THE BABE OF THE BULLPEN
Just like Ruth, Rivera’s dominance on mound helped the Yankees become the Yankees again
You open here, with the best closer of them all: Mariano Rivera was to the save as Babe Ruth was to the home run.
Nobody was close to Ruth in his time, which means the time when the Yankees really became the Yankees. Nobody hit more than 60 home runs in a season until Roger Maris hit 61 in ’61. Henry Aaron didn’t break Ruth’s all-time home run record until 1974, nearly 40 years after The Babe had played his last game. This was about genius, and even magic, that stood the test of time.
Mo Rivera was that kind of genius in the ninth, especially when it was the bottom of the ninth at the Stadium,
at a time when the Yankees really became the Yankees again. The bullpen doors would open and you would hear “Enter Sandman” again. Then here came No. 42, Jackie Robinson’s number, the last man who would wear that number in baseball except when all the players wear 42 every year on Jackie Robinson Day. Then Mo Rivera would be on the mound and in his office, ready to throw cutters past the world again.
One more time, a storied place would seem to organize itself around him, his talent, his DiMaggio-like grace. And there would be magic to these few minutes at the end of the game, with The Babe of the bottom of the ninth.
But there came the night at the old Stadium, in October of 2003, when Rivera was more than three outs, when he was three times that against the Boston Red Sox in Game 7 of the American League Championship Series. The Red Sox were ahead but Joe Torre’s Yankees came back late, scoring three in the eighth to tie the game.
Mo Rivera came in to pitch the ninth that night, with the game still tied.
Then he pitched the top of the 10th.
And the 11th.
In the bottom of the eleventh that night, of course, Aaron Boone hit one of the most famous October home runs in the history of the Yankees. Yankee fans will never forget Boone’s swing, simply because you never forget a swing like that at Yankee Stadium. But they will also never forget the way Rivera kept his team in there that long baseball night, and gave it a chance at another World Series. Not the last three outs this time. The last three outs times three.
The next April, I was sitting with Rivera at his locker. It was always one of the very best places to be in the Yankee clubhouse, alone with Rivera, talking baseball. The quiet man never liked to talk about himself very much. But he had – and has – a wonderful and perceptive and analytical baseball mind. Often I wouldn’t be there for a column. Mo always knew when I was there to get a quote from him, when I was there to just visit. On this day we were simply talking baseball. Mostly it was me listening to him talk baseball, about the strengths and weaknesses of his own team or the other team, or just something that had happened the day before. I think back on the conversations and remember him smiling.
On this afternoon in the baseball spring of ’04, we got around to talking about Game 7 against the Red Sox, and I told him that I’d been wondering ever since Boone’s home run who would have pitched the top
of the 12th that night if the Yankees hadn’t won the game, and the pennant.
“I was going to pitch next,” Mo said.
“But you’d already pitched three innings,” I said. He smiled, and shrugged. “I was ready to pitch all night,” Mo Rivera said.
He would end up with 652 saves in the big leagues and would have had more than that, could have gotten to 700, if his first run of brilliance with the Yankees wasn’t as a set-up man to John Wetteland in 1996. Rivera showed up at the old Stadium in 1995 and got his last save in 2013, was an AllStar 13 times. Now he goes to Cooperstown as the first baseball player in history to get 100 percent of the vote.
“I never could have dreamed a life like this,” he told me once in front of his locker.
Derek Jeter was more famous during their time together. Jeter was the player the kids wanted to be. Maybe someday Jeter will get 100 percent of the vote, too, as Rivera says he should. But Jeter wasn’t better at playing shortstop and playing baseball than Mo Rivera was as a closer.
Here is how important Rivera was to the Yankees across his splendid career: When he didn’t do the job, when he didn’t close the deal, the Yankees didn’t just lose games, they lost seasons. His first year as a closer was 1997. In a first-round playoff series against the Indians, he gave up a tying Game 4 home run in Cleveland to Sandy Alomar, Jr. The Indians won the game. The Yankees never recovered. They didn’t make it back to the ALCS that year. They didn’t make it back to the Series.
In 2001 in Phoenix, Game 7 of the World Series against the Diamondbacks, Alfonso Soriano had hit a home run to put the Yankees ahead 2-1. If Rivera got the last three outs, the Yankees would win their fifth World Series in six years. Yankee fans know what happened that night the way they know their screen names. Mo made an error and Scott Brosius didn’t turn a double play and Tony Womack hit a double and Torre brought in the infield and Luis Gonzalez blooped one over Jeter’s head and the Yankees didn’t win five World Series in six years.
And then at Fenway Park three years later, another Yankees-Red Sox Game 7, Mo walked Kevin Millar when the Yankees were three outs away from a sweep, Dave Roberts pinchran for Millar and stole second, Bill Mueller singled Roberts home. The game was tied. The Yankees weren’t sweeping the Red Sox. They were about to become the first team to blow a 3-0 lead in October. It is another way to understand the great Rivera: When he didn’t get the save, nobody could save the Yankees.
But he almost always did get the save, across all the seasons and years. There is a wonderful symmetry to the fact that No. 42 ended his career with 42 postseason saves, and an earned run average of 0.70. He had 11 World Series saves.
“My greatest moment,” Rivera said after being elected to the Hall of Fame, “is being a Yankee.”
He was the great moment for nearly two decades in New York, the skinny Panamanian kid who said he never could have dreamed the baseball life that he had as a Yankee, the extraordinary baseball life about to be honored in Cooperstown. Not the bullpen doors opening for him this time. Just the doors of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Opening wide for Mo Rivera, closer.