It was May 9, 2012—springtime in the Bronx—when Mariano Rivera hobbled up onto a podium in a room deep in the penetralia of Yankee Stadium, supported by crutches, looking melancholy and broken, half-smiling, half-grimacing, to face the press.
He was talking publicly for the first time since his career almost came to a grisly halt when the living Yankee legend tore the ACL and meniscus in his right knee chasing a fly ball during batting practice six days prior. The then-42-year-old had barely been heard or seen since his injury, banished, first to a New York City hospital to treat a blood clot discovered after his injury, then to his home in swanky Purchase, N.Y. There, the night before the press conference, Rivera, sweating and screaming at his television, watched young David Robertson—his understudy, the poor soul tasked with following up the greatest final act of all time—walk the bases loaded in the ninth with a two-run lead, before worming his way off the mound with the save.
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Rivera commanded tremendous authority over that room full of reporters, just like he does over an entire stadium every time he takes the ball in the ninth inning. New York fans and press alike have a unique, heartfelt fondness for No. 42, and as he emotionally told the assembled media how agonizing the injury had been and how it tested his faith and entire perspective on his life, he played that like a violin.
“I wasn’t looking for this at all and it happened. It happened when I was doing something I love,” Rivera said, almost incredulously. “It’s all I know how to do. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last 22 years. It’s hard to put it down and just walk away.”
But, really, walking away is exactly what Rivera needs to do; not for himself, but for this storied franchise.
Rivera has been a constant in New York since 1995 and has pitched so well into middle age—he had 33 saves and a 1.80 ERA at 40 years old, then 44 and 1.91 at 41—it defies belief. He throws the same pitch more than 80 percent of the time, stubbornly jamming his 90-mph cutter in on the hands of lefties or slicing it away from righties, willing the ball to move in those crucial final milliseconds when the batter thinks he knows where it will end up. He pitches with an intense, quiet focus and emotional detachment that could be misconstrued as carelessness if he wasn’t so perfect.
At this point, he’s simply lengthening his already vast leads in every statistical category, from the bafflingly simple (he’s played in more games than any other AL pitcher, and is the all-time leader in saves and finished games) to the incredibly nuanced (he has the lowest career HR/9 rate in history; his best-ever 206 ERA+, a metric that accounts for ball park tendencies and league difficulty, is 70 points higher than the next pitcher; his win probability added of just over 54 is astronomical—no other reliever has more than 27).
Oh, and then there’s the playoffs. He’s appeared in 96 post-season games, pitching 141 innings and surrendering just 11 earned runs. That’s a 0.70 ERA, a mark that no one who pitches more than 100 playoff innings will ever touch. He has 42 post-season saves. Brad Lidge is next with 18. Only five guys have more than 10. Any writer who leaves Rivera off their Hall of Fame ballot the first year he’s eligible should be arrested.
Even before his injury, Rivera was not-so-softly hinting that he was preparing to leave baseball. He’s an old man and, frankly, has little left to prove. Other interests—restaurant ownership, philanthropy and his church—were tugging him away.
No one in New York ever talked much about Rivera’s inevitable departure because no one in New York wanted him to realize he could stop doing this. But when Rivera’s knee burst at its seams, so too did the pinstripe dream that the Panamanian could pitch forever. And, it appeared, Rivera’s personal design to walk away on his own terms. Everyone had to face some harsh realities. The sooner New York—the team, the fans, everyone—does that, the easier this is going to be.
The cold truth that Yankee fans, and perhaps many in Yankees management, are wary to face is that Rivera’s physical deterioration and public musing on retirement are unavoidable signifiers of a sea change in the team’s modern history. Gone are the free-spending days of the past 20 years when the Yankees were run like an empire, flashed excessive opulence, pursued every top free agent and built a $1.5 billion coliseum, which opened in 2009.
New MLB rules strictly governing spending have encouraged Yankees brass to rig the ship for some tight manoeuvring, with a goal of lowering payroll below the league luxury tax threshold by 2014, which will be $189 million. So, it’s not exactly an impoverished enterprise, but this is a team that hasn’t spent less than $200 million on payroll since 2007. For the first time in a long time, austerity is in vogue in the Bronx.
Derek Jeter was the first to feel the plates shifting below in 2010, when his oft-contentious contract negotiations were dragged through very public mud—GM Brian Cashman famously challenged him to test the free-agent market to realize his true value. Jeter settled, begrudgingly, for a pay cut of nearly $10 million. The club has worked hard this off-season to find a way out from under the five years and $114 million still owed to the rapidly aging, forever-injured Alex Rodriguez.
Rivera himself took a cut from $15 million in 2012 to $10 million for the 2013 season; not the contract most 43-year-olds coming off a potentially career-ending injury could dream of signing, but also not as much as you might expect to pay the greatest closer of all time who has done more for the organization than arguably anyone else in recent history.
Andy Pettitte, a 40-year-old who hasn’t pitched a full season since 2009, is currently the team’s No. 2 starter, not because anyone is intimidated by his declining fastball, but because he’s relatively cheap and willing to sign a one-year deal. Same goes for Kevin Youkilis, a 34-year-old third baseman who hit .235 in 2012 while matching his career-high in errors from the season prior. Not long ago, frugal steps like these were unheard of in New York. Now they’re the new normal.
The worry is that as these seismic plates shift along Yankee fault lines, catastrophe is imminent; that not only will the payroll get leaner, but the win total will as well. Remember, this is a team that has made the playoffs 17 of the past 18 years. They haven’t won fewer than 89 games in a season since 2000. The problem with perpetual contenders is expectations rise as quickly as the banners. The more success you experience, the less tolerant the fan base is of failure.
This conundrum is just a few bad injuries or slumps from materializing in New York this year, as the team faces a more competitive AL East than ever, which is saying something in the best division in baseball. The Blue Jays are going for broke; the Rays have won 90 games in four of the past five seasons; the Orioles are young and surprisingly plucky; and the Red Sox can’t possibly be as miserable as they were last season.
The Yankees, meanwhile, have a decaying roster of once-great players. Jeter, Rodriguez, Youkilis, Ichiro Suzuki, Mark Teixeira and Travis Hafner—two-thirds of the starting lineup—are all well past their primes. Meanwhile, Robinson Cano and Curtis Granderson (who will start the season on the DL with a broken forearm), the Yankees’ most productive hitters in 2012, are both pending free agents who will not be cheap to re-sign. Cano especially will warrant an exorbitant salary as maybe the best second baseman in baseball.
With $78.625 million already tied up in next year’s payroll on just four players—Rodriguez, Teixeira, Suzuki and C.C. Sabathia—giving Cano the $25 million–plus he’ll command could handcuff Cashman’s ability to fill out the roster with other talented players. Letting Cano leave for another club would not only be a great loss of skill but a very public embarrassment for a franchise that once stopped at nothing, financial or otherwise, to acquire and retain top players. You can almost feel the foundation of Yankee Stadium crumbling.
Rivera is right in the middle of it, whether he likes it or not. Even if he can seamlessly return to elite form this season—far from a guarantee with the severity of his injury—halfway through what many believe will be his final year, the narrative will shift from comeback story to farewell tour. And he will become a daily reminder of one or both of the following: How bad the 2013 season is and how atrocious 2014 might be.
This story originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine’s MLB Preview issue:
