Miami Marlins: Don Mattingly at crossroads of his tenure

With a team designed to fail forward fast, is there any chance Don Mattingly returns next season for the Miami Marlins?

Spring training is a time for optimism, even for rebuilding clubs like the Miami Marlins. But as we head into another season of Marlins baseball, and the second year of a rebuild, it seems fair to ask:

Will 2019 be Don Mattingly‘s last season with Miami?

Donnie Baseball was brought in following a bizarrely embarrassing 2015 Marlins campaign. Expectations were high following a fifteen game improvement in 2014 and a busy offseason. Former owner Jeffrey Loria hilariously overreacted to a slow start though, counting on a repeat of 2003 magic, and fired then manager Mike Redmond less than two months into the season. The replacement was the team’s then general manager, a guy whose only previous managing experience had come at the high school level. Giancarlo Stanton seemed poised to challenge the home run record, before suffering a season ending injury that June. Stanton and Dee Gordon both earned starting nods to the All-Star Game, but neither was healthy enough to play.

Suffice it to say, it was a long summer. One which, as it became increasingly clear, would be ending in a search for a new skipper.

Yet, while it was patently obvious Loria would in the market for his seventh Opening Day manager since buying the team in 2002, the fact that it would be Mattingly was anything but.

Mattingly had just produced his fifth straight winning season as manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. More impressively still, his third straight division title. However, he couldn’t deliver a pennant, and the Dodgers decided to make a change. Maybe Dodgers ownership overreacted. Maybe Mattingly was only good enough to make the playoffs, but not to win in them. But for an organization that hadn’t had a winning season since 2009, Mattingly looked like some glorious Joe Torre/Bill Belichick level prize. The guy was a winner, and a consistent one at that.

Three years into his four year contract, the Miami Marlins are still waiting on Don Mattingly to provide that consistent winning.

Barring a miracle, he isn’t winning this year either. Could he improve on the previous year, something he has also never done in his time with Miami? Possibly. Still, a losing record it’s going to be. You would be extremely hard pressed to find another sports franchise that decided “fifth time’s the charm” when it came to letting a coach try to produce a winning season.

Of course, there are some heavyweight caveats to throw out in Mattingly’s defense here.

Chiefly, it can be argued he’s really only had one fair chance to win, back in 2016. That year, he was on pace to do exactly what he was brought in to do. More impressive still, was on that pace despite losing one of his best players, Gordon, to an 80-game suspension back in April. Miami was easily having it’s most successful season in years, reeling off four straight winning months to start the season. That had happened once before in franchise history, in 1997, and all that team did was win a championship.

Unfortunately, injuries mounted in August. Mattingly would spend six weeks without his second best pitcher in Wei-Yin Chen, and three weeks without Stanton. All of that of course overshadowed by the tragic passing of ace pitcher Jose Fernandez the last week of the season. Obviously bigger than baseball, but just as obviously a factor in Miami dropping four of their last six games.

Fernandez’s passing would hover over the entire 2017 season, and no elite pitcher was obtained to partially replace him on the roster. On top of that, rumors of the club being sold and an uncertain future for the entire team were swirling since before Opening Day. Oh, and the team had its starting third baseman for less than 40 games. Difficult circumstances to effectively manage in, and all well beyond Mattingly’s control.

Then last season, Mattingly was handed a team designed to get a Top 5 draft pick. And the design worked. With this season projecting to end very similarly, just what does a fair evaluation of Mattingly look like come his exit interview this fall?