Mariano Rivera Highlights

• "I will ask this question again, with no disrespect meant to Capt. Jeter:

• "Order was restored for the Yankees - the official Yankee Rules of Order in baseball – with the last out of the World Series belonging to the great Mariano Rivera again. He threw a ground ball to Shane Victorino and nearly beat Robinson Cano's throw to first base and the Yankees had won again.

So had Rivera, who'd gotten the last out of a Series for a fourth time and had his fifth World Series as a big Yankee. So had Derek Jeter, and Andy Pettitte. Jorge Posada was around in October of 1996, but was just a kid on the bench, not the catcher, or the Yankee, he would eventually become.

Mo Rivera, setting up John Wetteland, was already unhittable in the '96 postseason.

• Fourteen innings, one earned run.
  

Thirteen years later, he was the same way against the Phillies.

• Sixteen innings in last year's postseason, 14 strikeouts, one earned run, 0.56 earned run average. A season that ended three weeks shy of his 40th birthday.

Now he is back. And the Yankees are back at Fenway Sunday night. One of the biggest winners in baseball history, the best closer in baseball history, one of the handful of legendary Yankees, returns to the scene of one of his rare failures, Game 4, ALCS, 2004, the night Rivera did not close out the Red Sox, the night the Yankees did not sweep the Red Sox, and the Red Sox began to make baseball history of their own.

• Mo Rivera is back at Fenway Sunday night, looking to start this season the way last season ended. Officially 40 now. Talking about pitching forever the way he has pitched since we first saw him, really, in that postseason of 1996.

The talk of this season will be a new contract for Jeter, who wants to play past 40 the way Alex Rodriguez does. Their hero, their role model, should be Rivera. He is the Yankee they want to be when they reach his age. There have been other Yankees, and other pitchers, who pitched at a high level at 40. Not like No. 42.

• Find another iconic New York athlete in any sport who has ever done it quite like this.

"I am young of heart," he said with a smile one day last October in the Yankee clubhouse. "And young of arm."

• The best of it last fall really was the way a whole new light was shined on the excellence of Rivera, the grace, the professionalism, the importance of the man, on his team, and in this time in sports, where we have been conditioned to be disappointed by the most famous names. More and more – mo and mo? – he let people get to know him, find out that he is the best quote in the room, has the sharpest take on baseball. And honest. And completely accountable. You want them all to be like him.

Rivera was more open than ever before, more willing to embrace who he is and what he has meant to the organization. That he is so much more than cutters and broken bats and all those saves. I will ask this question again, with no disrespect meant to Capt. Jeter:

If he was Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year, then what is Rivera?

Of all of them on the field that night after Game 6 against the Phillies, he was the happiest. Young in all ways that night. For all times, he is on the first page of the greatest Yankees: Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Berra, Ford, Mantle, Jeter.

• He is on the first page with others, from the other sports, in no particular order, and with all the names you would add to the list I am about to throw at you: Jackie Robinson and the young Willie Mays. Frazier and Reed and DeBusschere. Namath and Seaver and Messier and Simms and LT. He is what Clyde would have been coming out from behind the bullpen walls.

The only difference between him and Jeter is that Jeter is out there every day and Rivera, as often as we do get to see him, is not.

• "I work the late shift," he says.

As he gets later into his career, the question is always the same: Is this the year when he slips? Is this when he starts to act his age, become less than he has been?

• "I hear that every April," he said. "I'm used to it."

It is another April. Another opening night for him. If it ends right for the Yankees Sunday night at Fenway, he works the late shift again. He gives the Yankees and their fans the kind of ninth inning he keeps talking about, and makes them believe that he really can go forever."

• Mike Lupica, "At 40, Mariano Rivera should be every NY Yankees' hero and role model," NY Daily News 4/4/10
  

Labels: Mike Lupica, Rivera works the late shift

# posted by susan @ 2:16 PM