Baseball Hall of Fame countdown
Assessing chances for Mussina, Clemens, Rivera
USA TODAY is counting down the top 10 candidates on the 2019 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot in advance of the election results Tuesday. The countdown is based on voting by our power rankings panel, which includes five Hall voters. At No. 2 is Mariano Rivera.
We’ll try to wax poetic about Rivera, but his candidacy boils down to this: The Hall of Fame was made for immortal players such as Mariano Rivera.
He is the greatest closer in the history of the game. He is quite possibly baseball’s all-time best postseason player. There has never been another pitcher like Rivera, and there probably never will be.
He was the embodiment of the Yankees’ dynasty. The bullpen door swinging open sucked the life out of the opposing team. Rivera was going to get you out, probably breaking your bat in the process, and you were going to lose. That went on for nearly two decades. The only question to answer is whether Rivera will become the first player to receive 100 percent of the vote.
❚ Case for: The numbers back up the hyperbole. His 652 saves are the most all time and look like a record that won’t be falling any time soon. Craig Kimbrel is the closest active player with 333 and he’ll need to average 32 saves for 10 more seasons to pass Rivera. He had a 0.70 ERA in 141 postseason innings, the best of any pitcher with 30 career innings. He had 42 postseason saves and recorded the last out in the World Series on four occasions. Most striking about Rivera is his longevity. Other closers have had stretches of dominance (paging Eric Gagne), but Rivera did this his entire career. His last season at 43 was as good as his first as a full-time closer, 16 years prior.
❚ Case against: Haters might cite Rivera’s high-profile blown saves in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, which effectively ended the Yankees’ dynasty, as well as Games 4 and 5 of the 2004 American League Championship Series, triggering perhaps the worst postseason meltdown in sports history. Before latching onto that argument, remember that to even get to Game 7 in his game log, you have to wade through the first 772⁄ postseason innings of Rivera’s career that included
24 saves and all of six earned runs. Ultimately, unless you’re waging some kind of holy war against the specialization of relievers, there is no coherent case to be made against Rivera’s induction.
❚ X factors: While there’s nobody in history who rivals Rivera, there was precedent for full-time closers not getting into the Hall until Trevor Hoffman’s 2018 induction kicked the gate open. Lee Smith’s controversial induction this year via the Veterans Committee continued the trend, and there’s no way Rivera can be kept out now.
❚ Consensus: Rivera is getting in on the first ballot, and there’s a good chance he breaks the record Ken Griffey Jr. set in
2016 with 99.32 percent of the vote.