Don Mattingly finally made it to the World Series this year, as a coach with the Blue Jays. It never happened for him with the Yankees, of course, across a career with them when he was the greatest Yankee to never make it that far. Now on Sunday, when we learn how the members of Contemporary Era Committee have voted, Donnie Baseball will find out if he has finally made it to Cooperstown, where he belongs.
Mattingly’s name has been on the list of candidates being considered by the committee before, back in 2022, when he fell four votes short (you need to be named on 12 of 16 ballots) of making it to the Hall that time. This time around, here are the other famous baseball names being considered, in alphabetical order: Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Carlos Delgado, Jeff Kent, Dale Murphy, Gary Sheffield and the late Fernando Valenzuela.
You surely have your own strong opinions about Mattingly and the others. Braves fans who saw it all from Dale Murphy, both the talent and the class, are as vocal about him as Yankees fans are about Mattingly. Jeff Kent’s highest vote percentage on the writers’ ballot was 46.5. And everyone knows how much Fernando Valenzuela was beloved as a Dodger, for the way he could pitch and for the passion and beauty he brought to Dodger Stadium during his career, changing those stands forever in Los Angeles.
But I saw it all from Mattingly, from the time he showed up out of Evansville at the old Yankee Stadium for a brief cameo at the end of the 1982 season. I saw the way he could hit and the way he could play first base. I saw him try to lift so many mediocre Yankee teams in the 1980s and even into the 1990s, all those years when Yankee fans loved him the way he did. Dave Winfield, now a Hall of Famer, was there for a lot of those years, too. But it was different between Yankees fans and Donnie Baseball. He was theirs.
I had a front-row seat to Mattingly’s grace, and the way he played through the pain of a bad back at the end of his career. He would have made it to Cooperstown long ago if not for that bad back, which made him so much less than what he had been in his prime, when his fellow players had once voted him the best player in baseball in a New York Times poll in 1986. He was a former MVP by then, and on his way to having the most hits and RBIs in the sport in ‘86. Just put it this way: Don Mattingly was all that, respected by his teammates and his peers as much as by Yankees fans.
He was just a Yankee at the wrong time, as much as the Stadium and the team’s history was made for him. The Bombers had made it to the World Series in 1981, the year before Mattingly arrived at the Stadium. They didn’t make it back until 1996 — the year after he had retired. In that way, he was the star-crossed Yankee star. And it wasn’t just the Series: Mattingly didn’t even make it to the postseason until his last October in the big leagues, when he was as much a star of a rousing and memorable five-game series against the Mariners as a young Ken Griffey Jr.
What Mattingly did in that series was make everybody remember what he was like when he was young: 10 hits in five games, a .417 batting average, .440 on-base percentage, .708 slugging, a home run, six RBIs. The homer, a go-ahead shot, came in Game 2 at the Stadium, producing perhaps the loudest and most rousing cheer of Mattingly’s Yankees career, which is saying plenty. He was every inch a Hall of Famer over those handful of games, same as he had been as a kid.
“I honestly believe I honored the game as best that I could every day of my career,” Mattingly told me one time. He was managing the Marlins by then, after having already managed the Dodgers. “I tried to give as much to the game as it gave to me.”
He did all of that: A lifetime batting average of .307. A .343 average in 1984 and a batting title, 145 RBIs in his MVP season, and 238 hits in ’86. And nine Gold Gloves. There was even a night when Lou Piniella needed him to play third base, even as a left-handed thrower, in Seattle. I remember watching that game, late at night, seeing Mattingly start a 5-4-3 double play as if he’d been playing on that side of the infield his whole life. Everything he had, every single night.
I asked him on Thursday night about his blood pressure going into the weekend. “Just checked it,” he joked. “125 over 76.”
So, one last time then, Donnie Baseball had the numbers. He should have the numbers this weekend, when the Hall of Fame should embrace him as an honored guest at long last. I have said this before about the great Don Mattingly: You had to be there. Time for him to finally be in Cooperstown.
