A beloved infielder on a Hall of Fame track who spends his whole career in New York. A devastating back injury that shortens that career.

But enough about Don Mattingly.

If David Wright’s grand finale Saturday night didn’t carry enough bittersweet drama at Citi Field, there was Mattingly, Wright 1.0, in the visitors’ dugout as the Marlins’ manager. If the former Yankees captain can’t relate to every chapter and verse that Wright, the Mets’ captain, has experienced the last few years, he nevertheless knows the saga arguably better than anyone else alive.

“David’s [back] seemed to keep compounding. Mine stayed in one spot,” Mattingly said before the game “His seemed like it went all over. Each one of them is different. Everybody’s back is a little different. The battles he’s had are obviously very documented. Just the character he showed, fighting his way back and continuing to try, tells you a lot.”

From 1984 through 1989, Mattingly tallied 33 wins above replacement (thanks, Baseball-Reference.com). Double that and you get into Cooperstown. But Mattingly’s back woes began in earnest the next season, and from 1990 through 1995, his age 34-season, he totaled 9 WAR.

He retired after 1995 partly due to family reasons — he probably could have found a job somewhere, if not necessarily with the Yankees — which distinguishes him from Wright, who is having his conclusion thrust upon him. Yet the back woes clearly took their toll on Mattingly, which makes him appreciate Wright’s journey.

“You have to do so much work just to get back on the field,” Mattingly said. “I always look back, once you’re going through that, it was like [in the early] days you come, you get dressed, you go hit and you take groundballs. It turned into, ‘OK, come, you’ve got to get loose, you’ve got to do back work, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that, you’ve got to make sure you’re stretched out.’ And then you go try be on the field like everybody else.”

When Wright’s back problems hit critical mass in 2015, he reached out to Mattingly, who was managing the Dodgers at the time.

“We talked a couple of years back about trying to find a routine, how you play with this,” Mattingly said. “It’s hard to find a routine. [It was] my biggest battle. It took a couple of years. I was always thinking that he would find that routine. His just kept going to a different area. ‘This hurts, next thing something else is hurt,’ so he wasn’t able to get that routine for that stability of helping him out.”

Mattingly didn’t make it into the Hall of Fame on the writers’ ballot, and Wright is likely headed for a similar fate. Mattingly offered his desired forecast for how Wright copes with what could have been.

“I think it’s hard to not look back at your career in general and think, ‘I should’ve been better at this, I should’ve been better at that.’ And knowing that, for me, the end of your career is not what you were able to do early on,” Mattingly said. “I’m sure David will have some of that. But I think in general, you look back and you think, ‘I’m grateful.’ You never know what you’re going to get playing in the big leagues. You did what you did and whatever the reasons are whatever the reasons.

“In general, I would think that he knows he’s laid everything out there and he’s made every effort. He’s probably not going to have that much trouble with it.”

Surely, every Mets fan is rooting for Mattingly, forever a Yankee even though he has managed elsewhere, to be correct on this matter.