If Don Mattingly doesn’t want to manage the Miami Marlins or the Washington Nationals, or any of the other teams that have openings, he has a future in crisis management. For the last five years all he has done is deftly handle chaos.
Few men in baseball could have navigated the ordeals that swirled around Mattingly as he ran the Los Angeles Dodgers. In his brief time as the team’s manager he withstood an ownership collapse, a team sale, the random addition of several declining players with massive contracts, a barren bullpen, the stubbornness of Matt Kemp, a new general manager with a completely new philosophy, and three years of Yasiel Puig.
And somehow in that, Mattingly managed to win 55% of his games.
When people chuckle at the Dodgers’ $310m roster and wonder how Mattingly couldn’t win more than one postseason series, they don’t understand how flawed that $300m roster really is. More than $65m of it is dedicated to players the Dodgers are paying simply to not play of them – much of that shuttled out by new team president Andrew Friedman and general manager Farhan Zaidi in the name of future financial flexibility. Then there are the bloated contracts of Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford and Andre Ethier, all acquired or re-signed with an eye toward attracting a new television deal, negotiated two years ago which pays $8.3bn over 25 years.
In other words, the $310m roster exists less for winning than for making more money. But since the roster is $310m, the Dodgers obviously have to try to win, even if the proper pieces to make a true World Series run are not there.
Mattingly is probably not the right fit for the team’s analytics-heavy front office, and he seemed to realize that this week when he reportedly cut off talks about a contract extension. He adapted to management’s approach, but he was probably never going to be devoted to the theories and analytics, and front offices work best with managers buy into the data as much as they do.
Yet managing a $310m roster in a market like Los Angeles requires more skill than eliminating sacrifice bunts and using closers to get out of seventh-inning jams. It takes a unique personality to pacify former All Stars who don’t grasp the subtleties of platoon splits while making sure younger, cheaper and sometimes better players get the playing time they need.
The Dodgers’ managing job might be the most attractive in baseball right now, but it is also the most dangerous. Beneath the brilliance of Clayton Kershaw, the stability of Gonzalez, and the promise of Corey Seager and a small handful of bright pitching prospects working through the minor league system, are many bad contracts and a pitching staff filled with holes. It will take more than a bright mind to take the team deeper in October.
There is no doubt Mattingly grew as a manager and embraced approaches that must have seemed awkward to him at first. Getting this year’s Dodgers team to 92 wins with a rotation that went three pitchers deep and a lineup that was without Puig for much of the year might go down as Mattingly’s greatest feat. Had the Dodgers been able to score two more runs for Zach Greinke in Game 5 of the NLDS they might be talking about the World Series instead of the Mets. Had that happened, much of the credit should have gone to Mattingly.
Instead, his legacy might well be his 8-11 record in the postseason, which might have as much to do with some of Clayton Kershaw’s worst starts in the last three years than any managerial decision.
On Thursday, the man with the third-best winning percentage of any Dodger manager of at least five years walked away. Given what swirled around him, it’s a wonder Don Mattingly won 446 games in that time. Imagine what he could have done with a $200m roster of real talent instead of $310m of trouble?
