Don Mattingly has had quite a week. The Philadelphia Phillies ended Rob Thomson’s employment with the Phillies on April 28, 2026, after starting the season off with an appalling 9-19 record (one of the worst in MLB), and then put Mattingly in as interim manager for the remainder of the 2026 season and handed him the reins of the dugout. It’s a huge and difficult job, and a position that will be filled, with pressure given the expectations of the Phillies making a postseason run this year.
Fans of the Phillies, as well as fans of Baseball in general, began searching for this new man to lead them, and in doing so, an entirely new segment of Don Mattingly’s story started appearing again on social media. The story involved Don Mattingly voicing himself on an episode of The Simpsons in 1992, in which he was fired from Mr. Burns’ softball team because he refused to shave off his sideburns. If you haven’t seen it, it is really one of the most humorous things that has ever occurred on the series. The joke was almost absolutely spot-on.
Don Mattingly played for the New York Yankees throughout his early career, from 1982 to 1995. He was probably one of the most popular Yankees from that time period and was selected to six All-Star teams and won nine Gold Gloves, with his Gold Gloves being earned between 1985 and 1993. Mattingly won the MVP award for the American League in 1985. The Yankees retired Mattingly’s number 23 in 1997.
Don Mattingly continued as a manager of the Dodgers through 2015 and then went on to work for the Miami Marlins between the years of 2016 and 2022 and then became a bench coach for the Toronto Blue Jays for three seasons. He joined the Phillies’ technology staff in January of 2026, under Joe Thomsen, but is now running the entire Phillies operation. The Phillies’ general manager, Preston, is also Don Mattingly’s biological son, so this truly qualifies as a family matter.
What actually happened in the Simpsons episode with Don Mattingly?
“Homer at the Bat,” the show’s 17th episode in its third season, premiered on February 20, 1992. Mr. Burns, who is Homer’s boss at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, put a gigantic wager on his power plant’s softball team’s ability to win the championship and subsequently recruited nine major league Baseball All-Stars as ringer players. These ringers included Roger Clemens, Wade Boggs, Ken Griffey Jr., Steve Sax, Ozzie Smith, Jose Canseco, Don Mattingly, Darryl Strawberry, and Mike Scioscia, all of whom provided their own voices to the show.
Every player had a subplot in the show, but arguably, none is as memorable today, over 30 years later, as Don Mattingly’s subplot.
Mr. Burns becomes fixated on Mattingly’s sideburns and keeps ordering him to shave them off. Don Mattingly, confused and increasingly frustrated, shaves more and more of his hair, trying to comply, eventually shaving off the middle of his head entirely, while insisting he does not actually have sideburns. Burns eventually throws him off the team entirely, shouting at him about the sideburns that Mattingly keeps insisting do not exist. As Mattingly walks away, he mutters to himself that he still likes Burns better than Steinbrenner.
Producer Al Jean, speaking to the Baseball Hall of Fame, recalled that Don Mattingly himself was a bit confused about his storyline when he came in to record. Mattingly reportedly said, “Wait a minute. He gets to play in a band, but I’ve got to be in an apron doing dishes?” referring to how some of the other players had more glamorous subplots. The producers told him it was in the script, and it stayed as written.
Why did the joke turn out to be so popular?
Here is the part that makes the whole thing feel almost too good to be true. The episode was written and recorded months before it aired. In the script, the sideburns joke was invented by the writers as pure absurdist comedy, as there was no real-life incident they were referencing at the time.
But then, entirely by coincidence, Don Mattingly was actually benched by Yankees manager Stump Merrill shortly after the episode aired for refusing to cut his mullet. Life imitated art almost exactly, and the baseball world could not believe it.
Al Jean, who produced the episode and later became the show’s longtime showrunner, told the Baseball Hall of Fame,
“He ran a hardware store and he would say to kids with short hair to get a haircut. So we had Mr. Burns say it to Mattingly. And then, entirely coincidently, Steinbrenner fined him for having long hair after we recorded him, which is nuts. I never dreamed that would happen.”
The episode has a rating of 8.7 out of 10 on IMDb and has been placed first on ESPN’s list of the top 100 Simpsons sports moments. Now that Don Mattingly is the talk of baseball again as the new Phillies interim manager, the clip of Mr. Burns yelling at him about his sideburns has started circulating again on social media, with fans already making jokes about who on the current Phillies roster is going to be the first one told to shave their sideburns.
Edited by Sroban Ghosh