Goldman’s baseball quotables #13: Don Mattingly, cat juggler, Puig-bencher

Prior to Tuesday’s win-or-go-home NLDS game against the St. Louis Cardinals, Don Mattingly sat down his controversial center fielder Yasiel Puig. Puig is controversial in that he’s (a) very, very talented, but (b) sometimes makes mistakes of overenthusiasm or under-thinking. He’s also slumping -- kind of. Puig is hitting .250/.357/.417 in three games, albeit with an unsightly streak of seven consecutive strikeouts at one point. He broke that streak with a sixth-inning triple on Monday, then whiffed again in the eighth. Still, while the optics are not pretty, this is hardly Gil Hodges’ 0-for-21 in the 1952 World Series or Dave Winfield’s 1-for-22 in the 1981 Series, a performance that later inspired George Steinbrenner to call him “Mr. May.”

Andre Ethier, a left-handed hitter who has hit a robust .285/.359/.462 in his career but cooled to .249/.322/.370 and isn’t the defensive player Puig is, will start against Cardinals’ right-hander Shelby Miller. In his pregame presser, Mattingly had his meme all picked out:

This would seem to be a classic overreaction. Puig hit .307/.384/.516 against right-handed pitching this year (if he had done what most right-handed hitters do to left-handed pitching, he would have been the league MVP, but for whatever reason he did not), recovered from an August slump with a .284 average in September, and is, whatever his occasional missteps, probably the best all-around athlete the Dodgers have in the outfield. This is a gamble, and one wonders if it originated with Mattingly given just how uncomfortable he seemed announcing the move:

This is a decision that will inevitably be second-guessed, though somewhat unfairly because if a player doesn’t play you can’t know what he would or wouldn’t have done. If the criterion for any managerial decision is to give his team the best chance to win at any given moment, Puig would seem to be the best choice even if transiently slumping -- again, you don’t know what a player might have done if he doesn’t play in the first place, and unless you see the player swinging with his eyes closed in batting practice, you might not have the greatest insight as to when the slump will end. You’ll know it’s over when the player starts hitting. This is something the Yankees manager Ralph Houk was indirectly commenting on (this is from memory, so if I’ve messed up either the attribution or the exact words, forgive me) when he was asked if he was going to bench a slumping Graig Nettles: “I’m going to play with him until he hits, and then I’m going to keep playing him because he’s hitting.”

Having said that, one wonders if Mattingly has earned the right to make decisions on his outfield without his competency being called into question. As I wrote in our preview of this series:

One of the smartest moves of this season, in fact of the last calendar year give or take, was a move Colletti didn’t make. While everyone in the sporting press sweated how the Dodgers would divide four outfielders (Yasiel Puig, Andre Ethier, Matt Kemp, Carl Crawford) into three positions and tried to predict who would be benched or traded, Colletti hung fire, holding on to the lot. It turned out the Dodgers would need all four and Mattingly, through some combination of planning, disrupting injuries, and luck, was able to juggle them until he found a winning combination.

The Dodgers had the best aggregate outfield production on the circuit, but it was rarely the same guys in the same alignment doing the work. No player got more than 89 starts at any one outfield position. Crawford, hitting a painfully expensive .244/.282/.358 through the end of July, hit .373/.411/.520 the rest of the way. Kemp hit .248/.306/.418 and seemed to spend most of his time complaining about not playing center field, but Mattingly coolly ignored the latter and kept playing him on the wings.

Maybe that was just luck, or to return to a theme I have felt obliged to revisit frequently throughout this postseason, contingency -- things happen not as a result of our willing them, but because circumstances required them, and they just happened to work out. There is no real way of knowing. Still, you’ve heard of the metaphoric difference of herding cats. Well, Mattingly spent all of 2014 juggling outfield cats, creatures that, as they land back in your hand, claw and bite you (Kemp certainly seemed to try). As Steve Martin suggested, it may be cruel, but given the awkward way the Dodgers’ roster was constructed, in Mattingly’s position it was a necessity.

Nevertheless, if you’re a Dodgers fan you have a right to feel nervous because you’ve seen 252 games of Puig and nearly 1,300 games of Ethier and you’re familiar with the abilities of each. The 17^th-century British nobleman Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland, wrote, “When it is not necessary to make a decision, it is necessary not to make a decision.”

The question now is if Mattingly just ignored that very wise advice (translation: don’t overthink things/stay the hell out of your own way), if Ethier will bail him out regardless, or there’s something else going on that is dictating an otherwise dicey decision.