Former general manager of Anchorage Bucs dies at 63

Mattingly, 63, retired last summer as general manager of the Bucs, the team he created in 1980.

His body hobbled and made fragile by multiple myeloma, Mattingly was a less visible presence than usual last season at Mulcahy Stadium, a park he toiled at for hours during his three-decade love affair with the Bucs.

But when he was feeling good enough to be at the ballpark, he was the same old Dennis, complaining good-naturedly about his team's batting average yet loving every minute of every game.

Mattingly was in and out of the hospital in recent months and was released for the final time Sunday, said Gary Lichtenstein, director of baseball operations for the Bucs and a close friend of Mattingly's.

"The last day he was aware of things was probably Wednesday," Lichtenstein said. "He was at least able to recognize you. We held the phone up to his ear because a lot of coaches and players called, and he was struggling with energy.

"It was just hard to see. You know Dennis. He didn't want to be like that. So I call it a kind of sad relief for everybody."

Mattingly was an old-school baseball man to whom a handshake meant everything. He was a straight-talking, no-nonsense, blue-collar man with a sense of generosity, whether he was sharing a bag of sunflower seeds up in the Mulcahy pressbox or donating his time to his baseball team.

His efforts often took the form of physical labor that helped keep the Bucs going and Mulcahy in decent shape. As general manager of the team, his job duties included driving the team bus, answering phones, recruiting players, fixing anything that broke and mowing and watering the Mulcahy outfield.

Mattingly started the Bucs in 1980 as an adult baseball team called the Cook Inlet Bucs. A year later, thanks to Mattingly's efforts, the team earned membership in the Alaska Baseball League.

Since then, Mattingly and the Bucs have brought such talents as Jered Weaver, Jeff Kent and C.J. Wilson to Alaska for the summer.

In 2000, Mattingly was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable form of cancer that attacks the immune system and makes bones brittle. In his final years, Mattingly could break a rib merely by coughing.

The life expectancy for those with the disease is five years, but thanks in part to two life-extending stem-cell transplants, Mattingly lived for more than a decade after his diagnosis.

The second transplant, in late 2008, came after much of his health insurance benefits had been depleted. His family made an appeal for help and Mattingly, who loved talking baseball and bowling and family but never much liked talking about himself, agreed to discuss his situation for a newspaper article. As word spread of his need, more than $150,000 was raised for the transplant.

Money came from former players and coaches, from baseball fans, from people who worked with Mattingly during his Teamster days, from people who bowled with him -- Mattingly on four occasions bowled 300 games -- and from people who simply heard his story and were touched by it enough to make a donation.

He remained upbeat, at least in public, as the disease roared back last year. Like any good baseball man, he found parallels between his life and life on a diamond.

"This game, if you don't accept failure before you even start playing, you're in trouble. Here you can be on top of the world one day and be underneath the dirt the next. It teaches you to take what comes," Mattingly said at a game last summer. "I've been through quite a bit these last several years and I'm not gonna let it get me down, because I'm not gonna dwell on things that might go wrong."

Reach Beth Bragg at bbragg@adn.com or 257-4335.