It has been 25 years since Don Mattingly played his final game and made his lone playoff appearance as a player with the Yankees.
And in this time of no baseball — or any other sports — Mattingly has found himself watching old games, and recently caught some of his last game — the Yankees’ loss in Seattle in Game 5 of the 1995 ALDS.
“My wife was switching through the channels the other day and that game was on,’’ the Marlins manager said Thursday on MLB Network’s “High Heat.”
While Mattingly wasn’t interested in reliving the whole game, he quickly noticed he was about to come to the plate.
“They showed I was coming up the next inning and I said, ‘Well, who’s pitching?’ ’’ Mattingly said. “If it’s Randy Johnson, that at-bat is not going to go very well. And it actually was, so I did watch that. That’s about it.”
It was the last plate appearance of Mattingly’s career, a strikeout against Johnson in the top of the 10th inning. The Yankees went on to lose the game on Edgar Martinez’s two-run double off Jack McDowell in the bottom of the 11th.
Don MattinglyReuters“That’s one of those games you don’t really want to remember, to be quite honest with you,’’ Mattingly said. “I know it was a great game in a great series, but it was a tough one … to live through.”
Though it ended poorly for Mattingly and the Yankees, it came after a resurgence by both the team and its first baseman.
Over the last 30 games of the regular season, the Yankees went 24-6 to clinch the wild card and Mattingly — who struggled for much of the season because of his chronic back issues — was a key reason for the run.
He went 35-for-113 (.310) with two homers, 13 RBIs and an OPS of .803 during that stretch and followed it up with a fantastic postseason, going 10-for-24 with a homer and six RBIs in the ALDS loss.
On Thursday, Mattingly attributed his finish to a change he made in his swing.
“During that season, probably that last month … I started getting my feel back,’’ Mattingly said. “I kind of went to a leg kick.”
It helped make up for the lack of power that plagued him in the latter part of his career.
“Once I really got hurt and had trouble maintaining my back, I could never find that place, it didn’t seem like,’’ Mattingly said. “It took me two or three years and I kind of ran into a leg kick that season late and I went to it and it felt unbelievable.”
The results were dramatic.
“All of a sudden, I had a little bit of power back [and] I was driving the ball the other way,’’ Mattingly said. “I kind of found the rhythm that last month and we needed to win every day. I kind of got hot along with a lot of our guys. I was swinging the bat [well] going into that postseason and I always felt if I was swinging the bat good, I’m as good a hitter as anybody.”
It wasn’t enough for the Yankees to win their first postseason series since 1981, but it allowed Mattingly to close out his career on a high note.
