COMMENTARY : Mattingly Finds Closing Door on ’94 Tough

There were so many bad days, once he left Yankee Stadium and went home to Evansville much too soon. Now in Fort Lauderdale, on a bright baseball morning, Don Mattingly was asked about the worst day.

“The worst day was when Bud Selig closed the door,” Mattingly said last week.

He is nine days from the start of a new season, one that is supposed to be the payoff for everything that has ever happened to him with the Yankees, both good and bad. Mattingly looks around the clubhouse and sees another Yankee team that is loaded. Across the room are the lockers belonging to Jack McDowell and John Wetteland, two of the best pitchers in baseball. The new season is rich with possibilities for Mattingly, who has never played a single playoff game in his career.

It does not mean he can close the door so easily on last season.

Mattingly was in first place when he went out on strike, with a record of 70-43. And he was like all the players last Aug. 12, certain the owners would never cancel the rest of the season, the playoffs, the World Series. Then came the September day in Evansville a month later when Mattingly watched on television, watched in amazement, as Selig “called off baseball.”

Last week, Mattingly sat in front of his locker at Fort Lauderdale Stadium and said, “I’ve got this outdoor basketball court at my house. Full court. My kids were out there, riding their bikes up and down the court. I remember just sitting down on the concrete and watching them, just thinking how great kids are. They didn’t know anything about what I’d just seen, they didn’t have a care in the world, they were just riding their bikes. I sat there for a long time and then I realized my wife, Kim, was next to me. I finally turned to her and said, ‘I can’t believe this is happening to me.’ ”

He wasn’t going to win the American League East. Wasn’t going to win the pennant.

Wasn’t going to play in the World Series.

“We’d put all that work in as a team, we’d won all those games, we’d come back all those times,” Mattingly said. “And now we were just back to zero. It’s why I feel that if we do win the division this year, we’ll have won it twice.”

He shook his head and said, “This is like our two-fer season.”

Mattingly was in Yankee Stadium only one more time last year after Aug. 12. It was the day of the New York City Marathon, and he was there filming a Nike television commercial.

He was asked about being in the Stadium so close to when the World Series should have been played there. The World Series for which he had waited longer than any great Yankee had ever waited.

“I didn’t feel sad, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “I didn’t feel mad, or spooky. I wasn’t feeling anything by then.”

He always hits in the winter. He did not pick up a bat after that commercial for a long time. “All I wanted to do was play hoops,” he said. “I wasn’t going to pick up a bat until I wanted to pick up a bat. And that wasn’t until this one union meeting we had in Arizona (in late January). I came back from that one and felt we were close, even though it turned out we weren’t.”

He hit and waited and finally Don Mattingly was down in Fort Lauderdale with the Yankees, getting ready to defend a title in the AL East that he had not really won. There was an intrasquad game, and Mattingly was throwing the ball around the infield from first base and for one moment--”I guess this was my spooky moment”--he felt as if the game were being played on Aug. 13, the day after the strike began.

“I threw the ball across the field, and it was like this was the next inning of last season,” Mattingly said.

There was a moment in the intrasquad game when Paul O’Neill bounced a ball up the middle, and Mattingly said he flashed back to O’Neill being 0-for-5 in the final game of last season, an extra-inning loss to the Blue Jays.

“I stood there thinking, ‘O’Neill never goes two games in a row without a hit,’ ” Mattingly said. “ ‘He never goes two days in a row.’ ”

He was back. He does not ever get back October of 1994. Mattingly does the only thing he can, in this short baseball spring. He points himself toward October of 1995. He got three hits against the Dodgers in a game last week.

“I’m telling myself that (the short spring training) might be the best thing for me,” Mattingly said. “Because the alternative is thinking about what a slow starter I’ve been in the past, and how tough this might be for me. I’m taking the opposite approach. The one thing I’ve learned is that you’ve got to stay positive.”

He has seen too much. He played on Yankee teams on which Rickey Henderson hit in front of him and Dave Winfield hit behind him, and still the Yankees did not win. Ten years ago, he was on a Yankee team that chased the Blue Jays all the way until the first weekend in October before losing the AL East. Last season, after all the other disappointments, after all the back pain that has altered not just a swing but what once looked to be a Hall of Fame career, Mattingly lost first place and lost October because of a strike.

And now he is not so sure, even with Wetteland and McDowell, that the Yankees will just run away with the thing. Maybe because Mattingly has seen too much. Too much has happened to him at Yankee Stadium.

“You know how I feel about this thing?” he said. There was action all around him in the clubhouse, with players being weighed and players getting dressed, and the whole place feeling as if there was some baseball fire drill going on. “I feel as if Toronto and Baltimore and Boston got a reprieve. Not only did they get a reprieve, but they got a chance to reload.”

Mattingly turned around and looked at the clock. Thirty minutes until he was out on the field.

“I know how excited the fans are about this season,” he said. “Everybody in this room is excited. But as far as I’m concerned, there’s no way in the world that anybody can say that the Yankees win it this season. We win. I believe we will win. But ‘should’ is not a word that I believe you can use in our division.”

Mattingly is in the final year of a contract that pays him $4 million a year. You look at it, and look at his statistics since his bad back changed everything, and wonder how he can make that kind of money after this season. All of a sudden, Mattingly is 33 years old. He will be 34 on Thursday. I asked him if he ever sees himself hitting a home run to win the World Series, getting the big hit to win the Series, and then going home to Evansville for good.

“If I ever get a hit like that, I know I’ll want to come back and defend the title,” he said.

Now Don Mattingly smiled.

“But I dream about that hit,” he said. “I dream about that hit all the time.”