The Legend of Donnie Baseball

Today’s guest writer, James Potocki, spent 25 years creating content for Major League Baseball as a cinematographer, editor and producer. If you’ve been a baseball fan over that time, you might have seen some of his work – This Week in Baseball, Prime 9, The World Series Film and the documentary series, MLB Network Presents, to name a few. He’s continuing to tell stories both in and out of the sports documentary world, but his passion for baseball and its history remains. 

After making his first trip to a World Series this year and being named to the Contemporary Baseball Player Era Hall of Fame ballot soon after that Fall Classic experience ended, there’s been a renewed focus in the baseball world on Don Mattingly. The game can’t seem to shake the memory of the revered legend from the 1980s. It’s pretty remarkable considering how un-remarkable his career numbers look on Baseball Reference.  In Donnie Baseball, a documentary on Mattingly that I directed for MLB Network in 2022, we opened with narration that wondered why the Yankees’ great continued to hold such a special place with fans who lived through his run in pinstripes:

“In baseball, you can’t always explain why you feel the way you do about certain players … the truth is, it’s not even that measurable.”

Today I find myself wondering, “What if it is?”

Volumes have been written about the Hall of Fame case for Don Mattingly. Statistically, the argument seems pretty clear that his career falls short of our current standards for Cooperstown. On the JAWS list for first basemen, Mattingly ranks 40th, sandwiched in between Adrián González and Gil Hodges. Hodges, a beloved player for those great Brooklyn teams of the 50s, did eventually make the Hall of Fame (as part of the Golden Days Era Committee ballot, 59 years after his final Major League game).  His managerial success with the ’69 Mets probably was a difference maker but maybe that’s the rub – candidacy goes beyond a WAR Mason-Dixon line determining if you’re in or out. I’m not sure I’m even arguing that Mattingly should be inducted; I’m more interested in exploring why so many people do take that stance. Will Clark is 28th on the JAWS list for first basemen, John Olerud 25th and Keith Hernandez 22nd. None of them are on the ballot but Mattingly is. Carlos Delgado is on the ballot this year as well, ranking 38th in JAWS; his career numbers at first glance look like Willie Stargell’s, but the context of the era in which they were compiled means so much. I also doubt Delgado will get much support in December. But people calling for Mattingly don’t care about JAWS. They still measure greatness the way they did when Donnie Baseball was lashing doubles and ripping home runs into the empty upper deck seats of Yankee Stadium.

For a time in the 1980s, Mattingly was considered “The best player in baseball.” By today’s standards, that regard is difficult to support, save maybe 1986. But how was he measured then? By the Triple Crown columns of batting average, home runs and RBI. It’s also important to acknowledge the relative offensive wasteland surrounding Mattingly’s excellence. With continued integration, the arrival of cookie cutter ballparks and West Coast play (starting in 1958), the numbers that star hitters put up looked pretty different beginning in the late 1950s up until 1992. Before then, if you were a power hitter, you generally hit for average as well. No longer. You were either a homer hitter or a high- average hitter. Harmon Killebrew or Rod Carew, not both. Mike Schmidt or Wade Boggs, not both. To do both was special, and that’s what Mattingly did in his prime. This is what you looked at when celebrating Mattingly’s brilliance:

1984  .343 23 110

1985  .324 35 145

1986  .352 31 113

1987  .327 30 115

Man, that was glorious. Batting average was so important, every ten points of it was a different class of hitter. “Oh, Mike Schmidt is hitting in the .290s now, he’s getting better.” That type of thing. A .260 hitter versus a .270, .280 hitter, etc. I can still remember those groups. So to hit .300 with 20 home runs was an impressive feat for a star. George Bell hitting .300 with power meant something. But if you hit .320 with 20 home runs and cleared 100 RBI, like Mattingly did for four straight years, it was supernatural. This is no New York bias. From 1958 to 1992, here’s the list of players to go .320-20-110 four times:

Hank Aaron

Don Mattingly

How about .320-30-110 three times?

Hank Aaron

Don Mattingly

And .340-20-110 twice?

Don Mattingly

That’s what people remember. He was putting up Stan Musial, Joe DiMaggio numbers when guys didn’t do that anymore. And you can’t just do it once, like a George Foster, Tommy Davis or Norm Cash. You have to repeat it, and Mattingly was in that zone for four straight years. On top of that, he was also a doubles machine, leading the league three years in a row, topping 40 in each of those years and reaching 53 in 1986. That ’86 season was monstrous in this offensive wasteland. He broke Yankees records set in the iconic 1927 season – the doubles mark by Lou Gehrig and hits total by Earle Combs. 238 hits, 53 doubles, a .352 average, 31 home runs. The only other players to reach the 230/50/.350/30 plateaus in the same season:

Chuck Klein, 1930

Ducky Medwick, 1937

He also never struck out. From 1984-87, you were twice as likely to see Donnie Baseball either homer or double than whiff when he came to bat. The iconic show This Week in Baseball was how fans caught up on baseball on the national level; it wasn’t to be missed on Saturdays to see the highlights around the game. Players would pop up every few weeks when they stood out on occasion, but Mattingly was a regular weekly attraction during his heyday, which only further cemented his stature in the game.

He played for one team his whole career, claimed a batting title, an MVP and nine Gold Gloves. He looked the part, too, with the eye black and the dirty uniform. He was the Hitman. He was friggin ‘Donnie Baseball,’ the nickname connoting a paragon, an exemplar. Yankee fans loved (and love) Don Mattingly. If there was a metric for it, he’d easily be in the top five on the fan meter in the entire history of the franchise. In Game 2 of the 1995 ALDS, when he hit the only postseason home run in his career, they had to stop the game because the fans in the Bronx were so frenzied they were littering the field with debris. Lou Piniella called for his Mariners team to come off the field and back into the dugout to wait for the crowd to calm down. Try to envision a packed house of 57,000 fans in Yankee Stadium for someone to throw out a ceremonial first pitch before a World Series game. I was in the building when Reggie Jackson would come out, Whitey Ford and Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, and DiMaggio. No one got a louder ovation than Mattingly. It’s insane, really. You’d have to raise someone from the grave for it to get any louder.  Hang onto the roof, indeed.

On average, the top 1.5% of all players to ever take the field are enshrined in Cooperstown. Did Mattingly do enough in his prime to merit that? The narrative might work for him, as the one-franchise star player who lost his career to injury. A Tony Oliva comp maybe, or a Kirby Puckett. It’s been pointed out that his career numbers are pretty comparable to Puckett’s, who made the Hall of Fame on his first ballot. Maybe the real difference maker with Mattingly and Puckett is two rings and an iconic moment frozen in time in 1991 …”We’ll see you tomorrow night!” But when people really assess Mattingly’s greatness, it’s that peak, not measured by WAR or OPS+ but, again, through the statistical standards of his time. The sum of his parts would have to be greater than the whole – which just might be how we truly judge players, anyway.

I think about Eddie Murray, a fantastic player with monster career counting numbers: 500 home runs, over 1900 RBI! Still, I think people take Mattingly over him at their respective peaks. And I would, too. Or even Robin Yount, who checked all the boxes for Cooperstown but it was almost like you woke up one day and said, “Wow, Robin Yount is going to be a Hall of Famer.” He was without question “The best player in baseball” in 1982, winning the MVP. He won another one in 1989 with unremarkable numbers. Incredibly, he was an All-Star only three times. But he played for 20 seasons and got his 3,000 hits and became a first-ballot selection. You couldn’t argue against it, but it didn’t always feel like that. In the mid-1980s, Mattingly felt like a Hall of Famer, and he’s continued to carry the reverence of one.

In considering the case for Dale Murphy, Joe Posnanski recently wondered “How long does someone have to be great to be a Hall of Famer anyway?” The baseline here is Sandy Koufax, who was otherworldly for five straight seasons, which include his incredible World Series performances in 1963 and ’65.

Mattingly doesn’t have any rings, and was “great” for only four seasons, so maybe he’s one year short. 

Or maybe, when we put our Bill James caps on, the greatness of his peak comes into retrospective question. Batting Average immediately is dismissed and replaced with OBP. Mattingly suffers there because he didn’t walk very much. You could look to OPS+, but that would ignore his subpar running game and the fact that he played first base. And even though he won nine Gold Gloves there, the defensive metrics, for whatever they’re worth, do not help him. WAR is the standard, and Baseball Reference categorizes WAR levels as 8+ equating to  MVP caliber and 5+ as All-Star level. Mattingly was a five-WAR player four times, a six-WAR player twice and seven-WAR player once, 7.2 in 1986. Though he finished in the top 10 in WAR for position players four times, he never led his league.  

It’s funny, there’s an interesting comp to Mattingly from the 1920s, one that checks those same boxes as he did from ’84 to ’87. Joining Mattingly, as well as Barry Bonds and Manny Ramírez, he’s one of four eligible players in the history of the American and National League to hit at least .320 with 20 home runs the same season four times and not be in the Hall of Fame. He’s the first 30-30 player in history. He homered in six consecutive games in 1922 to set a new record, one later pushed to eight straight by Mattingly (1987) and others. This Babe Ruth-contemporary ended up with only 42.7 WAR – Mattingly has 42.4 – and received less than one percent of the HOF vote in 1956 and 1958 and then appeared on a Veterans Committee ballot once, in 2003, where he gained 9.9% of the vote.  The player? Ken Williams. He’s been lost to time, like most great players, but was celebrated for a little while as he nearly led the lowly Browns to a pennant over the Yankees in 1922.

Whose name is on every tongue? Ken Williams
Whose praises are now daily sung? Ken Williams
Who is the rooter’s joy and pride?
Who gives the pesky pill a ride?
And separates it from its hide? Ken Williams      

Who is our most admired youth? Ken Williams
Who makes the fan forget Babe Ruth? Ken Williams
Who is the guy so calm and cool?
Who swings his trusty batting tool?
And knocks the pellet for a gool? Ken Williams

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

In the final act of Donnie Baseball, Joel Sherman considers the legacy of Don Mattingly and concludes, “Even if he never makes Cooperstown, I think the history of baseball includes his name in a way that a lot of people that do make the Hall of Fame aren’t spoken about.”

It might have to be enough for him. I don’t suspect he’ll get the votes come December, but I think it would be really cool if he did. The truth is, most of the players immortalized in bronze in Cooperstown are forgotten over time. Patrons walk through the plaque room and brush right by Jesse Haines and George Kelly and Chick Hafey and Rick Ferrell and Sam Rice. But as long as Don Mattingly is alive, he’ll be greeted with a standing ovation in the Bronx. People will want to take their picture with him and shake his hand. A generation of parents will continue to tell their children about Donnie Baseball, the best player in the game before his back betrayed him. 

Towards the end of Barry Levinson’s The Natural, Roy Hobbs sits up in a hospital bed on the eve of a game to decide the fate of his New York Knights and the league pennant. He shares his regret with Glenn Close’s character Iris Gaines on how his career fell short, how he could have broken every record in the book. He always wanted people to see him on the street and say, “There goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was.” She responds, “With or without the records, they’ll remember you. Think of all those young boys you’ve influenced. There’s so many of them.”

The next night, Hobbs, of course, wins the game in ultimate cinematic light-blasting fashion, winning the pennant and retiring to the sunlit farm with his son and long lost sweetheart. He looks content and happy, because although he fell short of what he could do in the game, he had done enough to be a legend. Wouldn’t you rather be Bo Jackson than Curtis Martin? In his own way, Don Mattingly lives in that space, too. 

In Ron Shelton’s Bull Durham, Crash Davis educates Nuke LaLoosh about his opponent in the pool hall.

“Nuke, do you know who this is? This is Sandy Grimes. Sandy Grimes hit .371 in Louisville in 1967.”

“.376,” Sandy interjects.

“I’m sorry,” Crash continues. “He hit .376. That’s a career, man. In any league.”

Somewhere in between the fictional careers of Sandy Grimes and Roy Hobbs, we can find the legend of Donnie Baseball, a legend founded upon the pillars of the game’s hallowed numbers, greatness realized even if the overall journey fell a little short.

“There goes Don Mattingly, the best player in the game before his back betrayed him.”

“This is Don Mattingly. Don Mattingly hit .352 with 31 home runs for the New York Yankees in 1986.”

It should be enough for him and his fans, no matter what happens this December. Because after all, what else is there?

Thanks to Baseball Reference and its extraordinary research database, Stathead, for help in assembling this piece.