Don Mattingly puts his future with the Phillies in peril as his strategy with Jhoan Duran backfires
Donnie Baseball, beset by a flawed roster and poor bullpen asked his closer for too much and starter Jesus Luzardo for too little in a Game 1 collapse that recalled the days of Rob Thomson.
ATLANTA — As Don Mattingly settled into his seat on the golf cart to return to his clubhouse after he’d mismanaged his flawed roster into an eighth-inning collapse, Braves ace Chris Sale strode toward the interview room to discuss his role in the Braves’ 5-3 win in Game 1 of the National League wild-card series.
With his magnificent left hand, which on Tuesday had dealt 5⅓ innings and allowed just one run, Sale doffed his cap and tipped it in Mattingly’s direction. Mattingly’s head was down, understandably. Sale, persistent, took his cap off and tipped it again. Mattingly nodded appreciatively.
After Mattingly’s performance Tuesday, that might be the last time the pair sees each other for a long, long time. Mattingly is the Phillies’ interim manager, and he wants to come back next season. A report last month said Mattingly would have to win the NL pennant to make that happen.
That yardstick got longer Tuesday.
» READ MORE: The Braves slayed their demon in Game 1. The Phillies still have theirs in an overworked and shaky bullpen
Mattingly used his best reliever, closer Jhoan Duran, in a situation overwhelmingly foreign to Duran. The decision smacked of the odd and desperate moves that cost Rob Thomson the manager’s job 28 games into this season. Mattingly was installed by Phillies president Dave Dombrowski last winter as Thomson’s bench coach to mitigate misjudgments like this. Mattingly was promoted to interim manager in April with the assumption that such misjudgments would not continue.
Yes.
Well.
Sale has pitched against teams Mattingly coached and managed. He respects Mattingly. So do I. Pretty much everybody associated with baseball respects Mattingly, both as a player and a manager. Sale one day will be in the Hall of Fame. It’s an injustice that Mattingly isn’t there already. He served as the face of the most important sports franchise in American history during some of its leanest years. From 1984-94, Mattingly was the soul of the New York Yankees. People have named their children after Donnie Baseball, including their daughters: no, not “Donna,” but, rather, “Mattingly” as a first name.
The Hit Man is a legend. That doesn’t mean he is infallible. He hit .307 in his 14-year career, but he also struck out 444 times. He struck out again Tuesday.
With a 3-2 lead, Mattingly asked Duran to pitch the seventh and eighth innings. Duran has pitched in the seventh inning just three times in the past four seasons, and zero times in 2026.
Mattingly asked Duran to get him six outs, which requires Duran to pitch, sit, and pitch — an up-down. Duran has done that once this year, on Aug. 29, against the Angels, the second-worst team in baseball. He did it on two days’ rest; he’d had just one day off before Tuesday. That also was 10 appearances ago.
Duran dominated the seventh.
He fell apart in the eighth.
Predictably.
» READ MORE: At second base, Queen Latifah? John Kruk’s revelation, broadcast magic highlight Phillies-Braves broadcast
With two outs, Michael Harris II nubbed an infield single. Duran then hit Ozzie Albies with a 3-2 pitch. Duran looked tired.
“After the infield single, that at-bat to Albies was a little uncharacteristic of him, just not being able to find the zone there and the curveball, being that wild with a 3-2 count,” said catcher J.T. Realmuto. “I thought maybe he looked a little tired.”
The first thing that goes when a pitcher is tired? Command.
First, the wild curveball.
Then, disaster.
Austin Riley came to bat. Realmuto set up outside. Duran missed by a foot-and-a-half.
Riley turned Duran’s pitch, a 99.9 mph fastball, into a 104.6 mph missile over the right-center field wall. That was Duran’s 25th pitch, the third-most he’s thrown this season and the most he’s thrown in 15 appearances.
Mattingly has been dealt a bad hand from a stacked deck. He is plagued with a thin bullpen. He had to use No. 1 starter Zack Wheeler in Game 162 on Sunday because his hitters stunk down the stretch and couldn’t lock up a playoff spot. That meant using Jesús Luzardo on Tuesday, but Luzardo had just come off the injured list, and he was limited to 75 pitches or so: He gave them 77 in five innings of one-run ball.
Mattingly’s plan: Use Duran until his arm fell off.
It failed.
“We talked about it before the game ... he’d go the seventh, eighth,” Mattingly said. The Braves’ best hitters were due up in that span, but Mattingly said that was his plan regardless of where the Braves were in the lineup ... and, incredibly, beyond.
Mattingly said he would have used Duran for a third inning, too.
“If the second [inning] went really quick, I would have just checked with him. If not, we would have went to somebody else,” Mattingly said.
He added that, in the ninth, Duran might have combined with another reliever, such as Jonathan Bowlan, who also just came off the IL.
What could Mattingly have done differently?
Mattingly could have left Luzardo in for another inning. Everyone, including Luzardo, was satisfied that, after 21 days off, he lasted five innings and had 77 bullets. But if Duran can be asked to throw three innings, Luzardo, in perhaps his last start of the season, with a garbage bullpen behind him, could have pitched into the sixth.
Marcus Hayes alerts
Mattingly could either have stitched together a seventh inning with rookie Alex McFarlane, who’d already pitched the sixth, and Bowlan, or just given Bowlan the seventh. He was, most likely, going to pitch in the ninth, anyway. He could have leaned on José Alvarado, who is inconsistent but has good numbers against Ronald Acuna Jr. and Matt Olson, two batters he would have likely faced.
This might seem like unfair second-guessing, but, well, that’s baseball, and the beauty of the game: Its deliberate nature fosters hindsights.
At any rate, Mattingly won’t face the same backlash that Thomson faced in his four years in the crosshairs and his legacy of woulda-couldas.
It began with lifting Wheeler for Alvarado in Game 6 of the 2022 World Series. It continued with Craig Kimbrel’s bullpen usage in the 2023 NLCS. It mushroomed when Thomson used 40-year-old reliever David Robertson in multiple innings in Game 1 of the 2025 NLDS, a role Robertson had not filled all year, then asked Bryson Stott to bunt over Nick Castellanos in Game 2 the next night.
So, thanks in part to Thomson’s litany of miscues, but thanks much more to Dombrowski’s failure to bolster the bullpen, Mattingly’s mistakes Tuesday won’t resonate as much.
That won’t make the ice on which Mattingly is skating any thicker.
In April, the day before he fired Thomson, Dombrowski offered the manager’s job to fired Red Sox manager Alex Cora, who declined ... for the moment. Mattingly was Dombrowski’s second choice. Dombrowksi has said he would not consider Mattingly as manager for next season until after this one ends.
On Tuesday, Cora got one step closer to wearing Phillies pinstripes.
