MIAMI — Don Mattingly isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Miami Marlins general manager Kim Ng announced Thursday that Mattingly’s mutual option for the 2022 season has been picked up, meaning Mattingly will remain as the club’s manager for at least one more season.
“It’s a good feeling to be wanted,” said Mattingly, who is in the midst of his sixth season with the organization after managing the Los Angeles Dodgers for five seasons before that.
Ng said the organization had a July 15 deadline to decide whether to pick up Mattingly’s option, a stipulation Mattingly wanted in his contract that received no objections when it was negotiated toward at the end of the 2019 season. The Marlins front office made the decision on their end a little more than a week early. Mattingly informed the organization shortly afterward that he would exercise his end of the deal, too.
“That was coming up here real soon,” Ng said, “so we just decided to make sure we got it done.”
The decision provides some continuity between the front office and the team as the Marlins go through the latest stage of their rebuild.
Mattingly, 60, is already the longest-tenured manager in Marlins history.
“In terms of what our vision is and what our mission is,” Ng said, “Donnie’s always been on board.”
He is 345-447 all time as the Marlins’ manager, but the record only tells part of the story.
Mattingly has seen the Marlins’ rebuild unfold. His goal now: "Get to the finish line."
The death of star pitcher Jose Fernandez in September 2016, Mattingly’s first season with the club, set them back. He weathered through the early years of the club’s rebuild under the organization’s new ownership group led by Bruce Sherman and Derek Jeter, one that saw the team's main stars (Giancarlo Stanton, Marcell Ozuna, J.T. Realmuto, Dee Strange-Gordon and Christian Yelich) traded away for prospects to bolster a barren minor league system. Miami went 63-98 in 2018 and 57-105 in 2019 in those first two years.
And then, during the COVID-19 pandemic-shortened 2020 season, Mattingly led the Marlins to their first playoff appearance since 2003 after the club posted a 31-29 record. Miami advanced to the National League Division Series before losing to the Atlanta Braves.
He did so while maneuvering through a COVID-19 outbreak at the start of the year that had 18 players test positive and a seemingly never-ending wave of roster moves that followed. In 60 regular-season games, the Marlins made 174 roster moves, used 61 players overall and had 18 players make their MLB debuts. Mattingly was named the National League Manager of the Year for the 2020 season.
“Donnie has the perfect demeanor for our organization with the players in terms of patience,” Jeter said Tuesday. “The young guys coming up, he understands you’re going to struggle. I think he has patience with that. So Donnie’s meant a lot, coaching staff the same way. We have to continue when our guys come up, they’re still developing. So we have to have good teachers on our coaching staff, which I think we do.”
After trying season, Marlins’ Mattingly joins rare company with Manager of Year win
Speaking toward the end of spring training, Mattingly said that he wasn’t worried about how his contract situation would unfold and that the situation “will take care of itself.”
His focus instead has been on trying to maximize the potential of his club, one that is in last place in the National League East but has shown short stretches where it has the potential to compete with some of MLB’s top teams — like this last series, in which the Marlins took three of four against the defending World Series champion Dodgers.
“It really hasn’t been a big issue,” Mattingly said about the contract decision. “You think about different things. That’s never been something, at least the stage, that you’re that concerned about. You feel pretty confident in what you do and in a good spot. ... I was really more concerned about how we were playing and trying to figure out how we win the close games and all that type of thing. You navigate the waters we were in.”
And he has the respect of his players.
Shortstop Miguel Rojas, the Marlins’ de-facto team captain who has been managed by Mattingly dating back to his MLB debut with the Dodgers in 2014 and has seen the Marlins’ rebuild unfold from the beginning just like his manager, called Mattingly his “father in baseball.”
“A guy who I can call part of my family,” Rojas said.
Why is that?
“Our relationship is more than just baseball,” Rojas said. “For me it’s so important to have a guy like him that really cares about his players, really care about the development of the other players. You want someone who cares about you, someone who’s going to have your back in the bad moments and good moments, but like he always says, he’s not going to have your back if you’re not working your butt off. For me, that’s the main key with Donnie. You have to really work hard to earn his respect back and the way that he treats people. I’m just happy for for the relationship that we’ve had all these years.”
