it starts at the top.
Thomson needs to call a team meeting, flip the postgame spread, cuss a veteran, and spit on the floor. Then have infield and outfield practice before every game.
Something. Anything.
I like Thomson, and I think he’s a good manager, and I generally sympathize with his reluctance to tinker with a star-studded lineup and usually have little issue with his decisions about his pitchers. But in a season where Castellanos has been the high point, Sunday was the low point.
Bloody Sunday
Cristopher Sánchez’s tummy hurt, but he was 73 pitches into a no-hitter after five innings with a 2-0 lead on Sunday. There’s no universe in which Sanchez comes out of that game unless his arm hurts like hell or he’s about to vomit on the mound.
Unless you’re in Rob Thomson’s universe. “Topper,” a level-headed, even-handed, well-respected baseball man, has, in his second season as a big league manager, too often become a slave to analytics.
» READ MORE: Trea Turner and Rob Thomson still puzzled by slump this season
He pulled Sánchez even though Sánchez told Thomson he wanted to pitch at least one more inning. That’s probably all it would have been, since the Phils have Sanchez on a 90-pitch count, which in itself is outrageous. Thomson’s reasoning: Sánchez had hit three batters, walked two others, and he’d be facing the Pirates’ order for the third time.
As for the pitch count, well, a pitcher who has started nine games should be able to throw 100 pitches. As for facing the lineup again, I don’t care if a pitcher is facing a lineup for the fourth time, or fifth, or 15th; if they haven’t gotten a hit on him, then give him some Pepto Bismol and send his woozy butt back out there. There’s no bellyaching in the majors.
But the numbers said “no,” so Thomson did, too ... the same way he said “No” to ace Zack Wheeler in Game 6 of the World Series.
Seranthony Domínguez replaced Sanchez, which was a gamble in itself. This was just Domínguez’s second appearance after missing nearly six weeks with an oblique strain, and he was typically, perhaps predictably, ineffective.
» READ MORE: A year later, trading for Brandon Marsh is still paying off for the Phillies
Domínguez went single-homer-groundout-walk-single-bench. Jeff Hoffman came in and extinguished the flames, and the Phillies regained the lead in the seventh, but more follies followed and turned what should have been a low-pressure win into a 10-inning loss.
Sitting Sánchez was just the most obvious issue Sunday regarding Thomson. There were others.
The Phollies
First: In the seventh inning, shortstop Turner and third baseman Edmundo Sosa collided on the infield grass while trying to catch a popup. The rule: If the shortstop calls it, it’s his. That’s pretty much true everywhere on the infield — your shortstop is your shortstop because he’s the best fielder — but it’s always true in this situation, as any Little League coach will tell you. Perhaps the Phillies should hire a Little League coach to tell Sosa, because the big-league coaches aren’t getting through to him.
Second: That runner scored from first base on an error by center fielder Johan Rojas. He misplayed a one-hop liner because he tried to pick it with his glove hand off his left hip, which would allow him make a quicker throw to third base. He did this instead of squaring the ball up, securing it, and relying on proper footwork and his cutoff man to minimize the damage. Again: fundamentals.
Third: With Alec Bohm on second and Bryce Harper on third, Turner hit a fly ball to right field, where the Pirates are stashing 23-year-old catching prospect Henry Davis. Davis was throwing 94 mph as a 16-year-old. Harper knew this, and third base coach Dusty Wathan knew this, and both of them watched Davis fire a bullet all the way to home plate. Bohm apparently didn’t know this, because he broke for third when the catch was made, assuming Harper was going to try to score. Bohm didn’t need to read the scouting report; All he had to do was read Harper. Instead, the catcher threw to second base, at which point Harper broke for home, where he was out by several feet.
A pattern
Harper knew that feeling. He’d been out by several feet in the fifth inning the night before, trying to stretch a one-out single into a double. In the bottom of the fifth, center fielder Brandon Marsh foreshadowed Rojas’ Sunday error, again trying to play a simple one-hop liner off his hip, missing, and allowing two extra runs to score.
Granted, errors are going happen in the field and on the bases, but the Phillies’ errors are errors of technique and focus, not fatigue or bad luck or the sun or karma.
And they keep happening.
On July 22 in Cleveland, Marsh, second baseman Bryson Stott, and Castellanos, charging in from right, let an easy fly ball fall between them, which allowed the only run of the game to score. On July 2 against the visiting Nationals, a fly ball fell between Marsh and left fielder Kyle Schwarber, which led to a four-run third inning and a 5-4 loss.
Thomson and his staff have enjoyed a long honeymoon. They earned it. After Joe Girardi was fired two months into the 2022 season, they guided the Phillies to their first World Series in 14 years. After losing 32 of their first 57 games in in 2023, they seemed to have overcome their World Series hangover: They went 26-10 in their next 36 games. But this latest swoon has come about less from good competition and bad luck than their talented team playing bad baseball with terrible technique and poor focus.
» READ MORE: Could the solution to the Phillies’ need for a righty-hitting left fielder come from the ... Mets?
Technique and focus are the responsibility of the manager and his coaching staff. Really, it’s just about all they do.
That, and pitching changes.