COMMENTARY : There’s Still Life in Mattingly’s Bat and the Yankees’ Season

A call was made to Tim McCarver Wednesday, because things are starting to jump in baseball, and when that happens you never can go wrong with McCarver. He still makes more sense about baseball than anybody, is still the best spokesman for the game that I know about. He knows all the things that are wrong, but is not one of those who has forgotten what is right. Maybe that is why McCarver spent so much time talking about Don Mattingly.

It is not just Yankee Stadium that feels a certain way about Mattingly. It is not just Buck Showalter, and Mattingly’s teammates, and Yankees fans.

“I’m so excited at what he’s done the last week or so, I can’t even tell you,” McCarver said. “I’m rooting for him from the bottom of my soul.”

McCarver admitted he doesn’t know Mattingly very well, has spent very little time around him. When he is not working for ABC on baseball, he does Mets games on WWOR-TV. Half the time Mattingly is playing, McCarver is watching the Mets. And it is quite rare for McCarver to see a Yankees game in person. So I asked why he feels this way about someone he really only knows as a player whose best days are supposed to be gone.

“Don Mattingly is important, that’s why,” McCarver said. “Not just to the Yankees, but to baseball. That’s just my opinion. He represents goodness at a time when goodness certainly is not the common thread in baseball. More than anything else, it’s that goodness that’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think about Mattingly.

“And there’s a lot more than that, of course. In the face of adversity, in what can be such a difficult city for any athlete to excel, I have never heard Don Mattingly make an excuse about anything. I have never heard him making an excuse. He is totally and thoroughly genuine. He doesn’t need the media to explain him to the fans. They understand him perfectly all by themselves. It’s why he has the relationship with them that he does.”

Mattingly has begun to hit the ball again, and hit it hard, and all of a sudden the baseball season feels alive here, the way it does in other places on the baseball map. Mattingly is not the only reason the Yankees have gotten up, gotten right back in the race in the American League East. He is certainly not the only hot hitter on the team, because everybody can see what Wade Boggs has been doing, and Paul O’Neill, and Mike Stanley, and even Tony Fernandez.

Suddenly, though, in a loud and emotional and quite wonderful way, this Yankees’ season has organized around the Yankees’ captain. He was the most popular athlete in town even before he got his swing back. Even before people were swinging at him. Now he feels bigger than ever.

The Yankees are winning, and that makes their fans feel good. But there is more going on than that. If the Yankees end up catching the Red Sox, we will remember the real excitement starting the week Mattingly went deep a few times, at a time when people were wondering if he ever would go deep again.

And we will remember the first real noise of the season for Mattingly and the Yankees, the first loud roars from a ballpark that has been half-empty almost all season. It was the roar that greeted Mattingly’s home run last Sunday afternoon, and then another one when he showed himself on the dugout steps for a curtain call. Then the caps came out on the field. It was Cap Day, and some of the people didn’t think cheering was enough for Mattingly, and so they threw their caps on the field.

There have been other times at Yankee Stadium when people threw things on the field and made the place look very bad. Not this time. The caps floated through the air like confetti. Baseball felt as good here, looked as good in these moments, as it had in such a long time.

Even when the Yankees were running away with the American League East last season, people didn’t fully enjoy themselves, because the threat of a strike was always around, spoiling even the best baseball occasions.

Then everything began to go wrong this season. Jimmy Key was hurt and other pitchers began to go, and Mattingly couldn’t see straight, or hit. The Yankees were 12-12 on May 25 and didn’t get back to .500, with a record of 40-40, until Tuesday night. There were cheers for the Yankees. None lasted. Until now. By the end of the homestand, the Stadium was not just cheering Mattingly but everyone.

Mattingly lost nearly half a season, in one way or another, because of injury and then a virus that attacked his eyes. He tried to compensate for poor vision when he should have taken himself out of the lineup. But this was the season when Mattingly finally was supposed to make the playoffs, and everything had gone wrong for the Yankees, and so he couldn’t sit it out. Showalter waited for Mattingly’s eyes to get better. During the bad times, he had been reminded once again about Mattingly’s heart.

Now Mattingly is at .307.

“I don’t defend Donnie ever,” Showalter said, “because Donnie doesn’t need defending.”

Before Wednesday night’s game with the Royals, Mattingly -- who was supposed to have become a once-great player to be pitied -- was hitting .381 in July. That was 32-for-84 and third-best in the league. The 32 hits were also third-best. He had three home runs and 10 RBI for the month, with a few games left to go. It is the best full month (he hit .410 in just 39 at-bats in June, 1987) Mattingly has had since September-October of 1986, when he hit .422, with six home runs and 23 RBI.

And in the seven games the Yankees won to get them to 40-40, the winning streak that began after the grisly doubleheader loss to the White Sox that had people burying the Yankees before they ever got to August, Mattingly hit .500.

He was 11-for-22, scored 10 runs, knocked in eight, hit three home runs. He got standing ovations again and again. None of this would have seemed so important if the Yankees were losing these games. They weren’t. Suddenly the baseball season in New York wasn’t just a waiting room for football.

“No matter what happens, I will never forget these cheers,” Mattingly said to me the other day.

He won’t forget. The fans don’t forget. Mattingly’s bat is alive and so are the Yankees. It was not just caps in the air at Yankee Stadium last weekend, it was hope as well. Maybe it is not just Mattingly’s summer beginning late. Maybe it is everyone’s.