In time-domain synchronous OFDM (TDS-OFDM) system for digital television terrestrial multimedia broadcasting (DTMB) standard, the baseband OFDM signal is upsampled and shaping filtered by square root raised cosine (SRRC) filter before digital-to-analog converter (DAC). Much of the work in the area of timing synchronization for TDS-OFDM focuses on frame synchronization and sampling clock frequency offset recovery, which does not consider the sampling clock phase offset due to the upsampling and SRRC filter. This paper evaluates the bit-error-rate (BER) effect of sampling clock phase offset in TDS-OFDM system. First, we provide the BER for M-order quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) in uncoded TDS-OFDM system. Second, under the condition of the optimal BER criterion and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel, we propose a near optimal sampling phase estimation criterion based on frequency-domain response. Simulations demonstrate that the proposed criterion also has good performance in actual TDS-OFDM system with channel coding over multipath channels, and it is superior to the conventional symbol timing recovery methods for TDS-OFDM system.