New gig means new responsibilities for Thomson

PHILADELPHIA » Rob Thomson fielded ground balls and caught pitches in the low minors, caught flak and doled out advice in various minor league coaching stops in the Tigers’ and Yankees’ ranks, and eventually moved on to the majors, catching talent with his trained eyes as a front office force with the Yankees and eventually using those same skills as a top coach for both the Yankees and Phillies.

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.

LAURENCE KESTERSON — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Interim Phillies manager Rob Thomson, right, gets a laugh from first base coach Paco Figueroa, center, before Saturday’s game against the Los Angeles Angels.