Mattingly Struggles in Effort to Regain Power

Getting lost is easy. One wrong turn is all it takes. That leads to another wrong turn, which leads to another, and soon you are in a place you’ve never been before. That is what has happened to Don Mattingly, who finds himself almost halfway through the season in the strangest of places for him: a .262 batting average with no hint of power.

Don Baylor, the Milwaukee hitting coach who used to hit behind him, considered the landscape around Mattingly and decided, “He’s never been here before.”

Baylor thinks so much of Mattingly that he shows videotapes of Mattingly’s swing to his players, a visual “How To” of hitting. But the tapes are from 1984, 1985 and 1986. Baylor said that the swing Mattingly uses now bears little resemblance to the one that produced 89 home runs, 368 runs batted in, 656 hits and a .340 batting average in those years.

“You can tease him with the ball just off the plate now,” Baylor said. “Now he’s getting himself out. When you’re struggling, the team is in last place, you’re making the kind of money he is and you don’t have the supporting cast you’re used to, it’s easy to put it all on yourself and start swinging at balls out of the strike zone more and more. I’ve never seen him hit pop-ups to shortstop like he does now.”

Baylor noted that Mattingly is dropping his hands, rather than bringing them directly through the hitting zone, and flattening his swing.

“He’s pushing the ball instead of driving it,” Baylor said. “In ’84 he was so good with taking that pitch away and driving it down the line and taking the pitch in and pulling it down the other line. Now he’s just pushing it. He just doesn’t go long periods like this flying out weakly, weakly, weakly -- especially in this park.”

Baylor said that he passed along his advice to Mattingly, but only after Mattingly approached him this week and asked for help.

Mattingly has not hit a home run in 146 at-bats since he hit his fifth on May 20. He has just 12 doubles. Since April 20 -- all but the first eight games of the season -- he is hitting .211. Mattingly has reacted testily when questioned about his hitting.

But Mattingly is encouraged by the past two games, in which he is 4-for-9. He may be finding his way back to more familiar territory.

“I can feel it,” he said. “I’m not even nervous anymore. If I don’t have a hit in my third or fourth at-bat, I still feel good. I’ve gone back to being myself.”

How did Mattingly get here? These are the most-often-mentioned wrong turns:

--His back. Mattingly was a career .330 hitter when he left a game June 4, 1987, with a disc injury. Since then, he has hit 20 points lower than that. He doesn’t spring from as deep a crouch as he used to nor does he generate the same torque.

One National League executive said that if Mattingly had opted for free agency after this season rather than signing his five-year, $19.3 million contract, he would have no interest in signing him.

“Nope,” the executive said. “I’d be too concerned about his back. Here’s a guy that’s been on a downward trend and has a back problem. It’s too risky. I can’t believe that they gave him five years. He might not even be playing five years from now. Three years, maybe. But five years? I can’t understand that.”

Said Mattingly, “My back is fine. I’ve had no problems with my back all year.”

--His impatience. Mattingly, who never has walked more than 56 times in a season, has just nine unintentional walks in 301 plate appearances this year.

“His patience used to be his greatest asset,” Baylor said. “Boggs and Mattingly would always take that first strike because they knew they could still get a hit with two strikes. Now when I see him get two strikes it’s like a panic situation. We tell our pitchers that with two strikes, there’s no need to throw him a strike.”

--A lack of protection in the lineup. Mel Hall (.251) and Steve Balboni (.219) most often hit behind Mattingly.

“Your protection makes a big difference in terms of the pitches you see,” Baylor said. “Donnie never had to think about it when he had Jack Clark and Dave Winfield behind him, Ken Griffey and Rickey Henderson ahead of him. He had a lot of guys up and down the lineup.

“A pitcher would look at Mattingly and then look in the on-deck circle and see somebody like me or Winny. So he thinks, ‘I can’t walk him because then I have to face him and him and him.’ He doesn’t want to give up a three-run dinger.”

Said Darrell Evans, the Yankees’ hitting coach, “We need to get somebody hot behind him. We have to get him chances to drive in runs where they have to pitch to him, rather than pitching around him.”

Mattingly has slumped before. He was 0-for-15 and 0-for-19 (his longest drought) in a two-month span during the 1985 season. And he once went 171 at-bats over the 1988 and 1989 seasons without a homer. But he has never struggled this badly for this long nor received as much criticism. Being astray has left him angry, hurt, defensive and determined to find his way back.

“I’ll hit,” he said. “And when I’m going good I’m not going to listen to anybody or talk to anybody then, either.”