Mattingly Is Rich, but Also Very Depressed

Afternoons bring hope to Don Mattingly, only to have evenings deliver despair. And the more this routine repeats itself, the more despair begins to swallow hope. The toll of playing on the worst team of his pro career is beginning to wear on Mattingly.

After another Yankee loss here Wednesday night, Mattingly slouched in a chair in front of his locker with a glazed look on his face. He asked reporters what the team’s record was, and when he heard it was 18-32, he winced.

“Man, oh, man. This is just so tough,” Mattingly said. “I’ve never been on a club that lost like this. It hasn’t been like this since I was 13 playing for a Babe Ruth League team. We were horrible. Awful. Plus we had bad uniforms. Ugly green things. It was terrible.”

The next day, Thursday, he showed up for early hitting 4 1/2 hours before game time, shagged balls with a right-handed glove and talked about seeing the positive in every situation, even one as bleak as the Yankees’ predicament. “You’ve just seen the metamorphosis,” Mattingly said of his outlook.

But with each defeat, Mattingly’s optimism requires a little more effort.

“It does get harder,” he said. “It’s very hard the way we’re playing. I’m learning to deal with it.

“It’s been difficult because we’ve lost so much. The end of the games have been harder than the beginning. I mean, by the seventh inning we’re getting pounded again or we’re down a run and we don’t expect to win and you think, ‘This is another night we couldn’t get over the hill.’ And you come back today and it’s a fight to get ready to play tonight. That’s the feeling we have to fight.

“I don’t know if this team was ever confident. We weren’t. Remember, we weren’t exactly a great team last year. And when they traded guys like Pags (Mike Pagliarulo), they traded away our attitude. We have nobody with that swagger that good teams have. Winny (Dave Winfield) had it. Jack Clark had presence. Those good teams we had, we’d be one run down in the seventh and we we were going to win. Somebody would pop one or Rickey (Henderson) would get on, steal a base or two and score on a sacrifice fly.

“This team isn’t like that. What they need to do is get rid of anybody who doesn’t care. I take it home every night and some guys just leave it. That ticks me off, to see a guy laughing and joking around when we lose. He doesn’t care. I’m not saying we have a lot of those guys. But you don’t want to have any of those kind of guys on your team.”

Since 1985, the Yankees’ win total has dropped from 97 to 90 to 89 to 85 to 74 and, at this rate, to 57 this year. Mattingly, who could have been a free agent after this season, committed himself to five more years of this when he agreed to a $19.3-million contract on the eve of Opening Day.

Now here he is two months later, having witnessed the ninth change of managers since his debut in September, 1982, and struggling for a pathetic team that compiled the worst 50-game record of any Yankee outfit since 1913. Mattingly is in an 0-for-17 slump that has dropped his average to .263. He has one extra-base hit, a double, in his past 64 at-bats.

“In my worst moments, yes, I say, ‘Why did I sign?”’ Mattingly said. “I could have just played this season and then had my pick of where I wanted to go after that. It would have been fun.

“But then I come around and think about the reasons why I signed. I want to be a part of winning here. It would kill me if I left and two or three years later the Yankees won. I played for a team that won 97 games, had the second-best record in baseball, and now I’m playing for one that has the worst record in baseball. I want to be a part of bringing it around again.

“I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I’ve always been real positive. That’s just the way I am. I can see a lot of good things on this club. I’ve played with some real outlaws here and I’ve seen the good side in them. I’ve told them, ‘You’re better than that.’ And if they don’t come around, it bothers me.”

Mattingly will be 34 when his contract extension expires. He has indicated that he prefers to retire then. The danger is that Mattingly will leave baseball as the Ernie Banks of his time, a Hall of Fame player who spent his entire career with one club and never made it to postseason play. There is no reason to believe that it will turn out any other way, certainly not as long as George Steinbrenner runs the team.

“That doesn’t scare me,” Mattingly said. “I have no fear of that. As long as I’m here doing the best I can and being the best player I can be, I can live with that. I mean, I want to play in the postseason. And I know I’m going to. Here. I have no fear of that. After the five years is up, if I haven’t made it, maybe I’ll just have to come back again.”