The Curse of Donnie Baseball
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Less widely known than the Curse of the Bambino, the Curse of the Billy Goat and other baseball jinxes is The Curse of Donnie Baseball. The New York Yankees won the American League pennant in 1981. In 1982, the team called up first baseman Don Mattingly from the minor leagues. His last season as an active player was 1995. The Yankees won the World Series in 1996. Despite such achievements as the American League's batting title in 1984, its Most Valuable Player Award in 1985, and a team record for most hits in a season in 1986, with 238, Mattingly never appeared on a pennant-winning team.
The Yankees never even reached the postseason until his last season with them, 1995, when they lost the Division Series to the Seattle Mariners (after being up two games to none in the best-of-five series), despite Mattingly batting .417 in the series. Aside from that, the closest the Yankees came during Mattingly's tenure was in 1985 (two games behind the Toronto Blue Jays in the American League Eastern Division) and 1988 (three and a half games behind the Boston Red Sox). The Yankees led the division by six and a half games over the Baltimore Orioles on August 12, 1994, when the Major League Baseball Players Association went on strike. Bud Selig, then acting commissioner of Major League Baseball and owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, would later cancel the remainder of the season, ending what may have been Mattingly's best chance at playing in the World Series.
In 1997, the Yankees retired Mattingly's uniform number 23 and dedicated a plaque in his honor that would rest in Monument Park at Yankee Stadium. After the dedication ceremony, the Yankees lost to the Montreal Expos, who they probably would have played in the 1994 World Series. That season, the Yankees finished second in the American League Eastern Division to the Orioles, and it remains the last season (through 2005) in which the Yankees did not win the division title. The next season, 1998, the Yankees began a run of five American League pennants in six seasons, ending with the 2003 World Series. With all this talk about curses, it should be noted that notoriously superspicious Red Sox fans began discussing a new "Curse of the B's" after Aaron Boone's dramatic ALCS winning home run put their team to bed in 2003. Before Boone, the names Bucky Dent and Babe Ruth were synonimous with Boston futility. In 2004, Mattingly was hired as the team's hitting instructor. The Yankees were one game away from winning the American League pennant, when they had a historic meltdown, being the first team in Major League history to lose a 7-game series after being up three games to none on the Boston Red Sox, thus temporarily ending all childish talk of curses in "Red Sox Nation". In the next season on the job, the Yankees again failed to win the pennant despite winning their division and having the highest payroll in baseball.
This has led to the suggestion that the Yankees will never win a pennant as long as Mattingly is in uniform. Between their first pennant in 1921 and 1981, and again from 1996 to 2003, a total of 69 seasons, the Yankees won 39 American League pennants, or 56 percent of the available pennants. In the 16 seasons in which Mattingly has been in a Yankee uniform (1982 to 1995 and 2004 to 2005), the Yankees have never won. Unless, of course, you count in the 2000 season, when Mattingly returned to Yankee Stadium to play in his first Old Timer's day.
Despite this supposed curse, Mattingly remains immensely popular among Yankee fans for standing as the man who upheld the Yankee legacy through a dark period in team history in terms of competitiveness and front-office upheaval. Yankee broadcaster Michael Kay has said, "Don Mattingly may be the most popular athlete in New York City history." Apparently Kay never heard of a somewhat obscure guy named George Herman Ruth.
