Don Mattingly “The American Dream”
In the spring of 1983, when I was on the cusp of my fifth birthday, Grandpa Sid took me to the Yankees Spring Training in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The Yanks’ practice facility was not much further away from my grandparents’ new home in Boynton Beach than Yankee Stadium was from their recently vacated apartment in the Bronx. He’d traveled over a thousand miles — far from the house that Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle had built — but his loyalties had not budged an inch. He believed in The New York Yankees and he wanted to impart that faith onto me.
That day, we sat on the hard metal bleachers and tracked the players taking batting practice and running repetitive fielding drills. As the afternoon wore on and my interest began to wane, my grandfather pointed at a wiry, hard-driving, rookie first-baseman from Indiana and instructed me: “Watch that guy. He’s the first one on the field and the last one off. He’s going to be a star.” My grandfather, of course, wasn’t scouting baseball talent. He was noting character. And, for whatever reason, that confident message was one of the most indelible memories from my childhood. He was pointing at Don Mattingly.
Donald Arthur Mattingly was born on April 20, 1961, in Evansville, Indiana. To me, as a kid, he looked like Indiana. His homespun face straddled the line between generic and handsome. His hair famously — polite on top and up front — grew out in the back to become one of baseball’s earliest and most divisive, mullets. His thick brown mustache, amiable and slightly curved around the side of his lips, became menacing when he was snarling at opposing pitchers. But what truly marked him — in the same way the entire midwest was explained to me — was his work ethic. People noticed it from the very beginning of his athletic career: “It wasn’t just that he was the best player, he was the hardest worker,” said Quentin Merkel, his high school coach. “He was so driven — I’ve never had a player who could hit like him.”
Not that long after my glimpse of him at Spring Training, Mattingly exploded into the Yankees’ starting lineup and became the heart of the team. In his first full season as the team’s first baseman in 1984, Mattingly led the American League in average (.343) and hits (207). He was second in the league in slugging percentage (.537) and at-bats per strikeout (18.3), fourth in total bases (324), fifth in RBIs (110), and 10th in on-base percentage (.381). His stance and swing were so pure and so rhythmic that they possessed an almost musical quality. He coiled himself like a snake in the batter’s box only to explode out on the correct pitch, scattering the ball throughout Yankee stadium with a grace that matched his grit. Yankees’ owner George Steinbrenner crowed: “Mattingly is the best young talent in baseball. You can talk all you want about [the Mets’ Darryl] Strawberry. I’ll take Mattingly.” I agreed and put his poster on my wall.
His 1985 season was even better. He batted .324, hitting 35 home runs and 48 doubles. His 145 RBIs were the most by any left-hander since Ted Williams and 21 more than the runner up. He won the Most Valuable Player and the first of his five consecutive Gold Glove awards (and nine overall). His absolute dominance continued into 1986, not only leading the league in hits and doubles, but breaking franchise records that had been set back in 1927 by Lou Gehrig and Earl Combs. He wasn’t the biggest or strongest or fastest — there were members of his own team that far surpassed him in each category — but no one out-worked him. In poll conducted by the New York Times, his fellow ballplayers selected him the best player in the league. George Brett quipped of Mattingly, “If he isn’t the best, I’d like to know who is.”
This had all implicitly confirmed my grandfather’s prediction from years earlier: Mattingly’s work ethic was his destiny. Now, as an adult, this observation sounds almost naive. But, forty years ago, it sounded more like an axiom than a prediction. My grandfather had a lifetime of evidence to support his prophecy. Sid had been born in 1921 to poor Russian immigrants. His own father had been a fine arts painter who’d switched to painting houses in America until he injured his back falling off a ladder. Their family was so profoundly poor that the first bed my grandfather ever had to himself was when he was in the Army during the Second World War (the bed at home was reserved for his sisters). His way out from this was work and responsibility. He put himself through City College and then law school at night once he had a family of his own. He spent his life working for the government of the country that had given him everything. And, in return for a life diligently serving, laboring and being a mensch, he got to retire in a peaceful and sunny paradise thousands of miles away from where his parents began. That’s how life was supposed to work in America if you did it correctly. You got out what you put in. And that’s how it was working for Mattingly.
Until it didn’t. On June 4, 1987, Mattingly exacerbated an underlying back injury that he had carefully managed his entire life. He had always tried to keep it quiet: “I was born with a congenital defect. If I hit too much, I got a pounding soreness. It was like a dead ache in my back…I tried to make the best of it. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want any sympathy from people. I didn’t want to hear people say, ‘How’s your back?’ Or, ‘He’s struggling because of his back.’ So what?” He asked Yankees’ manager Stump Merrill for a day off and ended up in traction at NYU hospital. The reality is — although he gritted through the impairment for the remainder of the year — he had reached the peak of his career. He powered through the 1988 and 1989 seasons, still putting up decent numbers. But his generational talent had been overwhelmed by a twist of genetic fate. All that he was left with was his work ethic and grit. And by 1990, in spite of his indefatigable will, he missed 59 games, batted .256 with five homers and 42 RBIs.
By the time Don Mattingly became the Yankees’ captain in 1991, the franchise had already won twenty-two World Series championships. They’d not won one, though, during Mattingly’s career. In fact, they’d not even been to the Fall Classic. But during his final season in 1995 — a season in which he limped his way to seven home runs and 49 RBIs — the Bronx Bombers finally made it to the playoffs. According to the story of The American Dream, The Hit Man’s work ethic should have been validated by a championship ring before he was put out to pasture. And, true to form, he tried. The badly hobbled Mattingly — as one last testament to the power of will and determination — hit .417 for the series with six RBIs and a magical go-ahead home run in Game Two. But, in the end, the Yankees lost, Mattingly retired and returned to his horse farm in Evansville. The next year, without Mattingly, the Yankees would win the World Series. And then again three more times in the next four years.
On those hard bleachers in Fort Lauderdale in 1983, my grandfather had promised me more for Mattingly. The guy who would soon be known as “Donnie Baseball” was doing everything right. And doing everything right meant that he would be rewarded with championships. Hustle and practice and teamwork and decency necessarily meant that Mattingly deserved the rings that talented guys with half the dedication (see: Mantle) collected during their careers. The American Dream promised that he would get everything he worked for. That was not the case. But why? Why didn’t he win a World Series? Why didn’t he end up in Cooperstown?
I wish the world was as simple as the one I absorbed on those bleachers. That people got what they deserved. I don’t think grandfather actually thought that — but what a wonderful thing to tell a child and what a wonderful thing for a child to believe. I love Don Mattingly. I love his swing. I love his opposite field doubles. I love his glove. I love that he still looks like Indiana to me. And I love his work ethic. Perhaps the rest just doesn’t matter.
My grandfather died in 2009, nearing his 88th birthday. At his funeral, my brother and I reflected that, as the first generation born here, his greatest gift to us was America. And, in that gift, was baseball, Don Mattingly and The American Dream.
by Kevin Blake