A PERFECT HALL CALL!
Mariano Rivera, the humble Yankee closer, is the ideal person for the Hall of Fame
COOPERSTOWN — When Mariano Rivera steps up to the podium Sunday to accept his Hall of Fame plaque — if the shrine’s poohbahs have any sense of drama they’ll have him close out the ceremonies to the musical accompaniment of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” — it will immediately evoke a wide range of emotions from all the people who made the pilgrimage for the final stop of his baseball journey that began with a clumsy cardboard glove some 30 years ago on the dusty streets of the tiny fishing village of Puerto Caimito, Panama.
Sitting behind him, Joe Torre, the man who installed him as Yankee closer in 1997 and who then became the beneficiary of most of his major league record 652 saves, will be reminded of how spoiled he was to have managed for 12 years with a safety net of the most infallible closer in the history of baseball. Let’s face it, and Torre has never downplayed it, Rivera made him a very wealthy man.
Scattered among the upfront rows in the special guests and family section of the Clark Sports Center, Rivera’s Core Four Yankee teammates, Andy Pettitte, Jorge Posada and Derek Jeter — for whom he also made a lot of money — will no doubt be feeling an immense community pride having shared those five world championships with him. They are brothers for life and Rivera’s induction is the ultimate family celebration. Who will ever forget in his final game, September 26, 2013, the image of Rivera dissolving in tears on the mound at the sight of Pettitte and Jeter, taking the place of Joe Girardi, emerging from the dugout and strolling to the
mound to remove him?
No doubt the tears will flow all over again Sunday, even perhaps from the normally hardened baseball scribes in the audience who thought enough of Rivera to accord him something they had not done for any other player in history — not Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Tom Seaver, Cal Ripken or Ken Griffey Jr. — a perfect 100% Hall of Fame ballot. It was something Rivera was still in amazement at in a conference call with baseball writers last week.
“Amazing, just amazing,” he re- peated. “I look back now at all I did (the 652 saves, the 0.70 postseason ERA, the record 11 seasons of ERAs under 2.00, 25 or more saves in 15 consecutive seasons and 42 postseason saves) and I say to myself: ‘How did I do this?’ Only by the grace of God. It’s incredible. I would say that to anybody, not just for me. To be in that position to have all that success — five times being on the mound to end the World Series — it was always a matter of timing … You focus on that next pitch, which may be the last pitch to finish a World Series and win a championship, and you have to control your emotions because that last pitch can also be a mistake. Not too many people had the opportunity to be in so many World Series. I had the desire and the passion. I wanted to be there in that spot.
“I am humbled that I was the one the Lord blessed.”
As Torre said, at his peak, Rivera changed the game just by being in the ballpark. “If you were in the other dugout as the manager or a player, you didn’t want to see him in the game. So it really put pressure on your team to have a lead to keep him out of the game. And when you feel pressure as a hitter, you’re not at your best.”
“Knowing I was coming to a team that had Mariano as the closer was definitely a factor in my decision to sign with the Yankees,” said Mike Mussina last week. Mussina, winner of 270 games — 49 of them saved by Rivera — will also be inducted Sunday, along with Edgar Martinez, Harold Baines, Lee Smith and twotime Cy Young Award winner Roy Halladay, who was killed in a small plane accident over the Gulf of Mexico in November 2017. “I got to see him every day. He made what is one of the hardest jobs in baseball so commonplace. He was just so accomplished.”
Listening to Mussina, I was reminded of a conversation I had with Rivera on a rainy February day in Tampa in the Yankee spring training clubhouse in 2005. A month earlier, they had held the Hall of Fame election and fellow closers, Bruce Sutter and Goose Gossage, who had both been gaining steadily in the balloting, had again fallen short, and Rivera seemed as incensed by the result as the ever-volatile and outspoken Goose. By then, Rivera, 35, already had over 300 saves and, with all that prolific postseason success, was well established as one of the most consistently dominant closers of all time, even if Smith held the all-time saves record of 478. (“I’m never going there,” he insisted to me then.) So it was not unreasonable to suggest he had a Hall of Fame plaque in his future.
“I do think about the Hall of Fame, sure I think about it,” Rivera told me that day. “Why not? Every player who comes into the game should be thinking that. You want to go to a World Series, play in the AllStar Game, and go to the Hall of Fame. But what about Goose? When does he get in? He’s my idol, you know that. What does it take for him to get in? Don’t they know how tough this job is?” (For the record, Sutter was elected the following year with 76.9% of the vote and Gossage in 2008 with 85.8%.)
They say the measure of a man is not how he handles success but how he deals with failure and, in that respect, Rivera went on to be an even more dominant closer after his throwing error in the bottom of ninth inning of Game 7 wound up costing the Yankees the 2001 World Series against the Diamondbacks. He later said that was the best World Series he’d ever been in because of the Yankees’ three riveting wins in the middle games at Yankee Stadium that helped lift the spirits of the city racked with grief from 9/11. He had 12 more Hall of Fame-caliber seasons after that, eight of them with ERAs under 2.00, and another World Series in which he recorded the final out.
And he did it all with just one pitch — a cut fastball that everyone knew was coming but had no way in hell of knowing how to hit it.
In the clubhouse after the game that night in Arizona, people were crying all around him. Rivera, however, was stoic. “It happens,” he said with a shrug. “I tell you what, everything was working. I threw good pitches. I don’t secondguess myself. I’m not perfect.”
Actually, last January, 425 baseball writers said he was.