To me he will always be just “Donnie Baseball.”
Kirby Puckett came up with the nickname “Donnie Baseball.” I got to know Kirby through the years when we played in the American League together. I got to know him socially at Ken Kaiser’s (a MLB umpire) annual charity dinner in Rochester, New York. Kaiser would have a pretty good group of guests, and somehow Kirby and I always hung out together and had a great time. I got to know him more as a person than as just another guy I competed against while he was playing for the Minnesota Twins.
Kirby was not just a great hitter—he was a great player! He exemplified the way you want your kids to play the game. He had fun. He brought a certain energy and excitement to the field every day. Kirby looked like he was playing Little League baseball, even though he was playing for the Twins in the 1987 World Series. He always had a big smile on his face. He hit the ball all over the field. He was blessed with a great throwing arm, terrific speed for a big man, and he was always making great catches in the outfield. It was impossible not to like the guy. And Kirby was at his best in pressure situations, because he never changed his approach to the game just because everything was on the line.
Kirby with the leg up and on balance. It looks like the one-leg tee drill. He gets his leg off the ground and yet he can stand comfortably on the back leg.
Nothing ever changes with your swing. I was never rattled if the bases were loaded with two outs and the outcome of the game was riding on my at bat. I never changed one single thing about my approach. The guys who hit best with runners in scoring position don’t put too much pressure on themselves.
Once again, let’s keep it simple: get a good pitch to hit and hit the ball hard. That’s about the only thing you can control as a hitter. Swing at a strike and hit the pitch like a bullet. Once you do that, you have won the battle against the pitcher. If you get a good pitch to hit and smash that pitch hard, well, there’s not much more you can do to help your team win the game.
You can’t control whether you hit a line drive to the shortstop or a bullet right to the center fielder. All you can control is making good contact and looking to hit a quality pitch that you can handle. And it just doesn’t matter if the bases are loaded in the ninth inning or the bases are empty in the first inning.
It comes down to a fight between you and the pitcher. Focus on simplifying hitting, and then those pressure situations don’t need to be pressure situations. Pressure to perform as a hitter will not help you at any point during the game.
Everything in hitting reverts back to the basics we learned in chapter 1 to build the foundation, and in all the drills in chapter 5 to perfect your swing. The next step is to win the battle with the pitcher every time you go to the plate in every at bat for the entire game. Say you’re coming up to the plate in the ninth inning with two men on base and down by two runs. Same darn thing—get a good pitch and hit it hard.
Of course, you want to be the guy who comes through in the clutch. You want to be the guy who can pick up a hit that will tie or win the game. But wanting to be that guy has nothing to do with the daily battle you face against the pitcher. Your personal battle is to defuse the situation of all the noise, and block out what inning it is and all the other useless distractions.
The guy on the mound is in the same situation: he’s got more pressure on him because he’s the one who has to make a quality to pitch to get you out. Turn it around and put all the pressure on the pitcher—and relax.
Forget about failure. Play the game hard, prepare as best as you can, and accept the reality that baseball is a game that will lead you down the road to failure at certain times. If you don’t buy into that reality you’d better wake up and deal with it, because even the greatest players fail a lot over the course of a season, and a career. You can hit a ball dead on the nose and have nothing to show for your effort. The book says you lost because you didn’t get a hit with that at bat. But my book says you won the battle. The pitcher knows you beat him. The next time he sees you he’s going to think, “I got away with murder the last time because he hit a bullet off me.” He knows you beat him. Keep playing the game hard, and the hits will fall in bunches.
Kirby was not afraid of making mistakes. He let it all hang out and played the game with freedom. I’m sure he worked his butt off to do all the little things well, but at the end of the day he looked like he was having the time of his life.
The Tom Kelly--managed Twins’ teams of the late eighties and early nineties played the game the right way. Kirby, Kent Hrbek, Gary Gaetti, and Dan Gladden had fun and never worried about making mistakes. They were fundamentally sound, played solid baseball, ran the bases hard, and were consistently some of the best clubs I competed against in my career.
I have a lot of respect for Tom Kelly. The way he motivated his teams to enjoy the game tells me a lot about him as a person and as a manager.
This you-can-have-fun idea is what I talk about when I’m coaching baseball. You have to love playing because it’s a game! When you look at old films of the Yankees from the sixties, with Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, you see the guys playing pepper, knocking the balls around and having a good time. It always looked like they were having a blast. And when the games started, they would play hard and play to win.
High school coaches have to make it fun. Little League coaches need to make it fun. I’m tired of hearing about talented young athletes giving up on baseball before getting a fair chance to make an impact.
The fact that a parent likes to coach baseball doesn’t mean that his kid has to like playing baseball. You can’t force things on kids; it has to be natural and fun. When the spirit comes out in their play as they progress, you can really tell that they grew up loving the game.
Wade Boggs kept his head down and his eyes on the baseball.
Boggs would never give away at bats. He was a tough out all the time. But when he came to play for the Yankees, I could see firsthand how hard he was willing to work at his craft.
We’d be down by eight runs or playing at midnight after a two***hour rain delay, and he treated every at bat like a do-or-die situation. He would foul off pitches. He would never swing at bad pitches. His level of concentration was tremendous. And he was consistent with that intense focus for every game of his entire career, and that tells you why he was such a great player.
Another thing I can tell you about Wade is that, when he first came up with the Boston Red Sox, they said he couldn’t play third base. But he worked at it for years and turned himself into a very good third baseman. He won a Gold Glove while he was in New York; he worked at his fielding because he would accept nothing less from himself than being the best. He worked long and hard to prove the so-called experts wrong.
Tony Gwynn was the master of the smooth, effortless swing. He made it look easy—but, of course, it’s not that easy.
Never buy into the negative things other people say about you. You must believe in your ability. Work on getting better every day with your fundamentals and your drills. All the hard work and drills and practice will make you a complete player over time. I want you to develop into a good hitter, but it’s also important to be a well-rounded player who can do a lot of things well to help his team win games.
I had the pleasure of playing against Tony in Winter Ball in Puerto Rico in 1983. He was a tremendous hitter. I was playing for Caguas and Tony played for San Juan. He had that effortless swing—sweet, smooth, and easy. In 1984, he won the NL batting title and I won the AL batting title. When I think of Tony, I remember that smooth, mechanically sound swing—he made hitting look so easy.
Chipper Jones of the Atlanta Braves reminds me of Tony, because Chipper also makes hitting look so simple. I’m sure that Tony and Chipper view hitting as a battle. So do I. I always had to work hard to improve my skills, and nothing is ever handed to you in this game. You will have to earn it.
TONY GWYNN: [Don Mattingly] could hit—whew. When we played together in Puerto Rico, we were the same type of hitter—hit the ball the other way, use the whole field, spray the ball around. Once he got to the big leagues, he developed that power stroke a whole lot quicker than I did. I knew from his stroke that he was going to be a good hitter. Donnie had so few strikeouts, and that put him in the mold of a contact hitter: a guy who would go up to the plate just looking to put the bat on the ball. Mattingly was the exception to the norm because he could go up to the plate and put his bat on the ball, but he could also drive it out of the ballpark.
I learned how to hit home runs by talking hitting with Ted Williams. Ted told me in 1992, “As big as you are you should be able to drive the ball out of the ballpark.” And then in 1995 I sat down and had a conversation with him, when he said: “Major-league history is made on the ball inside.”
He didn’t elaborate on that comment, and like most good hitters from the past he didn’t feed me the answer; instead, he gave me an idea to think about—and if you’re worth your salt as a hitter you will figure it out just based on a fragment of information or a question to consider.
Another line drive from Tony Gwynn; he’s on balance as he’s coming out of the box. He was one of the greatest players who ever lived.
So when you think about Donnie using his bottom hand to generate power in 1983--’84, that’s the same thing that I had to learn in 1995 after hitting for a decade without power. In order to hit the ball out of the park, I had to learn how to use the bottom hand correctly, and to use it efficiently.
Most young hitters don’t have the slightest idea of what hitting with the bottom hand means. Here’s what I’m talking about: Get into the hitting position. You’re in your stance. The pitcher is getting ready to let the ball go. You’re in the ready position, which for most guys is taking your hands back and setting your foot down.
Once you get to that point, it’s the bottom hand that dominates the swing; it’s the bottom hand that allows you to pull the bat though the zone—it gets the bat started in the zone and you generate bat speed by letting the bottom hand become the dominant hand as the bat comes through the zone.
Most young hitters think that you start with the bottom hand, but at some point the top hand takes over the swing—and that’s not true. The bottom hand is the dominant hand throughout the swing—and so, once you let your bottom hand do the work, now you can create enough speed that will allow you to drive the ball.
The two players I loved to talk hitting with the most were Don Mattingly and Wade Boggs. Donnie was an example of a hitter who went from just hitting line drives to hitting both home runs and line drives. He went from the guy I was, to the guy who every hitter wants to become—a .300 hitter, a power hitter, and a threat to drive in runs. That’s what all hitters dream about. Donnie was able to live that dream of putting it all together.
Whenever the Yankees were on TV, I was sure to keep the game on that channel until after Mattingly hit so I could analyze what he was doing. He had some years that were absolutely unbelievable. His career numbers are almost identical to Kirby Puckett (a Hall of Famer), but because Donnie got injured he doesn’t seem to get the credit he deserves. He was the dominant player in the American League from 1984 to ’89—there’s no doubt about that. His numbers reflect that fact. His back injury slowed him down, but he fought through it as best as he could because he was a tireless worker.
He was a Gold Glove fielder who would hit 30 home runs, drive in 100 runs, score 100 runs, stroke 200 hits. He was not a big guy and yet he was a dominant guy. And a great guy, to be sure.
George Brett was the best clutch hitter I ever played against. Look at the powerful legs, balanced on the bottom and ready to attack.
George was one of the most feared hitters of the last fifty years. I never wanted to see him at the plate with the game on the line because he always managed to find a way to drive in those key runs with me on base. You could have a tough lefty pitcher on the mound who retired him on grounders the first two times up, but on the third at bat—and seeing the exact same pitch, George would hit a rifle-shot to the left-field corner to win the game for the Kansas City Royals.
George is another one of those guys who played the game with reckless abandon. He had fun and did everything well—hitting, fielding, and running the bases. He had a great work ethic and was a tremendous competitor.
GEORGE BRETT: Donnie would take whatever the pitcher would give him and make the most of it. If the pitcher threw a down-and-away pitch, he’s going to get a base hit to left. If they throw it inside, he’s going to pull the pitch. He was able to work the whole field. And Charlie Lau, my hitting coach, always told me you’re not a real hitter until you can hit the ball all over the place.
George looks like he’s ready to get on top of another high fastball.
Donnie was a great clutch hitter. So many guys who play the game of baseball these days put pressure on themselves late in the game and get very tense at the plate. Donnie was exactly the opposite: He seemed to relax when the game was on the line.
Another thing that made him good is that he always put the ball in play and almost never had any strikeouts. You can hit the ball and move the runner up, and if you strike out you are not moving the runner up—this is where batting average can be a little misleading, because you can make productive outs and they will never show up in the box score.
Donnie didn’t draw many walks because if he had one swing per at bat, he would put the ball in play. A lot of guys foul off four or five pitches and then draw a walk. Donnie had skill to make the most of his swings and convert those swings into doubles and home runs. He would rarely get more than one or two swings per at bat, and he would put them into play because he had good fundamentals and a good swing.
Just like all the great ones: George was always having a great time when he played the game.
And even though he was a great hitter, he was not unwilling to shorten his swing—if the count did get to two strikes, because there was a pride factor back in the seventies and eighties. You did not want to strike out back then. I used to hate walking back to the dugout with my bat in my hand. I felt like that pitcher beat me. And I hate to get beat up. I had pride in not striking out during my career, and these days the hitters just don’t care. You see guys laughing in the dugout after striking out two or three times per game, and that’s a disgrace. It is style before substance—they want to look good striking out, and they swing from their ass.
I got along great with Donnie. One year, we were both struggling early in the season in April while the Yankees were in Kansas City. Donnie and I were down around .200 and “Pags” [Mike Pagliarulo] was hitting .180. We were all laughing at each other during batting practice. “I’m swinging worse than you.” “No, I’m swinging worse.”
After the game we went out for beers—something I would almost never do with opposing players. But I always had a lot of respect for Don and I always had a lot of respect for Pags. We came to the park the next day and, sure enough, Donnie gets a base hit his first time up and I’m laughing my ass off at third base. I doubled in my first at bat and Donnie was laughing his ass off at first base. Then Pags comes up and he strikes out, and we were all laughing at each other.
It was a great thing to go out with my peers while we were all struggling at the same time, talk about what was going through our minds, and bragging about how bad we were—and we were three pretty good players at the time—but we could laugh about our struggles and help each other out. The game of baseball is meant to be taken seriously, and it’s also something to enjoy with your teammates and friends.
You can’t expect to hit .300 unless you love to play baseball. The people who are the most successful in business and sports are the ones who love what they do for a living. I’m sure that Bill Gates loves his job—not because of the wealth but for the fun of competing.
My sister-in-law once said to me about my son Preston, who had a choice between signing with the Dodgers and playing college baseball at the University of Tennessee: “If you follow your passion, you will never work a day in your life.”
Enjoy playing baseball and have fun as you improve. Don’t make learning how to play the game any more complicated than it has to be. Don’t lose your perspective on having fun, because baseball is just a game.
