Now that he’s been appointed to his first major league managing post at age 58, Thomson is finding out he still has a lot of catching up to do.
“A lot of things happened yesterday that I hadn’t really gone through before; the press conference, and addressing the club as the leader,” new Phillies interim manager Thomson said Saturday prior to a game against the Angels. “So yeah, it was a little crazy.”
How nutty? “I had 350 text messages yesterday, so I’m still trying to catch up on that, too,” he said, mimicking swiping his phone. “That’s all I did, all night long.”
There were messages from family and friends and old baseball buddies, such as long-ago Yankees manager Stump Merrill and Thomson’s old junior college baseball coach.
“It’s been kind of neat,” he said, “you know?”
If anything, it’s certainly new for a guy who hails from a place called Corunna, Ontario, played one year of JC-level ball at a community college in Michigan that dropped its baseball program after his one year there, fell into a baseball scholarship at the University of Kansas, and set a hitting record there which moved the Tigers to draft him in the 35th round in 1985.
“I was there (St. Clair County Community College in Port Huron, Mich.) one year, they dropped the program, and I ended up playing in a summer league in Canada with two players from the University of Kansas,” Thomson said. “They called the coach, the coach came to see me and that’s how I got the scholarship.”
He would leave as KU’s highest averaged hitter ever for a single season. Quite an unlikely story, yet Thomson was just getting started.
“I played both (hockey and baseball); I guess I was a little bit better baseball player then,” said Thomson, recounting his youth. “Not that I was a great player – obviously I played professionally, but I didn’t get past A-ball – but just a little bit better baseball player.”
That might have had something to do with his father Jack, who owned a construction company, was a bit of an amateur philosopher … and according to his son was kind of into (baseball) analytics “before there were any.”
Perhaps that helped draw Thomson into the life of front office player development, which he toiled at for many of the 27 years he worked for the Yankees. There were various coaching jobs at various levels in that Yankees organization, including the last 10 years he was there serving under manager Joe Girardi.
There was also one experience in 1995 where he managed the short-season Class A Oneonta Yankees of the New York-Pennsylvania League, the only other managing experience Thomson had prior to his current job.
“My father said life is like going through a forest, and you get a basket and all of the trees are people, and you’re just taking a leaf off all these different trees and putting them in there,” Thomson said. “And at the end of it, that’s what you get.
“When I was a lot younger I thought about managing. But then as my career sort of went along, it didn’t become that big of a deal. So certainly the other day when I woke up I didn’t think I was going to be the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies.”
Frankly, for an organization that moved on from a top manager like Girardi, and one that had third base coach and former successful Lehigh Valley manager Dusty Wathan on hand – not to mention managerial legends Charlie Manuel and Larry Bowa and former GM Ruben Amaro still hanging around – the Thomson choice was indeed a bit of a surprise.
Even if it is an interim choice. Or is it?
“I just told them what I was about, what I feel like I’m about,” Thomson said of his first meetings with players as manager. “That’s being a good communicator and staying ahead of things and making sure they know when they’re playing, what position they’re playing and making sure that they’re prepared so that they can compete at a high level and be able to perform.
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