Core Four: The Heart and Soul of the Yankees Dynasty

by Phil Pepe

  Plain and simple, Posada was in a snit over being put in the No. 9 batting position. He was pouting. He was mad as hell and he wasn’t going to take it anymore!

  When reporters, who had seen the original lineup with Posada in it, wondered why he had been scratched, Cashman had no choice but to address the issue. During the third inning, he met with reporters and said that to his knowledge, Posada did not have an injury.

  “I don’t know why he made a statement during the game,” said Posada. “I don’t understand that. That’s the way he works now, I guess. I think he should have waited for the game to be over to talk to whoever. You don’t do that. You’re not supposed to do that.”

  Cashman said he had told Posada and his agent that he was going to address the media and exactly what he was going to say when he did.

  Not surprisingly, Posada’s action received the support of his teammates, and even of his opponents.

  Yankees captain and Posada’s best friend, Derek Jeter, said the catcher owed no one an apology for asking out of the game.

  “If he said he needed a day to clear his mind, there’s no need to apologize,” Jeter said. “I think everybody understands that. I think everybody in here [the clubhouse] understands that sometimes this game can be tough on you mentally. Everybody’s struggled, everybody’s been in a situation where things don’t seem to be clicking the right way. And if that’s the reason why he came out, then he doesn’t need apologize.”

  David Ortiz, “Big Papi” of the Red Sox, also saw things Posada’s way.

  “They’re doing that guy wrong,” said Ortiz, like Posada, confined to being a designated hitter. “They’re doing him wrong. You know why? That guy, he is legendary right there in that organization. And dude, DH-ing sucks. DH-ing is not easy.”

  Red Sox captain Jason Varitek, like Posada a switch-hitter and only eight months younger than his longtime contemporary and catching rival, was asked if he could appreciate Posada’s frustration.

  “We’re dealing with a lot of speculation right now with the little bit I just heard,” Varitek said. “I do know and respect what the man has done behind the plate for many, many years. Like I do with most things, I’m going to wait for the truth to come out and I’m not going to respond to something on hearsay.”

  With 24 hours and a night’s sleep, Posada’s temperature had cooled somewhat. He went into Girardi’s office the day after the brouhaha and apologized, sort of.

  “I just had a bad day,” he said.

  The conversation between Posada and Girardi then evolved into a clear-the-air discussion of their relationship, which Girardi could sense was rather emotional for Posada. What he saw, said the manager, “was not your typical Jorge Posada face.”

  Girardi said he told Posada, “I just want to see you have joy, and I want to see you enjoy what you’re doing and enjoy the game of baseball like you’ve always loved it. That’s more important to me than the apology.”

  Recalling his feelings during the time when he was trying to hang on to his job and Posada was coming on fast to take it away, Girardi said, “I knew that he was a better player than I was. There would be days I would get two hits and I’d go look at the lineup and his name would be there and I didn’t necessarily like it, but I understood it. Jorge was a more talented player, and I moved on, but it wasn’t the first time I had to move on because someone was more talented. It was the reality of the situation, and Jorge’s been a great Yankee.

  “He’s done so many wonderful things for this organization, and I’m extremely proud of what he’s done and to know Jorgie, and you look back, everything that we’ve done. I just said, ‘I know this is hard, I know it’s hard to struggle, but you’ll get through this.’”

  Speaking to reporters, Posada was in a more conciliatory mood the day after his blowup.

  “You learn from your mistakes, and I think I’ll learn from this,” he said. “Everybody has a bad day. I think I just had one yesterday and I’ll try to move on.”

  Posada also extended an olive branch in the form of an apology to general manager Brian Cashman, who would have been within his contractual rights to fine or suspend Posada. He did neither and said he considered the matter closed.

  Posada was not in the starting lineup in the third game of the series against the Red Sox, but that was not punitive. Boston’s pitcher was left-hander Jon Lester and Posada’s ineptitude as a right-handed batter made it an easy decision for Girardi to use right-handed hitting Andruw Jones as the designated hitter against Lester. But when Jones was due to bat in the eighth inning against right-hander Daniel Bard, Girardi called him back and sent Posada up as a pinch hitter. He drew a walk.

  After the unpleasantness in Boston, Posada picked it up somewhat and finished the season with a .235 average, 14 home runs, and 44 RBI—fairly respectable numbers for only 344 at-bats—helping the Yankees win their 12th division title in 16 years, all of them with Posada on the roster.

  However, the Yankees faltered in the postseason and were eliminated in the first round when they were beaten by the Detroit Tigers in five games. Posada held up his end. He started all five games and batted .429 on six hits in 14 at-bats.

  It was his last hurrah. When the season ended, there was no offer for the 2012 season, not from the Yankees or any other team. Reluctantly, Posada announced his retirement.

  23. Closure

  On Monday September 19, 2011, Mariano Rivera pitched a perfect ninth inning—he retired Trevor Plouffe on a ground ball to second baseman Robinson Cano, got Michael Cuddyer on a line drive to right fielder Chris Dickerson, and with his signature cutter struck out Chris Parmelee looking—in the Yankees 6–4 win over the Minnesota Twins in Yankee Stadium to record his 43rd save of the season and the 602nd of his career, passing Trevor Hoffman, since retired, for the most saves in baseball history.

  The monumental achievement earned the usual excitement and homage from the crowd of 40,045; elicited a congratulatory telephone call from the president of Panama, Ricardo Martinelli (if you’re the president of Panama and you want to continue being the president of Panama, you had better cozy up to Mariano Rivera lest he chooses to run for the office himself); and set off a raging debate.

  Is Rivera, as many have contended, the greatest closer in baseball history?

  Some say the greatest closer in baseball history was Cy Young, who pitched 749 complete games in his career, 103 more than any other pitcher. (Rivera has finished more games than any pitcher in history, 892).

  Some say Mariano Rivera is the greatest closer of only the last 30 years, which is about the time the term “closer” entered the baseball lexicon. Before then, relief pitchers were not called closers and were not used in the same manner that closers are used today.

  Rich “Goose” Gossage, who saved 310 games with nine different teams in 22 major league seasons (from 1972 to 1994, with one year spent in Japan) and was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2008, has been the most vocal proponent of the difference between the role of the “closer” in his day and Rivera’s.

  The basic difference, Gossage points out, is that today’s closer routinely enters a game to start the ninth inning with a lead of three runs or less, nobody out and nobody on base, while in Gossage’s day and before, it was common for the reliever (closer?) to come into a game in the ninth inning, the eighth, the seventh and, occasionally, even as early as the sixth, and with runners on base. A check of the seasons of some of the great relief pitchers of the past in comparison with Rivera makes Gossage’s point emphatically while, at the same time, gives a thumbnail history of the evolution of the relief pitcher as closer.

  (It’s important to note that the save didn’t become an official statistic of Major League Baseball until 1969. Prior to that year, there was no such thing as a save, though there were relief pitchers that arrived late in a game and finished up in a winning effort. It was therefore left to statisticians to
research every game ever played and, using today’s requirements, tabulate the saves that would have been credited.)

  “When you come into the game with inherited runners, when you can’t even allow the ball to be put in play, that’s where I shined,” Gossage told The New York Times. “I used to love that. I could get two strikeouts. The mental strain is incredible. I would be exhausted just because of the letdown of the pressure and the mental part of it.

  “When I pitched the ninth inning to save a three-run lead, coming in with no one on base, I felt guilty. I would go home and be embarrassed. Rivera is an awesome pitcher, but what he’s doing is easy. What he does and what we used to do is apples and oranges. It’s not fair to compare what closers today do with what we did. Managers today go by a big bible of how to use relievers. Righty faces righty. Lefty faces lefty. Face one batter. Don’t use a closer more than one inning. They use three guys now—two set-up guys and a closer—to do what we used to do by ourselves.

  “They’d put me in when we were losing by a run and there were men on base because they needed to get that out. If we had a three-run lead going into the ninth, they didn’t even put me in. Anyone can finish that. Today, if a closer comes in in the eighth inning, it makes headlines. It’s embarrassing.”

  Without the benefit of sabermetrics and computers, managers in Gossage’s day and before were not as enlightened as they are today. Needless to say, Gossage believes that had he been used in his day as closers are used today, he might have been a member of the 600 saves club along with Rivera and Hoffman.

  “Four or five of us in the past would have gotten there if we’d have been used the way they use these guys now, just to get saves,” he said.

  Even Rivera’s remarkable postseason record has its detractors. They point out that because of the expanded playoffs, Rivera has had many more opportunities to compete than his predecessors. That’s true (Murphy, Page, Duren, Arroyo, Face, and Wilhelm had only the World Series; Marshall and Sutter only the World Series and League Championship Series), but look at the results Rivera has compiled in the most pressurized situations: eight wins, 42 saves, a 0.70 earned run average, 110 strikeouts, 21 walks, 86 hits, and 13 runs in 96 games covering 141 innings. In those 96 postseason games and 141 innings through 2012, he has allowed only two home runs, to Sandy Alomar Jr. of the Cleveland Indians in Game 4 of the 1997 ALCS and to Jay Payton of the New York Mets in Game 2 of the 2000 World Series. Put another way, since yielding his last postseason home run, he has gone 57 games, 81¹⁄³ innings, 304 batters, and 1,140 pitches without giving up a home run.

  Thirty one of Rivera’s 42 postseason saves were for more than one inning, including four seven-out saves in which he wasn’t charged with a run and didn’t allow an inherited runner to score.

  Rivera has had 29 two-inning appearances in the postseason, with four wins, 14 saves, and three holds.

  The true genius of Mariano Rivera lies in his ability to accomplish so much while ostensibly throwing only one pitch, the cut fastball (or cutter), a pitch thrown with the similar motion and the same velocity as a fastball but as it approaches the hitter it bores in…in…in…on a left-handed batter and away…away…away…from a right-handed batter. It has wrought a forest of broken bats. In the 2001 season alone, Rivera is said to have broken 44 bats, but who’s counting?

  As Yankees hitting instructor Kevin Long explained to The New York Times, when Rivera throws his cutter “You’re thinking it’s going to be right here [he motions to the middle of home plate], so you start to swing and it ends up here [he motions to a spot on the fist of a left-handed hitter, a movement of some six to eight inches]. You might know it’s going to cut, but you really can’t see it until the last minute, when it takes off.”

  Eric Chavez has had the rare dual experience of hitting against the Mariano Rivera cutter as a member of the Oakland Athletics and watching him throw it to hitters from his third-base vantage point as a teammate.

  “When you go back and look at his career and what he’s done with that one pitch, I don’t think there’s a greater achievement than that,” Chavez said. “To go through major league hitters and dominate for all those years, it’s one of the greatest feats I’ll ever look back on. I don’t think people realize how incredible it really is. It will never be duplicated, ever.”

  The cutter is Mariano Rivera’s signature pitch, “The single best pitch ever in the game,” said 600–home run–slugger Jim Thome. “A buzzsaw,” said Atlanta Braves future–Hall of Famer Chipper Jones. “You know what’s coming,” said Mike Sweeney, a five-time All-Star and a lifetime .297 hitter for 16 major league seasons, “but you know what’s coming in horror films, too. It still gets you.”

  It’s a pitch so dominant, so admired, so feared, and so closely identified with and perfected by one pitcher it would not be surprising that in the not too distant future managers, coaches, pitchers, broadcasters, and baseball writers will refer to the pitch not as “the cutter,” but as “the Mariano” or “the Mo” or “the Rivera,” much in the way that ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction is commonly known as “Tommy John surgery.”

  Rivera’s genius also is in his amazing pinpoint control, the velocity he generates from a trim, athletic, 6'2", 185-pound body, and a smooth, fluid pitching motion that allows him to repeat his delivery pitch after pitch, along with his durability and his longevity.

  Since 1996, and until May 3, 2012, five months and four days after his 42nd birthday (when he tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee shagging fly balls in Kansas City prior to a game, as he had done maybe a few thousand times), Rivera had pitched in fewer than 60 games twice and fewer than 50 just once.

  By comparison, Joe Page retired at age 32, tried a comeback four years later, and pitched in only seven games with the Pirates. Bruce Sutter and Ryne Duren were finished at age 35, Luis Arroyo at 36, Sparky Lyle at 37, Johnny Murphy, Mike Marshall, and Rollie Fingers at 38.

  Elroy Face pitched until 1969, when, at the age of 41, he won four games and saved five for the Montreal Expos. At the age of 41, Rivera won one game and saved 44.

  Goose Gossage pitched until the age of 42, but managed only one save and hadn’t saved as many as 13 games since age 36.

  Hoyt Wilhelm was a physical phenomenon. At the age of 47, he recorded 13 saves. At the age of 49, he had a record of 0–1 with one save for the Los Angeles Dodgers and he made his last appearance 16 days before his 50th birthday. Wilhelm’s longevity may have been aided by the fact he threw a trick pitch, the knuckleball, which was more baffling to hitters and less stressful on the arm of the pitcher.

  The only reliever on the list who rivaled Rivera in both dominance and longevity is also the only one whose career overlapped with Rivera’s: Dennis Eckersley. Eckersley saved 36 games at the age of 42 and retired at 43 after posting a record of 4–1 with one save for the Boston Red Sox. (P.S. Eckersley, Gossage, Sutter, Wilhelm, and Fingers are the only relief pitchers that have been elected to the Hall of Fame.)

  It’s worth noting, and quite obvious, that most of the relievers mentioned above were merely hanging on at the end, eking out another contract or two, bouncing around from team to team. There has been no hanging around for Mariano Rivera, no bouncing around from team to team, no eking out another contract or two. He is the only reliever on the above list that has played his entire career for just one team.

  Through it all, Rivera typically has carefully avoided involving himself in the debate about the difference between past relievers and today’s closers. He is not known to even be quoted on the subject. After all, the claim that he is greatest closer in baseball history was not his claim, the rules for saves are not his rules, and the manner in which he is used has not been dictated by him. It’s the manager, not the pitcher, that decides how a closer is to be used.

  There is a school of thought that contends if Goose Gossage were pitching under today’s conditions and philosoph
y, he would have as many saves as Mariano Rivera.

  Maybe!

  What They Say About Mariano Rivera

  Joe Torre, on ESPN radio the day after Rivera went down with a torn ACL in his left knee: “During the course of the season your players that play every day are probably more valuable, but when you get into the postseason, that last inning is so valuable, those last three outs. I laugh because I have been listening to the radio today and I’ve laughed at some people when it’s suggested that he may be not only one of the best relievers but maybe one of the best pitchers, and they say, ‘Well you only pitch one inning so how can you say that?’ Those last three outs, unless you sit in the dugout or you’ve watched it for years, those last three outs are like gold. I don’t think there’s any question of how valuable he was and in the postseason I don’t think there was anyone more important.”

  Tom Kelly, former manager of the Minnesota Twins: “He needs to pitch in a higher league, if there is one. Ban him from baseball. He should be illegal.”

  Hall of Fame closer Dennis Eckersley: “[Rivera is] the best ever, no doubt.”

  Trevor Hoffman, runner-up to Rivera as the all-time career leader in saves: “[Rivera] will go down as the best reliever in the game in history.”

  More Joe Torre: “He’s the best I’ve ever been around. Not only the ability to pitch and perform under pressure, but the calm he puts over the clubhouse.”

  Alex Rodriguez: “He’s the only guy in baseball who can change the game from a seat in the clubhouse or the bullpen. He would start affecting teams as early as the fifth inning because they knew he was out there. I’ve never seen anyone who could affect a game like that. He’s the greatest weapon in modern baseball, the greatest I’ve ever seen or played against.”