The Closer

by Mariano Rivera

  One of my teammates in Fort Lauderdale is a kid I’d heard a whole lot about. How could you not have heard about Brien Taylor? He was the number one overall pick in the major league draft in 1991, the Yankees’ prize for having their worst record in almost seventy-five years, finishing 67–95, in last place in the American League by a wide margin. Brien signed for a record bonus of $1.55 million, a contract that was negotiated by his mother, Bettie, and the family advisor, Scott Boras, and that instantly made him The Future of the Franchise, and a tourist attraction before he even put on his uniform.

  Brien warms up before a Florida State League game, and the scene around the bullpen looks like a mall two days before Christmas, everybody clamoring to see the most famous young left arm in baseball. He is mobbed by fans and autograph seekers everywhere we go. One time he is so swarmed he falls down and almost gets trampled. His No. 19 jersey is actually stolen from our clubhouse, a crime that I don’t believe was ever solved. Everybody is caught up in Brien Taylor Mania, even Mark Newman, the Yankees minor league boss, who, after Brien’s first start, or maybe his second, compares him to Mozart. I am not even compared to a backup singer for Menudo.

  Other than the $1,548,000 difference in our bonuses, Brien and I are separated by… everything. He is a left-handed African American, a high-school kid from eastern North Carolina. I am a right-handed Latino, a twenty-two-year-old from southern Panama. He is a prodigy. I am a project. He grew up on the shores of the Atlantic. I grew up on the shores of the Pacific. 60 Minutes wants to speak to him for a profile. 60 Minutes wouldn’t know my name even with a program. He has a brand-new Mustang with a souped-up sound system. I don’t even know how to drive.

  Still, we connect easily. He strikes me as a down-home country kid who would much rather not have any of the fuss that surrounds him. He’s fun to be with, a good teammate, somebody who wants to be one of the guys, even though he’s obviously different. I find out how different the first time I see him throw in the bullpen, marveling at his silky motion, one that you can’t believe is the force behind a ball that hits the catcher’s glove like a firecracker. He throws 97, 98 miles per hour, the easiest gas you’ve ever seen, and has a big hard curveball, too.

  I watch and I think: This is amazing, the weapons this guy has. I have never seen anybody throw a baseball like this. Wow.

  Brien is the top-rated prospect in all of baseball, and in his first pro season, straight out of Beaufort’s East Carteret High School, he proves why. He gives up 40 fewer hits than innings pitched, and strikes out 187 batters in just 161.1 innings. His earned run average is 2.57. His stuff is ahead of his command and he is still learning the craft of pitching, but what a baseline to be starting at. He moves up to the Albany-Colonie Yankees and Double-A ball the following year, and now that he’s just two rungs on the pro ladder away from the big leagues, The Future is almost here. You can imagine him on the Yankee Stadium mound, blowing away hitters the way he has his whole young life.

  Brien’s going to show us the way, I think. There is no stopping The Future now.

  And then, a week before Christmas, 1993, I hear the news. I am home in Panama with Clara. The report on the TV isn’t immediately clear to me. All I hear are sketchy details about Brien Taylor and a fight. It honestly doesn’t sound like such a big deal. Then other facts start coming in, something about defending his brother and getting involved in a brawl in a trailer park in his hometown, and hurting his shoulder.

  His left shoulder.

  Tell me this is not true, I think. Tell me this is not going to have any impact on his big league career.

  Brien winds up having surgery, and rehabs through all of 1994. The Yankees bring him back in 1995, in the Gulf Coast League, wanting to let him break in slowly, but the fluidity, the smoke, the domination that seemed to come so easily, they are gone. He has no idea where the ball is going. A year later, he is much worse, walking almost three guys an inning and putting up an earned run average that could be off a pinball machine.

  I never see Brien again.

  The whole thing is so horribly sad—to think that the course of his entire life could be altered by a fit of anger and a momentary lapse in judgment. You wonder if what happened in the trailer park had anything to do with Brien’s name and fame—if the guy would’ve come after him if he’d just been a regular person. You wonder why Brien didn’t understand in that instant that getting into a fight would not be a good idea. It just makes you realize how it can all crater so quickly, leaving a hole that is beyond repair. And for Brien, the hole just seemed to get deeper, with a conviction years later on federal cocaine-dealing charges that put him in a penitentiary.

  I obviously was not in Brien’s shoes that night, or any other night, so who am I to judge? I just try to take away what I can from every situation, to always keep learning. Life is hard. Life is humbling. I do all I can to keep it simple and to pray to the Lord for clarity and wisdom, so that His will and His Perfect Goodness will guide me and keep me safe. And if I ever start to falter, it’s not too hard to remember Brien Taylor, who effectively traded in his Yankees jersey for a prison uniform, a baseball diamond for the Federal Correctional Institution at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

  The Yankees decide that I am a starter in 1992, and I start off well in Fort Lauderdale. The elbow pain is manageable, and if I don’t compare to our top pitchers, Brien and Domingo Jean, I am a pretty fair number three starter for the Florida State League. I strike out twelve in one early-season victory and follow it with a complete-game shutout of the Fort Myers Miracle, and get congratulations from my manager, Brian Butterfield, and pitching coach, Mark Shiflett, when I am the league’s pitcher of the week in mid-May. My precision is better than ever—I walk five guys the whole season—and I am pitching to an earned run average just over two, but as the year goes on a couple of troubling trends are emerging.

  One is that my velocity plummets after I’ve thrown fifty or sixty pitches. The other is that the slider I am trying to throw seems to aggravate whatever is going on in my elbow. It gets bad enough that the Yankees decide to put me on the disabled list in late July to see if rest alleviates the problem.

  I stay optimistic, because that is what I do. I’m in my third productive year of pro baseball. There is no reason to panic. I take a break from throwing for a couple of weeks and return in early August against the Dunedin Blue Jays. The Jays have the most dangerous hitter in the league, Carlos Delgado, a twenty-year-old slugger from Puerto Rico. Carlos is on his way to a thirty–home run, one hundred–RBI season, with a .324 average, in the middle of a lineup that also includes Shawn Green, Derek Bell, and Canadian outfielder Rob Butler, who winds up hitting .358, best in the league.

  It’s a Friday night in Fort Lauderdale, and I am ready for the challenge of a seriously stacked lineup. I am pitching well, and I move into the fourth inning when the Blue Jays get a man on first. I see him taking a good-sized lead. I fire over to chase him back, but as I do I feel something funny in my elbow. It’s hard to describe, but it’s not normal.

  Definitely not normal.

  I catch the return throw and take a moment on the mound. My elbow is throbbing. I turn my sights back to the plate and deliver, and now I feel a hard pop in my elbow, as if something just gave out. Or snapped.

  Or ruptured.

  I get the ball back from the catcher and pause again on the mound. I look around the park, and at the pockets of fans here and there, maybe a few hundred people in all. They are waiting for the next pitch, and it occurs to me that not one of them—not anybody in the whole park, even in the dugout and bullpen—knows that I am not the same pitcher I was two pitches ago. How could they know? How could they possibly have any clue about what just happened inside my right elbow?

  I look the same, but I am not.

  I finish the inning and walk to the dugout, my elbow hot and pulsing with pain. I know I am not going to be walking back out there, facing Carlos Delgado or anybody else, any time soon.

  I can’
t pitch, I tell Mark Shiflett. The pain is bad.

  The trainer, Darren London, packs my elbow in ice, and I spend the rest of the game on the bench. It is a strange sensation to be out there competing with everything you’ve got one second, and to be a bystander the next. Something goes pop and, faster than you can say Tommy John, you are damaged goods. You try not to project, but you can’t lie to yourself.

  You know—absolutely know—this is not good.

  Does this mean surgery? How long will I be out? What will I need to do to get better? My head is swirling with questions, but somehow I do not feel any deep anxiety, or anything close to despair. It is the peace and grace of the Lord; it cannot be anything else. Of course I am not happy about the pain and whatever repercussions there will be. Of course I am concerned about my future. But I am not flipping out about it. When the fishing nets were frayed or broken, we fixed them. When the engine on the boat broke, we did all we could to fix it. I come at life from a mechanic’s mind-set. If you’ve got a problem, you find it and you take care of it. That’s exactly what I’m going to do with my elbow.

  The process isn’t always pleasant, but it is simple, and straightforward. You do yourself no good by worrying or projecting, letting thunderheads of gloom set up in your head.

  We’re going to get your elbow looked at and take good care of it, Darren London says.

  Okay, thanks, Darren, I say.

  I go back to my apartment and think about calling Clara but decide against it. It wouldn’t be fair. All it would do is make her feel terrible that she is not with me. After a bad night of sleep—the elbow is really inflamed and tender—I undergo a series of tests with a Yankee doctor in Miami. The MRIs apparently do not show damage to the ulnar collateral ligament. Then there are more tests, and finally they send me to see Dr. Frank Jobe, the same doctor who would operate on Brien Taylor. He is the king of all elbow-fixers, and the inventor of Tommy John surgery—a term that has become as much a part of the baseball vocabulary as grand-slam home run, or performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs).

  If you hang around pitchers for any length of time, I guarantee you will hear a conversation that goes something like this:

  You ever have Tommy John?

  Yeah, two years ago.

  How did it go?

  Pretty good. Took a while, but eventually I threw even better.

  How about you?

  Yeah, mine was three years ago.

  How did it go?

  Same thing. It was a rough road, but I’m all the way back.

  Tommy John surgery is a reconstruction of the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow. Elbows don’t like throwing baseballs ninety-plus miles per hour, thousands upon thousands of times, and when the ligament goes, it has to be rebuilt with a ligament from your forearm.

  In Los Angeles, Dr. Jobe provides the diagnosis: I have a lot of wear, and I have stuff floating around in my elbow. I am going to require surgery, but I do not need a total reconstruction, just a thorough cleanup. It includes the removal of my funny bone, but at least it doesn’t put me in the Tommy John Club. I take in Dr. Jobe’s words as I sit in his office and don’t say anything at first. I am too busy talking to myself:

  This injury is not going to define me. It is not going to stop me. I will have the surgery I need and do whatever I have to do to get back.

  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 (though it is the ten-year anniversary of Rickey Henderson breaking the single-season stolen-base record). It’s just the day I get my elbow cleaned up—and (I hope) a fresh, pain-free start to my pitching career.

  Dr. Jobe does a great job on my elbow, and he also does a great job predicting the future.

  This is going to be an up-and-down process, he says. One day you may feel very good, and the next day you won’t. That is normal. It’s part of the process. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t progress every day. It takes time for the elbow to fully heal. Just be patient and keep doing your work, and it will be fine.

  I am out until the spring of 1993, have a short stay back in the Gulf Coast League, and then join the rotation in Greensboro. I have rust to scrape off and don’t have the command I had before, and they naturally have me on a low pitch count, but in ten starts I have an ERA of just over two, and that’s nothing to be discouraged about. It is all coming together, in the halting way Dr. Jobe told me it would.

  It’s all good for me in Greensboro, and there’s an added bonus, too—because I make a new friend. He’s our shortstop, maybe the only guy on the club who is skinnier than me. He was the Yankees’ top draft pick the year after they chose Brien Taylor. His name is Derek Jeter, of Kalamazoo, Michigan. I had met him before, in minor league camp, but this is the first time I get to play with him, and it is some show, because the kid is a year out of high school and all limbs, and you are never sure what he will do. I see him inside-out a ball to right-center field and wind up with a triple. I see him rip doubles down the line and hit in the clutch, and play shortstop like a colt in cleats, chasing down grounders and pop flies and making jump throws from the hole.

  Of course, I also see him throw the ball halfway to Winston-Salem, over and over, as if he’s still trying to get used to being in a six-foot-three body. But I don’t worry about the errors at all. Derek makes fifty-six of them that year in Greensboro, and years later, there are stories about how the Yankees were concerned enough that they considered moving him to center field. If anybody had asked me what I thought that year, I would’ve been happy to offer my opinion:

  Don’t even think about moving Derek Jeter. He is going to be fine. He’s getting better every day. He wants to be great. You can see it in how hard he works, how passionately he plays. He’s quick and has pop in his bat and wants to learn and will do anything he has to do to win.

  The only thing you need to do with Derek Jeter is leave him alone.

  A month into the off-season, Clara and I are preparing to rejoice in the birth of our first child. It has not been an easy journey by any means. Midway through the year, Clara flew up from Panama to visit me. She was almost five months pregnant. The doctor warned her about staying away from chicken pox because of the impact it could have on the baby. It turned out her flight had almost as many kids with chicken pox as it had motion-discomfort bags.

  Clara, predictably, came down with chicken pox shortly after. When she had her next ultrasound, the news was about as bad as it could get. The doctor told us our baby already had a pool of fluid in the back of his head and would most likely be born with a large growth in the area that could ultimately be fatal. He said that because Clara was already exposed to the disease there was nothing we could do.

  We were devastated. We prayed constantly about it. Clara connected with a group of Christian Latina women and joined them on a retreat, where there were prayers, and more prayers, for our unborn baby.

  Clara rested and took good care of herself. We stayed as positive as we could.

  Maybe the doctor is wrong. Maybe the baby will be fine, I told her. You can’t lose hope.

  The next time she visited the doctor, Clara was close to seven months pregnant. The ultrasound showed that the fluid had dissipated. The baby looked healthy.

  I’m thrilled for you, but I have to say, I have no idea how this happened, the doctor said. I don’t think I have ever seen a case like this in all my years of practice.

  On October 4, 1993, in Panama City, we welcomed Mariano Rivera Jr. into the world. Both mother and child came through it beautifully, and so did the father, who spent most of that day, and many days that followed, thanking the Lord.

  6

  The Call

  THE BUS TRIP FROM Rochester, New York, to Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is seven hours. It seems even longer when you make the trip after getting swept four straight. We pull into Pawtucket late at night, a tired bunch of Columbus Clippers piling into a roadside Comfort Inn. It’s the middle of May
1995, and after spending 1994 in Single-A, Double-A, and Triple-A, I am off to a strong start with the Clippers, striking out eleven guys in five and two-thirds innings in my previous start.

  We finally win a game to start the series against the PawSox. Tim Rumer gets the victory, and Derek Jeter, hitting .363, knocks a double to put us ahead to stay. Rain postpones the second game of the series. I don’t want to spend the whole day in my $45-per-night hotel, so I do what minor leaguers usually do when they are on the road: check out the local sights at the mall. The sights aren’t really local at all, since most malls look identical, a Gap here, a Foot Locker there, a food court in the middle. In Rhode Island, I just notice that everybody is wearing Boston Red Sox gear.

  Late in the afternoon, I’m back in the room when the phone rings.

  It is the Clippers’ manager, Bill Evers.

  Mariano?

  Yes. Hi, Bill. What’s up?

  I have some good news and bad news for you. What do you want first?

  The bad news, I guess, I reply.

  Okay. The bad news is that you are no longer a pitcher for the Columbus Clippers.

  What’s the good news?

  The good news is that you are now a pitcher for the New York Yankees.

  Excuse me?

  You better pack. You are going to New York.

  I hear his words the first time. They are not sinking in.

  Are you serious? I say.

  I couldn’t be more serious, Evers says. The Yankees want you to get down there as soon as you can. You need to reach out to the traveling secretary to make the arrangements.