Wednesday, July 16, 2008

 

"No debate: Rivera is the best closer in history"--Mike Lupica

(Mike Lupica): "We will make this more than it is this week at Yankee Stadium, the last All-Star Game in the place, maybe the last great baseball occasion in the place if the Yankees don't find a way to make the playoffs this season. All the way until the last out Tuesday night, we will hype this up as if it were the Super Bowl of All-Star Games, or the Olympics, because it is the Stadium and it is the Yankees and it is New York and it is, after all, what we do here.

But there is one player who will participate in this game Tuesday night who does

Mo Rivera is as good a reason as any that this game be played at this place this season, the last of the current rendering of Yankee Stadium,

The beauty of baseball and the beauty of sports is that there is always a debate about this giant of the sport or that. Some will say that Ruth will always be the biggest player of them all, has to be, just because of the distance he put between himself and the rest of the field when he seemed to invent the home run in baseball at the same time he was inventing the Yankees.

There will always be the debate about starting pitchers, all the way back to the real Cy Young. They will fight about whether you would give the ball to one of them if you had to win one game, or give it to Sandy Koufax or Bob Gibson or Tom Seaver or Steve Carlton or somebody else.

has lasted longer than any power pitcher in his job ever has,

He is the Babe Ruth of what he does for a living, has done full-time,

no other Yankee has been better at what he does than he has been.

And, at the age of 38, still is.

"They know we're still here," Mo Rivera said.

The Yankees are still here. Less than they have been in other seasons since they were reinvented and reimagined as Joe Torre's Yankees

ahead of John Wetteland. You want to know how long Rivera has lasted, how long he has pitched at this high level? Wetteland, long since retired, was born in 1966. Rivera, who will turn 39 this November, was born in 1969. And will be at the Stadium tomorrow night.

By now the world knows about the lowest postseason earned-run average in history and

the Yankees were still winning it all. There are all the postseason days and nights that are part of his legend, including

When it was over that night, when Boone's ball was over the wall and the Yankees came running onto the field,

"The best," Torre said of the game that night, and the way it ended.

He hasn't always been perfect, because no one is, so there was the night when Sandy Alomar Jr. beat him in a game in the first round and helped knock the Yankees out and there was the bottom of the ninth in Game 7 against the Diamondbacks and there was the worst night of all, for him and his team, when he couldn't get the last three outs he needed against the Red Sox, Game 4 of '04, and keep the Red Sox down against the Yankees, where they had always been.

understand something:

"Mariano Rivera is the Brightest Yankee Star of All," 7/14/08, Mike Lupica column in the NY Daily News. And Mike Lupica is the bravest NY Daily News employee of them all.


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