Philly Front Office

The Phillies are a dead floating carcass at the end of the MLB pool right now and there isn’t much that can be done about the personnel on the field. There are no backups ready to shine, there are no minor leaguers ready to be called up, and there are no trades to make. This is a $300m payroll that doesn’t look like it can do anything right. “It’s just April” is an overused term that applies to small sample sizes, scheduling oddities, and bad luck. This isn’t that. This team is fundamentally broken. As they say, you can’t fire the players, right?¹ What to do?

Fire Hitting Coach Kevin Long

Brandon Marsh is good, Bryce Harper is fine, and Justin Crawford is doing better than expected. That’s about it for Phillies hitting superlatives. Sure, Kyle Schwarber is on pace for 52 HRs, but also 230 strikeouts and a sub .200 average. The real problem is that everyone else isn’t just bad right now, they are some of the worst in the league. Alec Bohm might be the worst hitter in Major League Baseball. Bryson Stott is right behind him, but his .541 OPS is even worse when you consider 90% of his at bats are against righties! Trea Turner is back to being a blackhole at the top of the lineup. Adolis Garcia is exactly who we expected. No one else is worth speaking about. As a whole, the team is hitting .219 with a .294 OBP and a .362 slug. The only worse hitting team right now is the Mets who are essentially the same team as the Phillies.

How is damn near the whole team unable to hit at the same time??? I’ve heard some strange excuses over the last few weeks. Most recently it was that the team does not have a left hander to throw batting practice and haven’t all year. Excuse me? This is unfathomable. So, either the team won’t hire a southpaw to huck balls for an hour or they thought it would be fine to just not have anyone do this? That’s like a kid telling his teacher he couldn’t do his homework for a month because he didn’t have a pencil.

Someone tried to tell me that this isn’t Long’s fault because the players just won’t listen to him, as if that is some sort of reason to keep him. If they are stubborn and tuning him out, then a new voice needs to be brought in. This is not a charity. Long was a distinguished hitting coach for years, but his time has run out. The Phillies have no idea how to work counts, identify the strike zone, or plan for an at bat. Damn near every hitter on the team looks completely dumbfounded when it’s their turn to hit. It’s jarring to watch. Either Long doesn’t have any ideas or his suggestions are being ignored. Regardless, he is the easiest person to fire to change things up.

Phillies at the Trade Deadline 1.0

Fire Manager Rob Thomson

My biggest problem with Topper defenders is that they overly rely on the team making the playoffs as a source of praise. A team with a $300m payroll is supposed to win. Regular season wins with gobs of veteran talent is the norm, not an achievement. Is that fair to Thomson? No, not at all. It is a very high barometer for a very high stakes job. Of course, if the Phillies can’t even get those regular season wins, then what are we doing?

Thomson is not good at in-game decisions. He is not good at understanding analytics and even basic splits. He is horrendous at managing the pitching staff and knowing when to leave guys in and take them out. All that being said, what he has always been rightfully praised for was managing 26 personalities in his clubhouse. The team has not had more than a 5-game losing streak at any point in his tenure before this season. He keeps the team even. That’s not nothing. Well, now it is. The Phillies just lost 10 in a row and have looked almost completely inept in losing 15 out of 18. For most of the season the team has one good inning then shuts down. While claiming the players don’t care is silly, they are clearly not in fear of change coming or of the need to change any of their current awful habits. If Thomson can’t get through to his players anymore, then why is he here?

Firing Topper isn’t the easiest thing in the world from a human standpoint. The guy nearly retired a few years back and then led the Phillies to playoff success out of nowhere. He basically goes year to year at this point and could very well retire at the end of the season. After almost 40 years in coaching, the Phillies probably want to give him his dignity in retiring rather than getting the axe. That’s why he should not have been brought back this past offseason. Now they are stuck. Of course that didn’t stop Jon Middleton from sending Charlie Manual off with his Wawa quesadilla.

Donny Baseball would probably take over if they do choose to give Topper his papers.

Is Rob Thomson Back Because of the Money?

Fire General Manager Dave Dombrowski

Of course, the elephant in the clubhouse of disaster contracts and underperformance is the man who made all these decisions. Dave Dombrowski infamously said before the season that he was “content” with the Phillies roster. Yikes! We just watching Eagles GM Howie Roseman trade for a top tier pass rusher using basically only compensation picks and then scouring Africa for diamonds in the rough (after doing the same in New Zealand previously) less than 450 days after winning his 2nd Super Bowl. Howie is clearly NEVER content. It is a goddamn pleasure to watch that man relentlessly play every angle to better the Eagles. Yet, Dave Dombrowski is “content.” What was his offseason plan exactly?

There seemed to be two ideas set in stone this offseason: Kyle Schwarber had to come back no matter what and Nick Castellanos had to be gone no matter what. Secondary to that, the team was not going to spend more than $315m in payroll. While that’s a ton of money, due to contracts past there was not a lot of room. Still, the Phillies had their sights set on Bo Bichette. They even thought they had a deal. Had he been signed, there’s no guarantee JT Realmuto would have been back or Alec Bohm. When the Mets came in and swiped him, keeping Bohm and overpaying JT were the only contingencies. There was no backup plan. The team went from needing to make changes to running it back in one fell swoop.

Dombrowski has not made any tough choices since he took over the Phillies. He threw all the money at Trea Turner, Taijuan Walker, Nick Castellanos, Aaron Nola, Zack Wheeler, Kyle Schwarber twice, and Jesus Luzardo. I’m not saying all of these were the wrong moves or anything, just that he seems to have only one move: overpay. Because of all these deals, the Phillies have been left with very little depth. There has also been little in terms of building the farm system. It’s “okay” but the organizational overhaul that he implemented has not born much fruit other than at the top. Every year, after the top few names, the depth is nonexistent. Other organizations pump out major league regulars while the Phillies are constantly forced to either exhaust free agency or have the major league roster die on the vine. There is no one the team can call up right now for even competence. It’s a disaster.

The team had been grooming Sam Fuld to take over for Dombrowski, but that plan has since changed. The lieutenant in waiting is now Preston Mattingly, son of possibly the next coach. He cut his teeth in the Phillies minor league system and would likely be the next guy in charge unless the team went another way entirely. Would they actually fire Bombo though? Owner Jon Middleton had to basically beg Dave to come out of retirement to bring the organization to respectability. The two have been in lock step ever since. As much as so many of us have hated many of his decisions, Middleton is not going to can him mid-season unless there is some kind of confrontation. Considering these are the oldest of old heads, that’s probably not going to happen. This is an after-the-season decision if there ever was one. When he goes though, the Phillies are going to finally have to confront the Dave’s contractual sins.

An Angry Phillies Offseason

What Happens?

I don’t know. I can see the team just burying its head in the sand until the offseason in hopes that they just “turn it around” or I can see Long and Thomson fired before the team plays another game. No playoffs though will be unforgivable for Dave Dombrowski. He’ll get every opportunity to pull the right levers this year, but if none work, expect a swift retirement ceremony.

What I keep coming back to is what happened with the Eagles a few years back. Nick Sirianni probably should have been fired after the 2023 disaster year (still made the playoffs) and definitely after the Week 4 Cleveland game the next year. When a ship goes down, the Captain goes down too. Nick essentially had no answers for the sinking either. Well, the Eagles ended up winning a Super Bowl and getting an extension. Again this season, he had no answers when the ship went down. I didn’t say this was a helpful analogy, I just keep thinking about it.

Photo: Brett Davis – Getty Images

1. That’s not completely true. Nick Castellanos and Taijuan Walker have already been fired and if there was anyone to take Alec Bohm’s place, he might be gone too ↩︎