{"id":648655,"date":"2026-05-04T08:36:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T08:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/648655\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T08:36:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T08:36:08","slug":"can-phillies-blame-one-guy-for-horrible-start-to-2026-mlb-campaign","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/648655\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Phillies Blame One Guy for Horrible Start to 2026 MLB Campaign?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s very strange to look at the Philadelphia Phillies<\/a> before Rob Thomson and not get a sense that he was blamed, and perhaps he shouldn’t have been, for all of the struggles the organization has faced.<\/p>\n

Even when Dave Dombrowski spoke about the decision to move on from Thomson, it wasn’t exactly like he was putting all the blame on him, even if the decision to let go of him made it seem like that.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThis isn\u2019t a blame game,\u201d Dombrowski said<\/a>, per MLB.com. \u201cYou can blame whoever you choose. For us, we don\u2019t really do that. Rob, like the rest of us, you bear responsibilities. Just the way things were going, they\u2019re not going well enough. I don\u2019t think we\u2019re playing up to our capabilities. I think we\u2019re a much better club than we played. And so you make some decisions that are tough at times.\u201d<\/p>\n

The bigger problem here is Dombrowski, who obviously didn’t do a good enough job of putting together a competent roster. The Phillies look like a very good team on paper, at least one that can win games at a high level, but they just haven’t been able to do so over the first month or so of the regular season.<\/p>\n

\u201cNo, I don\u2019t have any regrets,\u201d Dombrowski said about his roster construction. \u201cI mean, if we play this way the rest of the year, I\u2019ll have a lot of regrets at the end of the year. But I think we\u2019re a lot better than this.\u201d<\/p>\n

If there’s been one positive from some of the comments that we heard coming out of Philadelphia, it’s that the organization isn’t hiding from the fact that it hasn’t played well. We all have eyes here, and even people who don’t understand baseball would say the Phillies just haven’t been playing as well as they should be.<\/p>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s better baseball,\u201d new head coach Don Mattingly said. \u201cWe haven\u2019t been losing unluckily. We\u2019ve contributed to that. We\u2019ve got to play better baseball. … This is a \u2018we\u2019 thing. This isn\u2019t point-your-finger-at-one-thing and say, ‘This is the solution.’ The solution is play better than the other team.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s very strange to look at the Philadelphia Phillies before Rob Thomson and not get a sense that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648656,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,40804,25107,591,2365,58173,85],"class_list":["post-648655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-blame-game","tag-dave-dombrowski","tag-mlb","tag-philadelphia-phillies","tag-rob-thomson","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648655"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648655\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648656"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}