RE: Phillies fire manager Rob Thomson - Phils shutout Giants as Jesús Luzardo tosses a gem | Game today postponed, doubleheader tomorrow
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
I had no idea that Mattingly was still active in baseball. That was my most valuable baseball card in my collection when I was a kid.
0
0
0.000
That's really cool, I see why it could be valuable, Mattingly's career is interesting in general. He seems like a bright spot for the Yankees in the 80's. Looks like there was some good Yankees teams in that decade but somehow they never made the playoffs much. That a bit of baseball history I should have known about but didn't, I always assume the Yankees were consistently in the playoffs. They did have multiple good records in the regular season in the 1980's, so they were pretty good with Mattingly, but somehow they always just missed it. They actually finished 1980-89 with the best overall record in the MLB in that time span going 854-708. They would have made a Wild Card in likely most of those seasons if the playoffs were setup how it is today. Pure divisional ruleset before 1995 was intense it's fascinating how difficult it was to make the playoffs back then it put a whole different emphasis on the regular season.
So would have I even at the time. It wasn't so easy to keep up with all that was going on in baseball back then though. Imagine trying to watch all the games, or even just the games you wanted to watch, without the internet?
I wonder if that was around the time that Yankees started spending big money to be in the top always? I kind of just presumed they always did that.
I guess the newspaper was big for those sorts of things. Reading the sports section as a kid and checking out the league standings with my grandfather are some of my favorite memories. About the Yankees spending, yes I imagine they always spent a lot but maybe they were just straight up getting beat/unlucky for awhile. But I have no idea. I'll have to look more into the history one of these days.