Mattingly’s style proving adaptable in Miami

DENVER — Don Mattingly spent the first 37 years of his professional baseball career with the game’s blue bloods — the Yankees and Dodgers. Now, in his first year as manager of the Marlins, he is learning how the rest of the baseball world lives.

And he relishes the opportunity.

That’s not knocking the Dodgers, a team he managed to National League West titles each of the last three years before stepping down at the end of last season. It’s just how much fun he is having taking over the job with the Marlins.

This is a franchise that had suffered seven consecutive losing seasons, including losing 91 games last year and 100 in 2013.

This year?

The Marlins are right there behind the Dodgers in the NL Wild Card battle. In rallying in the ninth for a 5-3 victory over the Rockies at Coors Field on Friday night — their second win in 50 games in which they had trailed going into the ninth — the Marlins remained tied with the Cardinals for the second NL Wild Card spot.

And the Marlins matter again as a team, not just because Ichiro Suzuki is two hits shy of becoming the 30th player in Major League history to collect 3,000 hits. That might be the focus of the attention of the media and fans in Suzuki’s native Japan as well as around the Major Leagues, but it is not with the Marlins.

Ichiro has not started a game in the last week, and his strikeout in a pinch-hit at-bat on Friday night left him hitless in his last 11 at-bats, and with only two hits in 21 at-bats dating back to his final at-bat in a July 21 start.

“What I love is Ichiro knows he is the fourth outfielder,” said Mattingly. “I am putting lineups out to win games, not so he can get to 3,000. He’s going to get to 3,000. He’s not trying to force it. He would have liked to have had it happen on the last homestand, but he was 2-for-17.”

The Marlins return home on Monday for a six-game …

continue reading in source mlb.mlb.com