Mariano Rivera Highlights

• ""You are going to hear something tonight," Mo Rivera had said before the game. "From all the years."...

• The Yankees came for Jeter now. First they were up on the top of the dugout steps and then on the field when the ball was past Scott and into right. Now they were slowly walking toward first base. Mo Rivera was there, and Jorge Posada, and Andy Pettitte, who have done so much winning with Jeter. And you imagined Paul O'Neill with them, and Bernie, and Tino Martinez, too.

They hugged him, one by one. Mo said something to him, so did Posada. The ovation would not stop. Above it all, they were chanting Jeter's name, the way the bleachers do in the top of the first, only it wasn't just the bleachers now, it was the whole place. There have been so many comebacks this season, and so many times when the crowd over here tried to sound like sellouts used to sound on the other side of 161st St. But the place had never sounded like this. This sound for Jeter.

• The Yankees finally left the field. The people would not stop cheering, would not stop chanting Jeter's name. Now he took off his helmet and waved it at the crowd, and then he pointed into the crowd. It only made the place louder.

• Now here it was, bottom of the third, Yankees ahead 3-1, Jeter with the hit that put him past Gehrig. So much of this over the last week has been silly, out of proportion to the record. This was not. This wasn't marketing or hype now. This was real now at the Stadium....

He showed up for good in 1996 and the Yankees won it all and won three more times through October of 2000 and he became the face of the franchise as much as any player ever has. Last night was about that. You can only imagine what it will be like around here when he does get closer to 3,000.

• None of this was Jeter's doing. Or the Yankees' doing.
  

• The media lost its head over this one. There is no big game for the Yankees until October.

The Gehrig record gave everybody a chance to have a party. It ended last night, after a long rain delay, in the third against the Orioles, a single to right by the biggest sports star in town....

• He is not the player Ruth was, or Gehrig, or Mantle,
  
• or even Mo Rivera.
  

A-Rod's numbers will all be bigger someday. Jeter isn't Joe DiMaggio. But in so many ways, the way he has carried himself, what he has meant, he has been this era's DiMaggio....

• The Yankees have tried too hard this season to move history and tradition across the street. People sure tried hard this week to make it seem like Jeter was trying to break DiMaggio's 56. But it was all real enough last night in the bottom of the third, when the Stadium cheered Jeter the way it did. And when he pointed back at them, it was as if the captain of the Yankees was cheering them back."
  

9/12/09, from Mike Lupica column , NY Daily News, "At New Stadium, Yankee Captain Derek Jeter hears that old Roar from the Crowd."

Labels: Mariano congratulates Derek Jeter

# posted by susan @ 2:30 PM