Phillies players express guilt, remorse as Rob Thomson era ends in Philadelphia

PHILADELPHIA — Rob Thomson watched the Phillies on Tuesday. For the 62-year-old baseball lifer, it was a familiar activity in an unfamiliar setting. Since 2018, no other human being on the planet has seen more of the Philadelphia Phillies in person.

It’s 1,222 games to be exact — 38 more if you count the postseason, countless more if you include those humdrum, sun-drenched, spring training exhibitions. He experienced all of those early afternoons and late nights — 597 as bench coach, 625 as manager — in more or less the same fashion: on the top step of a dugout, in baseball pants, with a focused scowl in his eyes and a lineup card in his back pocket. But Tuesday was different because Thomson was at home, presumably not in baseball pants, following the Phillies on TV, with the NHL playoffs on a second screen like the Canadian he is.

Thomson was fired Tuesday morning , the only possible scapegoat for his now-former ballclub’s abysmal 9-19 start. The Phillies, participants in the past four Octobers, entered this season with expectations to match. Instead, the team got cold fast, trudging through an April from hell.

At one point, the Phillies dropped 10 straight. Eventually, the losing became too much to bear, and president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski felt he had no other choice. “He's a wonderful person,” Dombrowski gushed Tuesday about the man he’d fired earlier in the day.