If there is an epidemic of swine flu, Mariano Rivera will not get it. If everyone in the New York Yankees’ clubhouse gets chicken pox, Rivera will not get it. Rivera is immune from bad things.
There has been an outbreak of blown saves in this post-season, but Rivera has not caught the closers’ disease. Jonathan Papelbon caught it. So did Joe Nathan. It struck Huston Street, Ryan Franklin, Jonathan Broxton and Brian Fuentes, too. Fernando Rodney caught it one game before the post-season began, in the playoff between Minnesota and Detroit for the American League Central title.
Rivera, however, has avoided the pitching plague, working as effectively in this post-season as he has pitched in 13 previous post-seasons. Appearing in all three division series games against Minnesota and five of the six league series games against Anaheim, Rivera gained three saves in three chances while allowing one run in 10 2/3 innings.
Rivera’s career post-season numbers are simply absurd. They cannot possibly have any basis in reality. But they belong to Rivera so they must be legitimate. In 84 games, including 11 before he succeeded John Wetteland as the closer, Rivera has compiled a 0.77 earned run average, 37 saves and an 8-1 won-lost record.
Other teams resent the Yankees’ big-spending ways. What other team could or would spend $423.5 million to get two pitchers to shore up their fragile starting rotation and a good-fielding run producer to fill the hole at first base?
But no matter what CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Mark Teixeira have done to get the Yankees back to the World Series – oh my goodness, for the first time in six years – they have nothing on Rivera. On a career-long basis, he more than any other player has been responsible for the Yankees’ championships.
Where would the Yankees be without Rivera? Not in the exalted position they have held the past 14 years.
When the Atlanta Braves were winning 14 consecutive division titles but were falling short of the World Series championships except for one year, their biggest problem was the lack of a good consistent closer. They had Mark Wohlers for a while but not nearly long enough to establish themselves as baseball’s No. 1 team.
Had Rivera played for the Braves instead of the Yankees, I suspect the Braves would have won a few more World Series.
There are some critics of the saves statistic who say it’s a cheap statistic, that it’s too easy to get saves. But just ask Papelbon, Street, Nathan, Franklin, Broxton, Fuentes and Rodney.
“That tells you it’s not easy,” Rivera told an interviewer recently. “I know all those guys. They want to do their jobs. It’s not easy.”
Ask Francisco Rodriguez, too. In 2008 he set a major league record with 62 saves for the Angels. He failed to convert seven opportunities. With the Mets this past season, he also failed in seven chances, but he had 35 saves, which means he squandered 17 percent of his chances compared with 10 percent last year.
But most of all ask Brad Lidge. A perfect closer in 2008 with 41 saves in 41 opportunities and then another 7-for-7 in post-season games for the championship Philadelphia Phillies, Lidge lived through a perfectly miserable season this year. He had 31 saves but squandered 11, and he had a 0-8 won-lost record and a 7.21 earned run average, allowing 47 earned runs in 58 2/3 innings and 1.9 baserunners per inning.
He was so bad manager Charlie Manuel used different relievers in the closing role late in the season. But Manuel didn’t give up on Lidge completely, and Lidge rewarded his manager’s confidence, converting all three save opportunities he has had this post-season while giving up no runs and one hit in four innings.
Lidge has been more typical of closers than Rivera. Even most of the best closers have off seasons and are inconsistent. Not Rivera. He is a month away from his 40th birthday, and he remains the best closer in the business. He just keeps going and going and going.
“It’s ridiculous; can I say that any more clearly?” Mike Scioscia, the Angels’ manager said the other day. He was talking about the increased number of off days during this post-season, but he could easily have been shaking his head in awe and talking about Rivera because it is ridiculous that someone could do what the Panamanian right-hander has done.
At 42, Trevor Hoffman, the career saves leader, is two years older than Rivera and has been saving games for three years longer than Rivera, but he hasn’t had the opportunities to fail in post-season games that Rivera has had. Hoffman has pitched in a total of six post-season series compared with the 29 series Rivera will have appeared in when he relieves in this World Series.
Rivera was one of the young players Gene Michael held onto instead of trading for veteran players in the early ‘90s when he was the Yankees’ general manager, changing the culture of the organization in the absence of the suspended owner, George Steinbrenner.
The change Michael instituted laid the groundwork for the Yankees’ run of World Series championships – four in five years 1996 through 2000 – and Rivera is still around.
Showing no signs of age or decrease in durability, he breezed through this regular season with 44 saves in 46 chances. In the past two seasons, pitching at ages 38 and 39, he had 83 saves in 86 chances. Rivera is so automatic that when he blows a save, it is a shock.
The biggest shocks Rivera delivered came in 1997 and 2001. In the first instance, the Yankees led Cleveland, 2-1 in score and the division series, when Sandy Alomar Jr. hit a home run against Rivera with two out in the eighth inning, tying the game and the series. The next day the Indians won the game and the series.
The second instanced occurred at an even more critical moment. It was the ninth inning of Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, and the Yankees led Arizona, 2-1. Rivera, however, made a throwing error on a sacrifice bunt, leading to an uncharacteristic inning for him that featured a run-scoring double by Tony Womack and a run-producing, Series-winning single by Luis Gonzalez.
That type of messy inning is a common occurrence for most other closers. It has rarely occurred in a Rivera outing.
