Kings of New York exit the stage they once graced
A period of incredible change was just around the corner. Not just for baseball in the Bronx but for the city’s wildly diverse society at large.
Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s grip was tightening, the streets of the East Village and SoHo were rapidly moving beyond the reach of its residents and no one fully understood that two young baseball demigods in the making were about to give the city a surge of energy just before everything came tumbling down.
Those future Kings of New York, Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter, finally made their breakthrough in baseball’s big league that spring. They were young but were as confident as any player in whom faith had been placed by the Yankees, long starved of success but still the biggest name in the sport.
And although the duo — one a pitcher, the other a shortstop — were naturally driven by arrogance and hope, they would never have allowed themselves to believe that their futures were tied up in each other and contained five World Series each with the requisite bona fide legendary status that comes with being a New York Hall-of-Famer.
It would have been even harder to believe in any of those prospects when just the following month, Rivera and Jeter were being relegated to the team’s minor league affiliate in Columbus, Ohio, everything apparently in tatters. Jeter’s bags were taken off a Yankees charter flight which was taking the elite players to their next series in Detroit while family members of his waited in the Motor City to greet their athlete cousin.
Instead, the two struggling young pros shared a meal at a New Jersey diner, unable to hold the tears back and unaware of what life now held in store.
On top of everything else, Rivera was homesick for Panama while trying to make his way in one of the cruellest roles in any sport. Before he’d ever thrown a major league strike, he’d already been forced to go under the knife, a portent of doom for anyone whose entire career depends so completely on the fragile ligaments which allow such inhuman contortions of the elbow.
Jeter was soon on the right track, his hitting talent bobbling to the surface like so many champagne corks he was destined to pop. Rivera had a bit of work to do. He had to redefine his career on the pitching mound by concentrating on closing games as a relief or substitute pitcher and he also had to redirect himself towards a whole new grip of the ball, revolutionising his own particular artistry and forging out a career defined by simplicity and dependability.
Soon enough, whenever the Yankees would have to hold onto a slender lead in the last inning, Mo would be sent out to shut everything down, with the same calm approach and robotic wind-up as he prepared to deliver his trademark unhittable pitch.
This week is most likely Rivera’s last, having encountered a thousand different batters — most of them humbled by their wild air swings.
His official farewell party was Sunday afternoon at Yankee Stadium, a ceremony that preceded yet another loss that all but ended his team’s post-season hopes.
Tonight and tomorrow night, they’ll face the Tampa Bay Rays for their last home games of the season and then they’ll set off on a thoroughly underwhelming trip to Houston to play the Astros, a team so bad that a recent game received an official TV viewership rating of 0.0 — not a single person in the sample was watching the lowly home team lose again.
But Rivera’s career has been storybook enough to excuse the fact there won’t be a dramatic last stand. It’s long been accepted the Yankees are as far away as they can be from that team of the 1990s.
And when you consider the 44-year-old’s knee blew up last year at Kansas during a routine warm-up, the fact he is able to go out on his own terms at all is a miracle which the famously God-fearing man will have already attested to higher powers.
The Yankees are done for a while now and it’s that rare specimen of a Yankee, the respectable and popular Mo, the last to wear Jackie Robinson’s number 42, who will bring one of the last remnants of a golden era into retirement with him.
E-mail: johnwriordan@gmail.com
