Rob Thomson called Kyle Schwarber ‘the best clubhouse presence I’ve ever been around’
Inside the Minute Maid Park visitor’s clubhouse Monday night, Rob Thomson told the team that had just rid itself of the longest active playoff drought in Major League Baseball that the work wasn’t finished.
“We’re not done,” the Phillies’ interim manager said, his right hand holding a bottle of champagne he’d soon try to drink from before remembering to uncork it. “After Wednesday, we’ve got 13 more wins, and then we’re World Champions.”
“Damn right,” came a voice from Thomson’s right. The NBC Sports Philadelphia camera didn’t show who said it, but it was easy to place. The voice came from someone who knows what Thomson’s talking about. Who knows what it’s like to break long droughts.
It came from someone who had stepped up earlier that night in the most recent “biggest game of the season,” setting the tone against one of the best teams in baseball with a first-pitch homer to the opposite field that seemed to ease everything. In case that run wasn’t enough (it was), that someone walloped another solo homer in the eighth, this one down the right field line, extending the lead to 3-0, the Phillies six outs away from ensuring a Red October.
It wasn’t just the voice that stood out; it was the conviction behind it. It was anything but disingenuous, the tone matching the cool-headedness that Kyle Schwarber carried into his multi-homer clincher, leading a team of talented players who haven’t quite won like he has to a place many of them had never been.
And Schwarber’s role in all of it wasn’t lost on anyone.
“I was actually meeting today with our staff,” Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski recounted during Tuesday’s NBCSP broadcast. “Rob Thomson said, ‘I think he’s the best clubhouse presence I’ve ever been around.’”
That’s what the Phillies paid Schwarber for back in March. OK, they paid him $79 million to hit 46-ish homers a season. Duh. But they also paid him that money to hit those homers when he hit them — like in Houston on Monday, or leading off Game 2 of a Saturday doubleheader in Washington that followed a 13-4 thrashing when it felt like everything was spiraling out of control.
Thomson was drafted in 1985. He played professional baseball until 1988. He was a minor league coach with the Detroit Tigers for the next two years and coached in the Yankees’ organization (both minor and major leagues) the next 28. He’s been with the Phillies since 2018.
The point: Thomson has been in baseball a very, very long time. That Schwarber’s reverence doesn’t just come from a Phillies Day Care to whom the 29-year-old must seem a baseball lifer, but also from a 59-year-old who’s occupied clubhouses with Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera and Jorge Posada — and won a World Series with all of them — should speak volumes.
Once Schwarber peppered the Crawford Boxes in Houston with that first-pitch 394-foot homer to lead off Monday night’s game, you almost knew. Sure, it was only 1-0; sure, no one could foresee that Aaron Nola would retire his first 20 hitters; and sure, the Astros were 49 games over .500 — but you knew. They were clinching that night. The omen was too good.
The stakes are incomparable, but the feeling wasn’t dissimilar to that which followed Dexter Fowler’s leadoff homer in Game 7 of the 2016 World Series — a homer that a 23-year-old Kyle Schwarber watched from the on-deck circle, hours before he and his Cubs broke a different, much longer drought of their own. You knew.
The stakes, it feels necessary to reiterate, were far higher, but the pressure is applicable. No other Phillies position player has experience like that. The Phillies’ common denominators across four years of September collapses were topics of discussion during what some might’ve called Episode 5 — but this iteration has a different numerator, if you will.
“I think a natural tie there is Kyle Schwarber, to everything that he brings to the table,” Dombrowski said Tuesday of the Phillies’ 2022 clubhouse. “There’s not many that I’ve been around in my time that are like him.”
So now, it’s time for Schwarber to lead these Phillies through a place they’ve never been together: the playoffs. Thirteen more wins won’t be easy. Hell, neither will two.
But it’s possible. As Schwarber himself might say: Damn right, it’s possible. And if it happens — two, 13 or anything in between — the best clubhouse presence of Thomson’s long baseball career and the tone-setter whose personality might be just as important as his bat could very well be an indispensable reason why.
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