Since retiring as a player after the 1995 season, Don Mattingly has been quoted as saying that he thinks he could have reach 3,000 hits if he hadn’t decided to spend more time with his kids. Here’s the most recent version of that quote that popped up on Twitter.
No source was cited for this quote, but I don’t doubt Mattingly said it. In 2014 he gave an interview on MLB Network in which he made a similar remark, so I think this is probably an accurate reflection of how he feels.
I’m a bit torn about this. Part of me finds it really admirable that a player would retain that level of confidence in his abilities. It’s no secret that Mattingly struggled mightily with back problems for the last several years of his career, and was a shell of the player who had been so remarkably good in the mid-1980s. For him to feel, 20+ years later, that he still had five good years in him when he hung up his spikes is revealing about the level of swagger he brought to the game.
At the same time, it makes me sad that he feels this way, because there isn’t a chance in the world that he’s right.
When he retired, Mattingly was 847 hits short of 3,000 for his career. He would have needed nearly 170 hits per year for five more years to reach 3,000. Here are his hit totals from his final five seasons:
1991: 169
1992: 184
1993: 154
1994: 113
1995: 132
To be fair, those final two seasons were shortened by strikes. If we extrapolate them out to full 162-game seasons, his totals would look like this:
1991: 169
1992: 184
1993: 154
1994: 162
1995: 147
That’s an average of 163. If he’d played five more seasons at the exact same level he’d played his final five years, he’d have collected about 815 more hits and fallen about 32 hits short of 3,000. With that small a gap to close, I’m sure he can wishcast a bit at some luck or a single great year or a final season at the age of 40 being enough to push him over the top.
But the thing is, if he’d hung on until he was thirty-nine, he wouldn’t have played like he did from 1991 to 1995. He would have played worse.
Age matters. It grinds on all of us, even great athletes. To expect Mattingly to produce the same results at the ages of 35 to 39 that he produced at the ages of 30 to 34 is not realistic. Look no further than Mattingly himself. Here are his hits-per-game totals for each four- or five-year blocs of his career
Ages 21-25: 1.29 H/G
Ages 26-30: 1.20 H/G
Ages 31-34: 1.13 H/G
In the second five years of Mattingly’s career, while he was still in what is usually the peak years for a player, his hits-per-game dropped about 7% from the prior five years. It dropped another 6% in the final four seasons of his career. We have no reason to believe that trend would have stopped, which means Mattingly was pretty likely to see his hits-per-game drop at least another 6-7% if he’d played five more seasons. That gets him down to barely more than one hit per game played, on average. To be even more accurate we should accelerate that decline since he would have been playing in his late thirties, but we don’t need to. Just his actual, unadjusted performance trend makes it clear he’d have fallen short.
The math is relentless. Mattingly would have had to play just about 800 more games to collect those 847 hits. That’s 160 games per year. Could he do that with his deteriorating back condition?
Probably not.
Mattingly had only played 668 game in his final five seasons. Even if we account for the strikes again, he only gets to about 725 games in those five seasons. In his last five non-strike seasons, he played in a total of just 703 games. In his entire 14-year career, he only surpassed 160 games one time, way back in 1986. In the nine years that followed he averaged just 141 games per year even after we adjust for the strike.
The most charitable scenario would could reasonably apply is that if Mattingly played five more seasons, he might have averaged about 140 games per year at the same 1.13 hits-per-game he averaged in the five years before he retired. That’s 791 more hits, leaving him at 2,944. A more realistic projection is that his playing time would continue to decline with age, to more like 130 games or fewer per year, and that his hits-per-game would continue its decline, to something like 1.05 or 1.06. That only adds 689 hits to his total, leaving him at 2,842, at least a full season’s worth of hits short of 3,000.
And remember, all of his other numbers were in decline during his final years. He only had an OPS+ of 105 in the 1990s. His batting average those years was .286, and he barely slugged .400. Five more seasons at that level or worse would have dragged down his otherwise impressive 127 career OPS+ to something more like 120. His .307 career batting average also would dropped by about ten points. His power was largely gone, so he only would have adding 40 homers or so. He’d have added another 10-12 WAR to his career total, putting him somewhere in the low-to-mid 50’s overall. And, again, that’s ignoring that reality that he likely would have suffered from even steeper declines in performance that players in their late thirties usually experience, particularly those with bad backs.
You know what you’d have after all of that? It wouldn’t be “Don Mattingly,” the tough-as-nails gamer that Bill James famously described as “100% ballplayer, 0% bullshit,” the guy who walked away at thirty-four rather than be less than he’d been.
Instead, he would be Vada Pinson. Here are his career numbers:
Those numbers aren’t exactly where Mattingly might have landed with five more seasons, but they aren’t too far off at all. And while Vada Pinson was a very, very good player, he is not in the Hall of Fame. Mattingly’s peak in the 1980s, including his MVP award, would have given him a better case than Pinson, but he already has a better case because of that peak and still isn’t in the Hall of Fame. In fact, he never got more than 28% of the votes cast.
I find it very hard to believe that nearly half the voters for the Hall of Fame, 47% of them, would have changed their minds about him to get him to the 75% threshold he needed for induction if he’d hung around for five more years and ended with career totals similar to Vada Pinson’s. His best bet might have been the added brownie points he would get from the championships the Yankees started winning as soon as he left in the late 1990s. But would those teams have won those titles with an aging, diminished Don Mattingly playing first base most days instead of Tino Martinez? Maybe, maybe not.
So no, I’m sorry to say that Mattingly would not have reached 3,000 hits if he’d managed to play five more years. And he still probably wouldn’t be in the Hall of Fame, either.
But it is admirable in a way that he still thinks he could have done it.
This is such a kind dismantling, I really appreciate the range you show in these pieces. Some people get the scalpel and some people get the hammer. I think your tone was spot-on here, particularly given the reasons Mattingly gives for stepping back, which are commendable. I've talked to one former player, a pitcher, who said something very similar about his decision to retire, at a point when his performance was on a very similar trend-line to that of Mattingly's. It makes me wonder if there is a correlation between decline and a willingness to step away to focus on other priorities. It seems straightforward that a player could more easily leave behind some decline-years, but if you are say, an Adrian Beltre, I bet that decision is much, much harder.
A very well done piece Paul. It always seemed that back injuries derailed Mattingly's career. That's why it's hard to believe he could've played three more seasons much less five. But no surprise that he felt he could've done it. That confidence is why he was an MLB All-Star and. almost HOFer!