Mattingly Thinking About Next Season

Don Mattingly says he and his family are 90% decided on whether he’ll return to baseball, but he’s only dropping hints that he actually plans to come back.

Mattingly, 35, left the New York Yankees last year after playing with them since 1982. He’s willing to play first, left field or right field.

“If and when I go back, I want at-bats, and it doesn’t matter where I’m getting them from,” Mattingly said. “I enjoy playing. I hate that, ‘He’s a first baseman.’ I play ball.”

But Mattingly stopped short of formally announcing his return.

The Yankees seem to have first base covered with Tino Martinez and Cecil Fielder.

“I don’t know about the Mets,” he said. “A rebuilding situation is nothing I would want to be involved with. I’d want to go to a club that knows where its needs are, and feels I can meet those.”

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San Francisco Giant pitcher Jose Bautista will sit out the rest of the season because of an aneurysm in his right shoulder and a blood clot in his right index finger. . . . Seattle Mariner ace left-hander Randy Johnson, the 1995 American League Cy Young Award winner, will undergo season-ending back surgery today in Los Angeles. . . . Wade Boggs, scratched from the Yankees’ lineup just before Tuesday night’s game complaining of back pain, returned to New York to have his back examined. . . . The Houston Astros acquired infielder Andujar Cedeno from the Detroit Tigers for a player to be named. Cedeno played for the Astros from 1990-94. . . . Astro owner Drayton McLane Jr., who will decide this week whether to put his team up for sale, met Wednesday with Mayor Bob Lanier. The mayor wouldn’t reveal whether any progress had been made in stadium talks during the meeting at his home.