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On April 28, with the Phillies off to a 9-19 start — tied with the Mets for the worst in the majors — president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski fired manager Rob Thomson and named bench coach Don Mattingly as interim manager. Since then, the team has been red-hot, going 16-6 and (briefly) climbing above .500 for the first time since April 7. While they aren’t yet in a playoff position, the Phillies’ season has at least gotten a much-needed reset. Cristopher Sánchez and Kyle Schwarber appear to be on their way to especially productive campaigns, and Zack Wheeler has made a strong return from surgery to alleviate thoracic outlet syndrome.

After winning the NL East in back-to-back seasons and making the playoffs four times in a row, at the outset of 2026, the Phillies appeared to have a pretty good shot at returning to October baseball, with a 24.4% chance of winning the division and a 68.8% chance of reaching the postseason according to our Playoff Odds. That said, they did have significant concerns, particularly with regards to their starting pitching and their remade outfield. Their rotation placed third in our preseason Positional Power Rankings, which seemed overly optimistic given not only the question marks regarding Wheeler but also the departure of Ranger Suarez for Boston, the ugly 6.01 ERA Aaron Nola put up last year, and the arrival of top pitching prospect Andrew Painter despite a subpar 2025 season at Triple-A. The remade outfield, with Justin Crawford taking over in center, Brandon Marsh settling in left in place of Max Kepler, and Adolis García replacing Nick Castellanos in right, offered a chance to improve upon last year’s subpar showing, but it was hardly a guarantee, particularly given that García had been non-tendered by the Rangers.

Under Thomson, the Phillies won just two of their first nine series, taking two out of three games from the Nationals at home and the Rockies in Colorado during the season’s first two weeks but losing series to the Rangers, Diamondbacks, Cubs (twice) and Braves (twice) — with a 10-game losing streak spanning parts of their home-and-home series against the last two teams — before Dombrowski swung the axe. It was a surprising move given the Phillies’ success under Thomson, who himself took over for the fired Joe Girardi in June 2022, guided the team to its first pennant in 13 years, and won at a .580 clip while making the playoffs in every subsequent season.

Dombrowski first tried to hire the freshly-fired Alex Cora, with whom he’d won a championship with the Red Sox in 2018. But when Cora said no, he turned to Mattingly, who joined the staff as the bench coach in January after three years with the Blue Jays, uniting him with son Preston Mattingly, the team’s general manager. Under Donnie Baseball, the Phillies won their first six series, beating the Giants, Marlins, A’s, Rockies, Red Sox, and Pirates. With a chance to push that to seven in a row — something that had never happened under a manager who had ascended to the job in midseason, according to The Athletic’s Jayson Stark — they lost Wednesday’s rubber match to the Reds, 9-4, and dropped the series, two games to one. Even so, Mattingly’s 16-4 start to his Phillies career was the best by a National League replacement manager in his first 20 games since Mike Dorgan went 16-4 after taking over the Providence Grays in 1880.

Though he’s almost universally well-regarded within the game, Mattingly has rarely stood out in his managerial career. He won three straight NL West titles with the Dodgers while Clayton Kershaw was in his prime but reached the NLCS just once. His Marlins teams had some real talent, at least at first (an outfield of Marcell Ozuna, Christian Yelich, and Giancarlo Stanton in 2016–17) but were generally underfunded, and fell short of 70 wins in each of his last four full seasons there (2018–22, interrupted by a 31-29 ’20 season with a playoff appearance). No one has ever suggested he’s a tactical genius on the order of Earl Weaver or Tony La Russa, or a turnaround expert like Billy Martin.

But as with Thomson in 2022, so far Mattingly has been the right man at the right time, taking over at a point where some positive regression could have been expected — as with most midseason managerial changes. Relative to their first month, the Phillies have improved substantially in terms of both their run scoring and run prevention:

With Taijuan Walker initially filling in as Wheeler finished rehabbing from his surgery, the rotation was lit up like a Christmas tree over the season’s first four weeks. The unit managed just six quality starts through the Phillies’ first 28 games, with Sánchez accounting for three of those, Nola two, and Jesús Luzardo one. Meanwhile, the starters were pounded for five or more runs nine times, and produced a collective 5.80 ERA, with Sánchez (2.94) the only one with multiple starts and an ERA below 6.00. The group struck out more than a batter per inning and, aside from Nola and Walker, did a decent job of keeping the ball in the park, but high walk and barrel rates, and an obscene .380 BABIP, pushed their ERA well above their peripherals.

On April 23, two days prior to Wheeler’s return, the Phillies released Walker, who had been rocked for a 9.13 ERA this season and a 5.67 ERA since the start of 2024. Wheeler’s season debut, a five-inning, two-run effort in a 10-inning, 8-5 victory over the Braves, offered a glint of optimism regarding a turnaround, but when Nola was drilled for six runs in 4.2 innings the next afternoon, the team hit rock bottom, and Dombrowski made his move. Since the managerial change, the rotation has been better in just about every important stat you can think of:

In their 22 games under Mattingly, the starting pitchers have delivered 14 quality starts, and if that doesn’t sound like a big deal, consider that for the entire season, the Phillies are 17-3 when they’ve gotten quality starts, and 8-22 when they haven’t. Sánchez has an 0.59 ERA and 1.12 FIP since the change, and is riding a streak of 29.2 consecutive scoreless innings; he allowed a run in the first inning of his April 30 start against the Giants, and has put up zeroes ever since. Already coming off a season in which he was the runner-up in the NL Cy Young voting, he’s reconfigured his balance of sinkers and changeups to both righties and lefties with impressive results, and now leads the NL in ERA (1.82), FIP (1.93), and WAR (2.5).

Wheeler has provided ace-caliber work since his return, pitching to a 1.99 ERA and a 2.38 FIP in five starts totaling 31.2 innings (including that April 25 debut) while allowing just one home run. His strikeout rate is down relative to last season (from 33.3% to 25%), and his average four-seam fastball velocity is down as well (from 96.1 mph to 95), though while throwing seven scoreless innings against the Pirates on Sunday, the pitch averaged a crisp 96.3 mph — obviously, a positive development. Luzardo has pitched very well since the change, posting a 2.86 ERA in five starts totaling 28.1 innings; overall, his 2.88 FIP and 3.23 xERA are both right in line with last year. His peripherals have barely budged, and he’s actually done an even better job of avoiding hard contact, but he’s sporting a beefy 4.85 ERA because his BABIP has spiked from an already-high .324 last year to .361 this year.

Balls in play have been a problem for this team in general. The Phillies’ defense has been notoriously porous in recent years, and even without Castellanos — at times the majors’ worst outfielder by the metrics during his four-year run — this year it ranks second-to-last in the majors in DRS (-21) and a distant last in defensive efficiency (.655, 21 points below both the Rockies and Orioles), but right at average in terms of FRV (0). While the rotation’s BABIP has improved by 85 points since the managerial change, it’s still at a major league-high .342.

Before Monday’s game, Mattingly drew a connection between the team’s starting pitching, defense, and improved performance overall:

“Our starting pitchers have gotten us into the game and keeping us there. We’ve caught the ball better, it felt like our at-bats are good, so really the whole thing was a combination from the beginning, right? Every error we made, it seemed like early in the year, it cost us runs. Now, if we kick a ball or whatever, our pitchers have been getting us out of it. We’re catching some balls maybe we were dropping before. So a little unlucky at times, but in general, we’re playing better.”

Both the rookie Painter and the veteran Nola have generally continued to take their lumps, regardless of manager, though the former did produce his first career quality start on Monday against the Reds, a six-inning, two-run effort, and appears to have moved past a three-homer, eight-run shellacking by the A’s on May 2. Overall, Painter has a 5.77 ERA but a 4.60 FIP and 4.64 xERA, so some positive regression may be in order. Nola, after allowing four runs in five innings against the Reds on Wednesday — just his second time reaching five innings in his last six starts — has numbers that are mostly as bad or worse than last year, when he missed two months due to a right ankle sprain:

While Nola’s knuckle curve and changeup have been more effective, his four-seam fastball has been beaten like a piñata, with batters hitting .432 and slugging .977 against the pitch, compared to a .230 AVG and .529 SLG last year. “We’ve talked about a lot of things,” said Mattingly regarding the 32-year-old righty after Wednesday’s start. “We’ve talked about him pitching backward, doing different things, using his fastball more, using it less, maybe it’s using the changeup more, maybe the breaking ball. Each team presents its own set of challenges.”

The most likely alternative if the Phillies were to shift Nola (who’s signed through 2030) to the bullpen or send Painter down to Triple-A is 28-year-old righty Alan Rangel, who’s on the 40-man roster and has made six relief appearance for the Phillies in 2025–26 (one three-inning effort this year). That doesn’t appear to be something the Phillies are considering right now, however.

With better starting pitching in general since Mattingly took over, the underbelly of the bullpen has been less exposed, and the team’s relievers have missed far more bats:

Note the much higher average leverage index — more often than not, the relievers have been pitching in close games and protecting leads instead of mopping up. The team did weather a late-April IL stint by closer Jhoan Duran, who’s been lights out (1.42 ERA, 0.98 FIP), and setup men Brad Keller, José Alvarado, and Orion Kerkering have generally pitched better since the change, though we’re talking about samples of less than a dozen innings on either side of that split.

On the other side of the ball, the offense has improved dramatically:

Under Thomson, only four Phillies carried a wRC+ of 100 or better into late April, namely Schwarber (.196/.344/.520, 140 wRC+), Bryce Harper (.260/.345/.500, 133 wRC+), Marsh (.297/.323/.473, 119 wRC+) and J.T. Realmuto (.259/.344/.352, 101 wRC+); the last of those performances was in just 61 plate appearances, as Realmuto not only shared time with backup Rafael Marchán but spent 10 days on the IL for back spasms. Crawford (.244/.322/.333, 87 WRC+), García (.230/.304/.380, 91 wRC+) and Trea Turner (.230/.304/.354, 86 wRC+) scuffled, with the last of that bunch, last year’s NL batting champion, well below his capability. Meanwhile, both Bryson Stott (.221/.268/.273, 52 wRC+) and Alec Bohm (.143/.218/.194, 17 wRC+) were absolutely dreadful.

Those two have both been far more productive since then, with Stott hitting .237/.280/.539 (121 wRC+) and Bohm .329/.368/.571 (159 wRC+). On Mattingly’s watch, all of the regulars save for García (.176/.259/.243, 44 wRC+) and Realmuto (.160/.218/.200, 17 wRC+) have a wRC+ of at least 100. Crawford (.270/.333/.429, 113 wRC+) has found his footing offensively, though he has -6 DRS and -1 FRV defensively, and the outfield as a whole has combined for an 87 wRC+ and 0.2 WAR, a step down from last year’s full-season 95 wRC+ and 3.2 WAR. On a more positive note, Harper (.276/.378/.566, 155 wRC+) and Schwarber (.276/.375/.763, 207 wRC+) have joining Bohm among their hottest hitters. Schwarber recently went on an incredible binge: In eight games from May 7–15 against the A’s, Rockies, Red Sox and Pirates, he mashed nine home runs, with two-homer games against Colorado on May 10 and Pittsburgh on May 15 offsetting a homerless game in Boston on May 13. Currently hitting .230/.357/.624 (167 wRC+) overall, Schwarber missed the entire Reds series due to a stomach-related illness but now has a major league-high 20 homers, putting him on pace for 64. Given that he hit an NL-high 56 last year, this is obviously no fluke; even going by his more conservative Depth Charts projection, he’d wind up with 51 Schwarbombs this year.

The 2026 Phillies were supposed to be a good team, but for a month they weren’t, and it cost Thomson his job. Now they are again, and most of their best players are playing well, though Realmuto is in a deep funk, Turner has yet to rebound, and the outfield still needs help. They’ve clawed their way to .500 (25-25), with lower Playoff Odds (61%) than they had on Opening Day. Circa late April, this is about the best they could have hoped for, but under Mattingly, they have bigger tests ahead.