(PHOTO: Robert Deutsch/USA TODAY Sports)
NEW YORK — Mariano Rivera laughed at me after I fouled off a pitch near my head.
“Don’t touch that one,” said the greatest closer in baseball history, promising a better pitch to follow.
“Shut up, Mariano Rivera,” I thought. “I’m here to hack. You don’t walk your way off Long Island.”
Whoa, wait a minute: What has happened here? How is it that I’ve come to take batting practice off a living legend? Can this possibly be real? And… man, what would Chris say?
Rivera threw BP to a small group of writers in a batting cage near the visitor’s clubhouse in Yankee Stadium on Wednesday. He appeared on behalf of New Era and its Diamond Era collection, and sung the caps’ sweat-wicking praises before settling in behind the screen to sling some signature cutters — though thankfully at only about 75-percent their typical speed.
Even at that rate, the balls slice away from righty hitters. They look like they flout the laws of physics, even if, in truth, they only reiterate them.
And so my time in the cage against Mariano Rivera — the Mariano Rivera — was, for that reason among plenty others, the type of thing I wish I could discuss with my late older brother, an M.I.T.-trained engineer and the smartest person I have ever known.
Chris would understand exactly how the cutter works, I’m certain, and be patient enough to explain it to a liberal-arts major like me. And with enough notice, he probably would’ve altered a pitching machine to simulate Rivera’s movement to help me prep for the casual eight-pitch promotional batting-practice session. That’s the type of dude he was: Brilliant, generous, and ridiculously competitive.
He loved the Mets and Red Sox, so he hated the Yankees. He sent me email tirades calling the club “fascist,” and insisting it was un-American to root for them. I still have them all in a dormant account I can’t bring myself to cancel.
But Rivera was no typical Yankee. And he boasted a unique set of skills that seemed perfectly designed to impress my brother. In one of the last emails Chris ever sent me, he wrote: “Rivera should be a Hall of Famer even if he never throws another pitch. He’s incredible.”
It’s from November, 2001.
Rivera, of course, threw many, many more pitches. He finished his career as the all-time Major League leader in saves, games finished, and ERA+. And unlike practically every pitcher before him, he managed to maintain his dominance into his early 40s, retiring after an incredible 2013 campaign despite no indication that he lost his ability to lock down the late innings.
My brother never got to see any of that. He died less than a year after he praised Rivera in that email, after cancer that started as a mole on his shoulder spread to his brain. (Please wear sunscreen.)
Nor did he live to see his kid brother stumble his way into this awesome occupation. And so the extraordinary baseball experiences this career affords me always come with brief waves of weird emptiness, because I am not able to share them with the person who taught me to love the game.
Here’s a true thing someone told me at his wake: You never fully lose the urge to call your lost loved ones. No matter how thoroughly you grasp the fact that they’re gone, or how frequently you think about their departure, you never shake the fleeting instinct to dial them up when, say, Darryl Strawberry buys you a sandwich, or you walk the Fenway Park warning track chatting about pitching with Pedro Martinez, or you take batting practice off Mariano Rivera.
Chris likely loved how Rivera showed that one truly dominant offering could make for a successful career as a big-league closer. But Rivera’s transcendent excellence, and my brother’s appreciation for it, came from more than the pitcher’s mastery of motion.
The psychological aspects of baseball may be impossible to quantify, but in some cases, they’re equally difficult to ignore. Plenty of relievers blaze into the Majors and post numbers to match Rivera’s for a couple seasons, but only one became the best of all time in his role.
All ballplayers, no matter how good, run into their share of misfortune. If a pitcher throws strikes, some will be hit, and some will find holes in the defense. Toward the end of Rivera’s career, every time he struggled in a couple of outings, there came questions about his ability to endure. But every time, he did.
“You have to be able to bounce back when you need to bounce back,” he told me last year. “I think those tools are more important than your pitches. Because you’re going to fail. Sooner or later, you’re going to fail.”
Obviously baseball lacks the gravity of real life, but it sometimes serves as a perfect microcosm. And in Rivera’s remarkable resolve after losses on the field, there exists real lessons on how to face losses off of it — no matter how disparate the magnitude. The same fire that endeared the resilient closer to my ridiculously competitive brother offers me guidance in how to handle his absence.
“You can’t change the past, and it has passed already,” Rivera told me. “Know tomorrow brings a new opportunity — a new game — and with that there are new challenges. So you have to get ready for that.”
That’s it, I think. Every single one of us, at some point or another, will suffer our share of horrible hardships. And we can dwell on them, and let devastating reality break us forever, or we can shoulder it all as best we can and keep swinging away. You don’t walk your way off any island.
What happens happens, and the past has passed. I took batting practice off Mariano Rivera. Got a few good rips in, too. How cool is that?
