The Futility Infielder

The Yankees introduced their new hitting coach on Tuesday, a man who needed no introduction as far as most of the team's fans were concerned: former first baseman Don Mattingly. The Yankee front office had been nudging him to join Joe Torre's staff for a few years, but Mattingly, who retired to his Indiana farm after the 1995 season, wanted to spend time with his three growing sons. With hitting coach Rick Down the designated scapegoat for the Yanks' failure to win the World Series, and Mattingly's family urging him to return to pinstripes, all the cards fell into place to unretire No. 23. Voilà -- the prodigal son has returned.

Pardon me for not getting giddy. Mattingly is The Man as far as nearly every Yank fan of my generation is concerned, revered as "Donnie Baseball" and touted as being worthy of the Hall of Fame, but I just don't feel the same way about him. Part of it is that cheesy porn-star moustache (now gone, thankfully), and part of it's the way his boosters insist his meager credentials are worthy of Cooperstown. But the real reason for that differerence is what separates me from most of your garden-variety Yankee fans: from the time I began following baseball (1977) through Mattingly's final season, I hated the Pinstripes with a passion.

I'm a third-generation Dodger fan, scion of a legacy that began when my grandfather saw Babe Herman get hit on the head with a fly ball. My understanding of big-league baseball evolved around the Dodger-Yankee rivalry of the '77 and '78 Fall Classics, and while I could admire the pizzaz of Reggie Jackson, the acrobatics of Graig Nettles, or the grit of Thurman Munson, I was expressly forbidden to cheer for the Yanks under my father's roof. The Yankees were evil, while the Dodgers, the team that broke organized baseball's color barrier, the team that once had a Jewish ace, were the good guys. Those World Series teams were easy for a neophyte to latch onto: the Longest-Running Infield (Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell and Ron Cey), Dusty Baker and own Reggie (Smith) and a voluble manager who elevated team loyalty to the level of religion, or at least physiological abnormality ("I bleed Dodger blue").

For a kid growing up rooting for the Dodgers, the years that followed those first two World Series were a mix of extreme highs, agonizing near misses, and ho-hum mediocrity. Fernando Valenzuela brought a World Championship and a measure of revenge in beating the Yanks in 1981, Kirk Gibson and the Stunt Men brought an even more unlikely one in 1988. The team was eliminated on the last day of the season in 1980 (losing a one-game playoff to the Houston Astros) and 1982 (curse you, Joe Morgan!), but won division titles in 1983 and 1985 before losing in the LCS.

The Yanks should have been so lucky. Instead, triggered by owner George Steinbrenner's free-spending ways and a tendency to trade their best prospects for over-the-hill veterans, they entered a New Dark Age, going 13 years without making the postseason and even falling into the AL East cellar. Those were good times for a Yankee hater.

That New Dark Age coincided almost exactly with the career of Mattingly. He got a brief cup of coffee on a sub-.500 1982 team, was a part-timer on a decent '83 squad, and then ran off four monster years for teams that could finish no higher than second. He garnered an MVP award in 1985, when he hit .324/.371/.567 with 35 homers and 145 RBI, and had two more top-five finishes in the balloting during that span. But his performance started to slide, and his next two seasons ('88 and '89) were merely very good as opposed to great. After that, back troubles got the better of him; from 1990 until the end of his career, Mattingly was a mediocre hitter. His teams were just as bad, falling as far as 95 losses in 1990.

The Yankee fortunes began improving during manager Buck Showalter's second season in 1993. They had the best record in baseball when a strike ended the 1994 season, and they finally returned to the postseason in in 1995, dragging the shell of Mattingly's former self all the way. At the tender age of 34, Donnie Baseball hit only .288/.341/.413 with 7 homers and 49 RBI as the team's regular first baseman that season. But in that thrilling AL Division Series against the Seattle Mariners, Mattingly crushed a lot: .417/.440/.708. He never won a World Series or even played on a team that won a postseason series, but that brief taste of October baseball provided some solace for the Yankee fans who'd watched his sad decline.

I moved to New York City in February 1995, still a Yankee hater who spent most of my energy rooting for the Dodgers. I spent that 1995 ALDS pulling for the Mariners, jeering Mattingly in front of my TV set. To this day the hair on the back of my neck rises when I recall the cameras panning to the Seattle bullpen as one of the announcers excitedly exclaimed, "The Big Unit is getting loose!" It wasn't until the following summer when the Yanks caught my attention in a different light. As I wrote awhile back:

In 1996, my second baseball season in New York City, I read the sports pages daily, waiting for George Steinbrenner, his new manager Joe Torre, or one of the players to spark a controversy worthy of the Bronx Zoo's legacy, whereupon the team would implode. Remarkably, it never happened. I had no great affection for [David] Cone at this point in his career, but his seven innings of no-hit ball in his post-aneurysm comeback on September 2 -- and his willingness to call it a day at that point -- exemplified these new Yankees: they had perspective. My Dodgers were still a factor in the National League at that point, but in my disgust with their meek showing down the stretch (a choke in the season's final week relegating them to the Wild Card, then a quick cha-cha-cha out of the postseason entirely), it seemed automatic to turn my attentions to the Bronx side. The rest, as they say, is history.

My allegiance to the Dodgers had eroded gradually via the retirement of Tommy Lasorda, the aforementioned foldup in '96, an even worse one which cost them a trip to the postseason in 1997, and a headlong plunge into the clueless oblivion of the Fox era. In 1998, I started participating in a partial season ticket plan for Yankee games, was treated to the best team I've ever seen, and damn near forgot about that gal Sally Ann I left behind on the farm. I still root for the Dodgers, and if the two teams should ever meet in a World Series there's no doubt which hat I'd wear, but it's tough to follow a team three time zones away when there's so much fun to be had close at hand.

But there's Mattingly, parked on the wrong side of a line which separates "my" Yankees from the ones I grew up hating. It's not his fault for getting old before his time and missing out on the championship run that followed his retirement, but it's something more than a coincidence that when the Yankees replaced him with a first baseman that could produce numbers appropriate to the position, they rose to the top of the heap.

I've largely embraced that cast of Bronx Zoo characters which beat my Dodgers, but that doesn't mean I've gone back to revise my allegiances across the board. I still get Bummed when I read about the Yanks triumphing over Brooklyn in the 1940s and '50s, still gloat a little at the smugness of the Yankee brass as the empire fell following the 1964 World Series, still flinch when I see Bucky Dent's home run off of Mike Torrez (yes Virginia, I was pulling for the Red Sox in that one, but the virus didn't take), and still throw objects at the TV when I watch Nettles smother another line drive with men on base in Game Three of the '78 Series.

Not that any of this was a military secret -- it's been quite well documented in these pages -- but I've fully copped to being an interloper in the House That Ruth Built, a bandwagoneer on the Joe Torre Championship Express. I don't deny my past while I plumb its depths on a regular basis, and that means I can't get too excited about Don Mattingly, Hitting Coach. I know he's a legend around here, and I do think he's got a shot at a good second career with this team. But when the next goat that needs 'scaping is Donnie Baseball, you'll have to forgive me if a little smirk crosses my lips.

If you want a different take on the Mattingly news, Alex Belth has some analysis and the perspective of a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee fan.