{"id":240475,"date":"2025-10-25T19:17:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-25T19:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/240475\/"},"modified":"2025-10-25T19:17:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-25T19:17:08","slug":"blue-jays-don-mattingly-a-superstar-servant-to-the-players-finally-gets-his-world-series-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/240475\/","title":{"rendered":"Blue Jays\u2019 Don Mattingly, a superstar servant to the players, finally gets his World Series moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Athletic has live coverage of Dodgers vs. Blue Jays in Game 2 of the World Series<\/a>.<\/p>\n

TORONTO \u2013 Don Mattingly is not comfortable as a sympathetic figure. He has had a remarkable baseball life, 36 seasons in uniform as a player, coach and 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cComplete is a big word, right?\u201d Mattingly said, when asked on Thursday if his career would have felt complete without getting here. \u201cWhen you say you got a chance to do this, that\u2019d be complete. But it wouldn\u2019t change the way I felt about myself or how I went about my business or anything else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mattingly, 64, is the former manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, who will face the Blue Jays in the opener at Rogers Centre on Friday. 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.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s why the World Series workout day \u2013 besides the required media availability \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you didn\u2019t know who he was, you would think he\u2019s just a random, normal person,\u201d said Tanner Scott, a Dodgers pitcher who played for Mattingly with the Miami Marlins. \u201cHe\u2019s a great guy, and he was so good at what he did. It\u2019s cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of all the World Series subplots, Mattingly\u2019s might be the coolest. Maybe he\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cYour success only comes through them,\u201d Mattingly said. \u201cSo the players are really what it\u2019s all about. They\u2019re going to drive this thing. We\u2019re here to support, so I can\u2019t say that getting back to the World Series is the reason I came back to Toronto. I came to Toronto because (GM Ross Atkins) called, John was a young manager, it felt like a great fit. That\u2019s the only reason I came.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mattingly\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Many players have logged 14 seasons in the divisional era (since 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not easy to make it to a World Series \u2013 he would know better than most,\u201d said the Dodgers\u2019 Clayton Kershaw, who won his three Cy Young Awards under Mattingly. \u201cSo I know he\u2019s gonna have a blast doing this. And obviously I hope he doesn\u2019t get a ring, but I hope he enjoys this week.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been really fun just to see his love for baseball grow this year,\u201d Mattingly said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s kind of the first year that he\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Don Mattingly (right) with George Steinbrenner (center) and Bernie Williams (left) in his final spring training as a player with the Yankees in 1995. (Doug Collier \/ AFP via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cReally, my decisions to walk away in New York as a player and to walk in LA are both based on family,\u201d Mattingly said. \u201cAnd I never look back on those decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

His seven seasons as Marlins manager included a spot in the expanded playoffs in 2020, when Miami upset the Cubs in the first round.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe year of COVID, we win that first round in Chicago,\u201d Mattingly said. \u201cAnd 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\u2019t able to. But you always believe that you can.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 with Rickey Henderson, Dave Winfield and Ron Guidry \u2013 went home.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a different time,\u201d Mattingly said. \u201cIf we\u2019d have had eight shots when I was playing to get in, then maybe you\u2019d feel different.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Yankees have had more than a dozen MVPs, and only Mattingly never played in the World Series. Yet he is revered, even by a generation of players too young to remember his career. Infielder Isiah Kiner-Falefa noted that Mattingly had nine Gold Gloves, more than any active American Leaguer, and is still smooth around the bag.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnytime I make a bad throw, I\u2019m like, \u2018Oh, I made Donnie Baseball jump!\u2019\u201d Kiner-Falefa said. \u201cBut when you do make a bad throw and he picks it, it\u2019s just like butter. And it\u2019s like, \u2018Wow, he\u2019s still got it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

George Springer, whose Game 7 homer in the ALCS lifted the Blue Jays to the pennant, was born in 1989 in New Britain, Conn., about 100 miles from the Bronx. The first day Mattingly played in Springer\u2019s lifetime, he hit a walk-off home run \u2013 because of course he did.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think he realizes how good he was and the stuff he was able to do,\u201d Springer said. \u201cBut he\u2019s the master of perspective, and it\u2019s 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\u2019s all pretty relative to what we\u2019re going through now.\u201d<\/p>\n

The master of perspective understands that reaching the World Series doesn\u2019t define him. Not getting there for all those years never consumed him. But the hundreds of text messages he\u2019s gotten since Springer\u2019s homer have made Mattingly recognize something.<\/p>\n

Dodgers fans aside, everyone is rooting for him.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been a really humbling feeling that people kind of want that for you,\u201d Mattingly said. \u201cFor me, I\u2019m happy about that. But it does keep going back to our players. It\u2019s really about them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Athletic has live coverage of Dodgers vs. Blue Jays in Game 2 of the World Series. TORONTO…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240476,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[558],"tags":[64,63,1187,1188,591,2704,85,5161],"class_list":["post-240475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-los-angeles-dodgers","tag-miami-marlins","tag-mlb","tag-new-york-yankees","tag-sports","tag-toronto-blue-jays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240475\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}