Edgar Martinez’s double has lived for more than three decades as one of baseball’s defining postseason moments.
The image remains unmistakable. Joey Cora reached on a bunt single. Ken Griffey Jr. followed with a base hit. Jack McDowell, who’d entered the game for rookie Mariano Rivera, had already struck out Martinez two innings earlier, then got another chance against Seattle’s designated hitter in the 11th inning of a deciding Game 5.
This time, Martinez lined a fastball down the left-field line for a walk-off double. Griffey scored from first. The Mariners won the American League Division Series. The Yankees’ season — and Don Mattingly’s only career playoff appearance as a player — was over. He’d retire that winter.
The play became known simply as “The Double.”
It also may have quietly become the first domino in a story that, 31 years later, reaches the Phillies’ dugout.
That isn’t to suggest Martinez’s swing somehow caused Mattingly to manage the Phillies. Baseball history is never that simple. Careers are shaped by hundreds of decisions, countless conversations and no shortage of luck.
But trace enough of those decisions backward and they repeatedly arrive at the same crossroads.
What if the Yankees had finished off Seattle?
Would Buck Showalter have kept his job?
Would Joe Torre have ever managed in New York?
Nobody knows.
What we do know is what happened next.
The Yankees dismissed Showalter and hired Torre, beginning one of the greatest managerial runs in franchise history. Torre won four World Series, six American League pennants and, without intending to, developed one of baseball’s most influential coaching lineages — Don Baylor, Willie Randolph, Lee Mazzilli, Rob Thomson, Joe Girardi and Don Mattingly all passed through it in one order or another.
Football fans celebrate coaching trees. Bill Parcells’ assistants became head coaches. Mike Shanahan’s staff eventually spread throughout the NFL. Baseball doesn’t get talked about that way nearly as often. But two of Torre’s branches — Girardi and Mattingly — have followed one another through the sport in ways neither could have imagined.
Girardi arrived in New York as Torre’s catcher, already a seven-year big leaguer, and would play for him from 1996 through 1999. Mattingly, meanwhile, had just retired after finally reaching the postseason only to watch his Yankees lose that unforgettable series in Seattle — a manager he never played for at all.
Nearly a decade later, they met again — though it very nearly didn’t happen.
Girardi finished his playing career with the Cardinals in 2003, even attempting a brief spring-training comeback with the Yankees in 2004 before retiring for good and taking a commentator’s job with the YES Network. When 2005 arrived, he was asked to come back to YES and declined. He also turned down the Marlins’ bench coach job that year, a position that would have put him in line to replace Florida manager Jack McKeon almost immediately. Instead, the Yankees hired Girardi as their bench coach under Torre. Mattingly was already in his second season as the club’s hitting coach.
Did Torre realize he had two future major league managers sitting beside him?
Or was he simply building the strongest staff he could?
Years later, Mattingly pointed less to strategy than temperament when describing what he took from Torre.
“Even keel, trust your players,” Mattingly said. “Getting careful with your reactions is huge in a place like this. If a ball gets booted and I’m reacting to it, it’s on TV, they talk about it, it becomes a bigger deal. That’s where you’ve got to keep a good face — any market, really, everything’s on TV.”
The other lesson was about pacing.
“The length of the season, understanding how this thing flows,” he said. “You’re going to go through stretches where it looks terrible, the sky’s falling. Then all of a sudden you go on a run and it looks great. You’ve got to understand the length of the season and not get caught in those waves — and not let your guys get caught in them either.”
Those lessons would eventually follow him to Philadelphia. Before they did, everything changed again.
After that single season together, Girardi left New York anyway, taking the Marlins job in 2006. His Florida club featured a 23-year-old Miguel Cabrera, a 22-year-old Hanley Ramirez and a 26-year-old Dan Uggla, plus 22 rookies on the sport’s lowest payroll — roughly $15 million. The Marlins hung around the Wild Card race deep into the year before finishing 78-84.
Girardi won National League Manager of the Year.
Ordinarily, that would have guaranteed another season.
Instead, a public clash with owner Jeffrey Loria ended his tenure after just one. According to reports at the time, Loria berated an umpire from his seat behind home plate during an August 6 game. From the dugout, Girardi asked the owner to stop. Loria left his seat and confronted his manager after the game in a 90-minute clubhouse meeting. Girardi was fired soon after, becoming only the second manager in history — after Davey Johnson in Baltimore — to win Manager of the Year and be dismissed the very next season.
If Girardi and Loria never clash, is Girardi still managing Florida when the Yankees need a successor to Torre after 2007?
History never offers those answers. It simply presents the next fork.
Girardi spent 2007 back at YES. That June, after the Orioles fired manager Sam Perlozzo, Baltimore offered Girardi the job. He turned it down. Meanwhile, in the Bronx, Mattingly was serving as Torre’s bench coach.
When the Yankees lost to Cleveland in the 2007 American League Division Series — a series that swung in Game 2 when a swarm of midges at Jacobs Field rattled Joba Chamberlain late, Torre elected to leave his team on the field through it, and Chamberlain uncorked two wild pitches that let the tying run score — New York fell in four games. Torre was then offered a one-year, $5 million deal, a pay cut from his previous contract. He declined it.
The most coveted managerial opening in baseball was now available.
The finalists were Girardi and Mattingly.
One had already managed and just won a Manager of the Year award.
One had spent years learning under Torre inside the Yankees’ clubhouse and was the fan favorite, seemingly the favorite from within as well.
The Yankees chose Girardi, citing his experience. That decision sent two careers in opposite directions.
Girardi inherited baseball’s most demanding job.
Mattingly followed Torre west to Los Angeles, as the club’s hitting coach.
Looking back now, Mattingly believes it happened at the right time — and says he wasn’t bitter about it even then.
“I wasn’t even mad about it, looking back,” Mattingly said, reflecting on that interview process. “I wasn’t ready to manage in New York. Not that LA was easier — it was a different environment. I had a few more years, went through the process, Joe helped me. But I probably needed more time. I’m pretty confident I would’ve picked it up, but there would’ve been a learning curve for sure.”
The Yankees missed the postseason in 2008 for the first time since 1993, closing out the original Yankee Stadium before the move next door. That winter, they committed more than $400 million to CC Sabathia, Mark Teixeira and A.J. Burnett. In Girardi’s second season, the Yankees won the World Series.
Ironically, they’d beaten Philadelphia in the Fall Classic.
Girardi owned four World Series rings as a Yankee — three as a player across four seasons, one as a manager, having edged out Mattingly for the position in the first place. Mattingly, despite 14 seasons as a player in pinstripes, reached the postseason only once and never appeared in a World Series.
Yet the rejection in New York ultimately worked in Mattingly’s favor. When Torre retired after the 2010 season, Mattingly took over as Dodgers manager. He spent five seasons in Los Angeles, winning the NL West in each of the final three — though 2014 and 2015 both ended in Division Series losses — before he was fired.
It wasn’t a straight handoff, either.
“I interviewed — it came while I was working under him, a couple teams were calling,” Mattingly said. “The Dodgers said ‘we really want you here.’ But there’s still a process, no guarantees. At that point I was just one of those names — someone people thought was going to be a good manager.”
Had the Yankees chosen Mattingly instead of Girardi in 2007, though, would any of this happen?
Does Mattingly ever spend those years beside Torre in Los Angeles?
Does he eventually become the manager the Phillies hired nearly two decades later?
History, once again, offered no clean answer — just the next fork in the road.
Girardi’s road eventually curved, too. After 2009, the Yankees reached the playoffs in three straight years but came up short of the pennant each time, then missed the postseason in both 2013 and 2014, lost the 2015 Wild Card Game to Houston, and missed again in 2016 — the same year Mattingly resurfaced as manager of the Marlins, the very franchise Girardi had led a decade earlier.
In 2017, with Aroldis Chapman re-signed after being traded away the year before, and a roster that no longer featured Carlos Beltran and Brian McCann — both dealt the previous season — it looked like a rebuild. Instead, the Yankees got a 52-homer rookie season from Aaron Judge and the emergence of Luis Severino as their ace. New York pushed all the way to Game 7 of the American League Championship Series as a Wild Card team — and lost to the Astros.
What if the Astros never stole signs?
Years later, Major League Baseball concluded Houston had operated an illegal electronic sign-stealing scheme throughout that championship season.
Had New York advanced to the World Series — or won it — does Girardi return in 2018?
Girardi’s contract expired after 2017 anyway, and the Yankees moved on to Aaron Boone, a postseason legend and the son of longtime Phillie and All-Star Bob Boone.
Mattingly, meanwhile, spent seven seasons in Miami. He crossed paths there with Derek Jeter, who was named the franchise’s CEO in September 2017, but the club traded away Christian Yelich, Giancarlo Stanton and Marcell Ozuna all in the same offseason, and the Marlins made the postseason just once during his tenure. Jeter stepped down in February 2022, ahead of what turned out to be Mattingly’s final season with the club.
Back in Philadelphia, Gabe Kapler had been hired to replace Pete Mackanin and managed the Phillies in 2018 and 2019. Then, ahead of 2020, the Phillies hired Girardi — who joined Rob Thomson, a Yankees organizational man since 1990 who’d climbed from coach to bench coach and had also come up on Torre’s staff. Kevin Long, Girardi’s longtime hitting coach in New York, left Washington after the 2021 season and joined the Phillies’ staff for 2022.
Without ever intending to, the Phillies had imported another branch of Torre’s baseball family.
With Bryce Harper, who’d signed before the 2019 season, leading the way, the Phillies went 132-141 under Girardi from 2020 through early June 2022. After a 22-29 start, Dave Dombrowski fired Girardi and turned the club over to Thomson.
Philadelphia immediately caught fire, going 65-46 the rest of the way, reaching the postseason for the first time in 11 years and advancing all the way to the World Series.
Thomson shed the interim tag and remained the Phillies’ manager for the next four seasons. His first three clubs reached October, but each postseason ended earlier than the last. The 2025 campaign proved especially frustrating, as the Phillies fell to the Dodgers in the Division Series after a series of bullpen decisions came under heavy scrutiny.
The front office wanted a more experienced voice beside him.
Mattingly became that voice.
After seven seasons managing the Marlins, he joined Toronto’s staff as bench coach in 2023 and helped the Blue Jays reach the 2025 World Series — the first Fall Classic Mattingly had ever experienced in any capacity. Toronto lost in seven games to the Dodgers, but Mattingly once again found himself viewed as one of baseball’s most respected veteran baseball minds.
That winter, the Phillies hired him as Thomson’s bench coach.
The move wasn’t made with another managerial change in mind. Philadelphia wanted experience in the dugout. It also didn’t hurt that Mattingly’s arrival could strengthen the club’s pursuit of free-agent shortstop Bo Bichette, who ultimately signed with the Mets instead.
Then history repeated itself.
The Phillies stumbled to a 9-19 start.
Dombrowski initially pursued Alex Cora, fresh off his departure from Boston and a manager whose own career intersected with the 2017 Astros. Cora declined.
Instead, Dombrowski turned to the experienced hand already sitting beside Thomson.
Mattingly.
The parallel to 2022 was impossible to ignore.
Four years earlier, Dombrowski had fired a former Yankee manager for a different longtime Yankees baseball man shaped by Torre’s organization. Now he’d fired Thomson and promoted Mattingly, yet another Torre protégé whose managerial path had crossed Girardi’s for more than two decades.
Different circumstances.
Different managers.
The same baseball lineage.
Third baseman Alec Bohm has lived through all three managers in that chain. He came up with the organization in 2020, meaning he’s played for Girardi, then Thomson, and now Mattingly.
Asked what stands out to him about Girardi and Mattingly specifically, Bohm’s answer had less to do with strategy than with how each carries himself with players who’ve lived the job he once lived himself.
“They’ve been in a player’s shoes, and they know how difficult the game can be,” Bohm said. “They have that radar — like, ‘I can see this guy’s going through it right now, I’m gonna give him a day.’ They see more of the human element of playing it, instead of just, ‘here’s your numbers, this is what’s expected of you every day.'”
The personalities, he’s quick to note, aren’t identical.
“Different people, different personalities. But every manager I’ve played for has kind of come from a similar coaching lineage. The manner of the clubhouse has stayed pretty much the same since I’ve been here, no matter who’s managing.”
Even as the sport leans further into analytics, Bohm says that hasn’t been the emphasis in Philadelphia’s clubhouse.
“In an era where baseball’s getting super analytical, I think here it’s stayed focused on the field — with the staff, the clubhouse. Less about trying to beat the game with a formula, more about playing the game the right way, the little things. Showing up to work, doing the baseball stuff.”
Few expected Mattingly to manage again.
Instead, the Phillies have gone 47-30 under him, climbing from 10 games out in the National League East to firmly back in the postseason race.
And with the Yankees facing off against the Phillies, just think about that 11th inning in the Kingdome and the overall impact it has had on the game’s history.
A butterfly effect, per se.
