The Miami Marlins and Toronto Blue Jays don’t have much in common, but managers Don Mattingly and Charlie Montoyo share a special bond among MLB skippers.
At the end of the day, not much separates MLB managers.
Most were former players. Among them, lots of journeymen and plenty of catchers, as well as solid locker room presences, glue guys, players who always seemed to have the mental game down cold. In all cases, baseball lifers … and all frequent targets for the judgement of baseball Twitter. `
However, Don Mattingly and Charlie Montoyo stand out from the pack.
Obviously, there are 30 active managers across MLB. Again, the vast majority played in the majors. But only these two, Mattingly and Montoyo, can claim to have spent their entire MLB playing career with a single organization. That’s it. Just two active lifers with a franchise out of 30 MLB skippers.
That’s pretty incredible given how many of those active managers do have some kind of prior connection to the franchise they are with. Almost as incredible as the fact that Montoyo has never made an MLB appearance for any organization that plays home games in the United States. Montoyo’s big league cup of coffee came with Montreal way back in 1993, lasting just five at-bats. He earned his managerial bones in the Rays system.
Mattingly is on his second team as a manager, and third as a coach, but does have his own unique footnote going for him. Only one other manager is even within 20 WAR points of him when it comes to playing careers, and he is the only former MVP winner to be actively managing. Put in simpler terms, out of those 30 active MLB managers, he is the only one who has a snowball’s chance of entering the Hall of Fame as a player one day. For those wondering about Montoyo’s five at bats, they were good enough for a 0.0 career WAR mark.
This is just an odd bit of trivia from a sport that produces tons of it. It’s great to have baseball back.