Phillies part ways with Kevin Long and Bobby Dickerson

Jim Salisbury of NBC Sports Philadelphia broke it Wednesday night, and MLB.com's Phillies beat writer didn't take long to back him up.

Todd Zolecki

@ToddZolecki

Can confirm these changes.

Jim Salisbury@JimSalisbury215

Phillies will move on from hitting coach Kevin Long and infield coach Bobby Dickerson, according to sources. More coming at @NBCSPhilly

So the run-it-back offseason gets its first real changes, and they hit the 2 parts of the team that fell apart this year. Start with the bats. The Phillies finished 2025 with a.759 OPS, 4th in baseball, and a.258 batting average, 2nd in baseball. This year the OPS dropped to.707, 22nd in MLB, and the average fell to.240, 21st. That is a lineup going from one of the best in the sport to below average in 1 season, and when that happens the hitting coach is usually the first one out the door.

Long's résumé is about as good as it gets for a hitting coach. He has World Series rings with the 2009 Yankees and the 2019 Nationals, he coached the Mets' hitters in between, and he spent 5 seasons in Philly starting in 2022. That stretch covered the 2022 pennant run and every October trip since. None of it saved him from a 50-point drop in team OPS.

Dickerson's numbers look worse, if anything. The Phillies' infield was +20 Outs Above Average in 2025 and -11 this year, a swing of 31 outs. That one stings, because Dickerson got a lot of credit for fixing Trea Turner's glove: Turner went from -8 OAA across 2023-2024 to +17 in 2025. Dickerson first coached the Phillies' infielders in 2019, spent 2 years in San Diego and came back in 2022. Now he's gone again.

The timing tells you who's driving this. Dave Dombrowski took the interim tag off Mattingly Wednesday and gave him a deal through 2028. Mattingly took over in late April after Rob Thomson was fired with the club 10 games under.500, then went 79-55 and got them to the postseason. They nearly blew the Wild Card spot in the final week, then lost to the Braves in 3 games in the Wild Card Series. Mattingly's son Preston has been the GM since 2024, so the Mattingly family now runs this team and picks the staff.

Long and Dickerson had been together on this staff since 2022, through Joe Girardi, then Thomson, then Mattingly. Keeping the manager and dumping the hitting and infield coaches is the classic move when a front office wants to look like it did something without blowing it all up. Whether new voices are enough to get this same core back to a.759 team is the whole question.

What to watch next: who replaces them, and whether these are the only changes. If the Phillies hire from outside, that tells you Dombrowski thinks the problem was the coaching. If the moves stop here and the roster mostly stays put, Mattingly is getting 2 years to prove the same group can do what it did in 2025.