Blue Jays’ Don Mattingly, a superstar servant to the players, finally gets his World Series moment
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 9 hours ago
- 5 min read
By TYLER KEPNER / THE ATHLETIC
Don Mattingly is not comfortable as a sympathetic figure. He has had a remarkable baseball life: 36 seasons in uniform as a player, coach or manager. Reaching the World Series, as a bench coach for the Toronto Blue Jays, is new. But the purity of the pursuit is what defines him.
“Complete is a big word, right?” Mattingly said, when asked recently if his career would have felt complete without getting here. “When you say you got a chance to do this, that’d be complete. But it wouldn’t change the way I felt about myself or how I went about my business or anything else.”
Mattingly, 64, is the former manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who are facing the Blue Jays in the Series. As a New York Yankee, he was probably the best player in baseball in the mid-1980s. His fame makes him a celebrity. His ethos makes him, in his word, a servant.
So that is why a World Series workout day — besides the required news media availability — was just another chance to be a grunt. When the Blue Jays pitchers went through their fielding drills, it was Mattingly over at first base catching their throws and dropping the baseballs back in a bucket. He could have been on a high school diamond in Indiana.
“If you didn’t know who he was, you would think he’s just a random, normal person,” said Tanner Scott, a Dodgers pitcher who played for Mattingly with the Miami Marlins. “He’s a great guy, and he was so good at what he did. It’s cool.”
Of all the World Series subplots, Mattingly’s might be the coolest. Maybe he will make a pivotal suggestion to manager John Schneider, a New Jersey kid who grew up with a Mattingly poster on his wall. But the players make the difference. It is their game.
He said he joined the Blue Jays because general manager Ross Atkins called him.
“John was a young manager; it felt like a great fit,” Mattingly said. “That’s the only reason I came.”
Mattingly’s absence from the World Series is like a clerical error by the baseball gods. He excelled for 14 seasons for the team with by far the most World Series appearances. Then he coached in pinstripes for four more years on Yankee teams loaded with Hall of Famers.
After the 2007 season, when the Yankees passed him over to hire Joe Girardi as manager, Mattingly followed Joe Torre to another Tiffany franchise, the Dodgers. The team won five division titles in his eight years in uniform. Still, no pennants.
Many players have logged 14 seasons since the divisional era began in 1969 without reaching a World Series. But no former MVP has also spent a dozen years as a manager without getting there at some point.
“It’s not easy to make it to a World Series — he would know better than most,” said the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw, who won his three Cy Young Awards under Mattingly. “So I know he’s going to have a blast doing this. And obviously I hope he doesn’t get a ring, but I hope he enjoys this week.”
Mattingly said he would have loved to be facing the Philadelphia Phillies, because his son Preston is their general manager. But he is delighted to share this with his youngest son, Louis, who is 10.
“It’s been really fun just to see his love for baseball grow this year,” Mattingly said. “And it’s kind of the first year that he’s old enough to hang around the ballpark, be on his own, be in the cages, be on the field. Teams are so much better nowadays about having the kids around.”
Mattingly had three sons with his first wife and retired after the 1995 season to be more active in their lives. That is why he never regretted the timing of his exit, even though the Yankees reached five World Series in the six years that followed.
The Dodgers have now made five World Series in the decade since Mattingly left Los Angeles. He did so, he said, because Louis was a newborn and his second wife, Lori, had two other boys and could not commute regularly to the West Coast.
“Really, my decisions to walk away in New York as a player and to walk in LA are both based on family,” Mattingly said. “And I never look back on those decisions.”
His seven seasons as Marlins manager included a spot in the expanded playoffs in 2020, when Miami upset the Chicago Cubs in the first round.
“The year of COVID, we win that first round in Chicago,” Mattingly said. “And you know what? We got a couple of good young pitchers out there that could have got hot. We could have moved on, but we weren’t able to. But you always believe that you can.”
There were other letdowns on the way here. In 1984, when Mattingly won the batting title, the Detroit Tigers started 35-5 and sealed the division before Memorial Day. In 1985, when Mattingly was MVP, the Yankees won 97 games, six more than the champion Kansas City Royals. But Toronto won the East, so the Yankees — with Rickey Henderson, Dave Winfield and Ron Guidry — went home.
“It’s a different time,” Mattingly said. “If we’d have had eight shots when I was playing to get in, then maybe you’d feel different.”
The Yankees have had more than a dozen MVPs, and among them only Mattingly never played in the World Series. Yet he is revered, even by a generation of players who had never seen him play. Infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa noted that Mattingly had nine Gold Gloves, more than any active American Leaguer, and was still smooth around the bag.
“Anytime I make a bad throw, I’m like, ‘Oh, I made Donnie Baseball jump,’” Kiner-Falefa said. “But when you do make a bad throw and he picks it, it’s just like butter. And it’s like, ‘Wow, he’s still got it.’”
George Springer, whose Game 7 home run in the American League Championship Series against the Seattle Mariners lifted the Blue Jays to the pennant, was born in 1989 in New Britain, Connecticut, about 100 miles from the Bronx. The first day Mattingly played in Springer’s lifetime, he hit a walk-off home run — because of course he did.
“I don’t think he realizes how good he was and the stuff he was able to do,” Springer said. “But he’s the master of perspective, and it’s cool to talk to a guy like him, just to hear what he has to say about the moment, about games he played in, guys he faced. It’s all pretty relative to what we’re going through now.”
The master of perspective understands that reaching the World Series doesn’t define him. Not getting there for all those years never consumed him. But the hundreds of text messages he’s gotten since Springer’s homer have made Mattingly recognize something.
Dodgers fans aside, everyone is rooting for him.
“It’s been a really humbling feeling that people kind of want that for you,” Mattingly said. “For me, I’m happy about that. But it does keep going back to our players. It’s really about them.”