Major League Baseball

What I learned from ... Mariano Rivera's memoir 'The Closer'

Published Jun. 17, 2014 9:33 a.m. ET

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Rob Neyer

When Mariano Rivera’s memoir was first announced in the spring of 2013, you might have been excused for yawning. As Craig wrote, “I love Rivera as a player, but I’m struggling to think of what would pass for drama here.”

Well, I read the book. Which, by the way, is a big seller!

True, there’s not a great deal of drama. There is a great deal of detail about each of the Yankees’ World Series postseasons during Rivera’s career. If you just can’t get enough postseason play-by-play, or you just want to relive the glory years ... well, this book might be just the thing.

If not, I’ll give you a little drama here, a few highlights there ...

It must be one of the most unlikely Hall of Fame careers ever.

But when I get in the game, I am usually ahead of the hitter, 1-2 or 0-2, by the time the announcer finishes saying my name. It goes that way pretty much the whole year... Tim Rumer is the club’s pitching star, one of the best guys in the Gulf Coast League, but with my very average fastball I have quite a run of success. This doesn’t surprise me. It shocks me. All around I see guys who are stronger than me and throw harder than me, and I am outperforming nearly all of them. It is almost an out-of-body experience. I get guy after guy out and think the same thing every time: How on earth am I doing this? The way everything is falling together is almost incomprehensible. First, I am supposed to be in the Dominican Republic, not Tampa, but the Yankees decided to bring me to spring training because I am already twenty... It has to be the work of the Lord. I am getting results way beyond my physical abilities.

That was in 1990.

"Dr. Jobe performs my surgery on August 27, 1992. It’s not a day that you’ll find commemorated anywhere in the annals of baseball history. It’s just the day I get my elbow cleaned up—and (I hope) a fresh, pain-free start to my pitching career."

I smoke through the Red Wings in the first inning. In the dugout, my catcher, Jorge Posada, sits down next to me.

What did you eat today?

Why?

Because I’ve never seen you throw this hard. The ball is flying out of your hand.

I don’t know. I feel good, I reply.

I wind up throwing a rain-shortened, five-inning no-hitter. I walk one guy, and Jorge throws him out stealing, so I face the minimum fifteen batters.

--snip--

Jorge tells me later that I was at 96 miles per hour all night and might’ve touched 97 or 98. It is a major jump that stuns people in the Yankee organization. Years later, I find out that Gene Michael, the Yankees general manager, got bulletins that night about how hard I was throwing.

Michael wanted to know, Was the gun working right? Do we know if this is accurate?

He checked with a scout who was at the game, and the scout confirmed it; his gun had 96 on it, too. Michael apparently was in the middle of talks with the Tigers to acquire David Wells. Once Michael confirmed the accuracy of the radar readings, I was no longer in the deal, or any other deal.

The night after my abbreviated no-hitter, Jorge and I and some of the other Clippers go to our regular dinner spot, Applebee’s. I have filet mignon and a loaded baked potato and vegetables.

Do you have any idea how you could go from throwing 88 to 90 to 96? I’ve never seen anything like it, Jorge says.

My shoulder is healthy, but there is only one answer. And it has nothing to do with increased filet mignon consumption. It is a gift from the Lord. I have known for a long time that He is using me for His own purposes, that He wants my pitching to help spread the good news about the Gospel of Jesus.

What else could it be? It makes no sense otherwise.

My throw seems to surprise him. He has to move his glove at the last moment to catch it.

Hey, stop playing around, Ramiro says.

What are you talking about? I’m not playing around.

I’m talking about the ball you just threw. It almost hit me.”

I just threw a normal ball, I say.

Well, it didn’t look normal to me.

We keep playing catch. I throw the ball to him again and the same thing happens. It breaks about a foot right when it is on top of him, and again he almost misses it completely.

That’s what I’m talking about, he says. Stop doing that.

I promise in the name of the Lord I am not doing anything, I reply.

I make several more throws to Ramiro and every one of them has the same wicked movement at the end.

You better go find somebody else to catch you, he says, finally. I don’t want to get hurt.

He’s serious. Our game of catch is over.

Try as he might—and he actually tried, for some weeks—to throw his fastball straight, Rivera just can’t do it. So he finally gives in and accepts one of the greatest gifts that any pitcher’s ever been given.*

* But I will mention, just in passing, that Rivera was a tremendous pitcher before he couldn’t throw a straight fastball.

and

“I look at it very simply: We are all human, and we all make mistakes. Some worse than others, some far harder to forgive. But who am I to judge?”

But as Mariano notes, Ruben wound up playing in Mexico for years, and starring there. Now 40, Rivera’s in his 10th season in the Mexican League, and once again he’s killing the ball.

When the Yankees lose the 2003 World Series, it’s because “We are not the same team we used to be. It’s not even close. The Marlins are fast and aggressive and play with spunk, but, I am sorry, those teams of ours that won four World Series in five years would’ve hammered them. They would’ve found a way, and willed their way through as a team. Because those were guys who cared more about winning than anything else. And it’s just not like that anymore.”

Hey, anything’s possible.

A week after Game 7, Rivera swung by Yankee Stadium. There, Joe Torre – Mr. T, as Rivera calls him – told Rivera that American Airlines Flight 587 had crashed in Queens, killing all 260 souls aboard.

It does not take me long to connect the dots. A dear friend and teammate of mine, Enrique Wilson, was booked on that flight, along with his wife and their two kids. When we didn’t win, there was no parade, no post-Series celebration to stick around for. So Enrique and his family took an earlier flight. Our losing had saved his life, his family’s lives. Please understand that I’m not suggesting the Lord cared about Enrique Wilson and his family and didn’t care about the people who did die that day. And I am certainly not saying Enrique’s life is more important than the lives that ended in the tragedy. I am simply saying that for whatever reason the Lord had his own play that day, and in effect said to Enrique that it was not his time to join him.

“It’s as tangible as the interlocking N and Y in our logo,” Rivera writes. “We are waiting for something bad to happen, mired in negative thinking. It’s another round of evidence of how the makeup of our team has changed. The guys from the championship years wouldn’t have succumbed to it. They would’ve found a way. This team does not.”

That’s the quote you’ve probably seen. But later in the book, Rivera writes quite a lot more about Cano. He criticizes Cano’s occasional failure to hustle in the field, his occasional failure to hustle on the bases, his tendency to swing at the first pitch with the bases loaded.

How often do you see a player with this beautiful a swing, who can play this kind of defense, and hit for this kind of power? It’s amazing. He steps in the box and has those quiet hands and then uncoils and the hands come forward, so strong, so quick. You see him rip a ball into the gap, and you think: With a swing like this, you should hit .350 in your down years. That’s the kind of ability he has. It is all there for Robby Cano. I hope he goes and gets it.

Two things come to mind. One, nobody’s hit .350 in his down years since Ty Cobb. And two, I wonder if Rivera’s frustration with Cano’s occasional missteps might have cost him a smidgen of objectivity.

Hey, anything’s possible. But the Yankees finished 6.5 games out in the Wild Card standings. For them to make up that ground, Jeter would have to have been the best shortstop in major-league history during those fifty or seventy-five games.

So, so true.

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