How Great is the Great Mariano Rivera

There will be a day when "Enter Sandman" does not play at Yankee Stadium. There will be a day when we have to find out who the next closer in the Bronx will be. There will be a day when Mariano Rivera will hang out the cleats and become an evangelical minister (like he promised in 2000 after he played four more seasons) or will just retire to spend time with his family. That time, however, is not now.

And if Mariano Rivera wasn't just half-kidding by his statement that he wants to play for five more years, it may not be anytime soon. Mariano Rivera is like Richard Alpert on LOST: the quiet leader who is always calm and collected and never ages. I agree with MLBTradeRumors which writes "It's difficult to justify $15MM a year for a reliever, but if anyone's worth it, it's Rivera."

*Side Note: I felt the advertisement on the right, found at Amanda's amandarykoff's posterous blog, was appropriate here. As Yankees fans we not only have the Yankees at all those times, we have Mo, who truly brings us "relief" in ever sense of the word.

I mean who would you want out there more at the end of a playoff game than Mariano Rivera? According to Baseball-Reference, Mariano Rivera has gotten the last out of 54 postseason games--no one else has more than 20. For those who hate "postseason stats" since the postseason is so expanded now, how about this (from B-R): Mariano Rivera has gotten the final out of 14 World Series games, only one pitcher (Allie Reynolds at 8) has even closed out more than half that amount. And for the first World Series he played in (1996), he wasn't even the closer!

How about some other stats? Last two years in the regular season* and career totals:

*Side Note: does anyone realize the type of years that Rivera has had the past two seasons? He's had some great years, but the past two may have been his two best. Check out the K/9 and SO/BB and it's amazing what this guy is able to do considering he's 40 years old. I'm telling you, the dude's Richard Alpert



The parts in bold in the yearly stats mean that Rivera was top in that category that year, the parts in italics of the career totals means that Rivera is first among active players, and the asterisks around his ERA+ for his career mean that he is the top pitcher ever in that category.

Let's check out his postseason stats for his career and this past season:



Those are ridiculous numbers. More ridiculous, Rivera didn't allow a run in the World Series this season, which was the 19th time in 29 postseason series he had accomplished that feat. And he was pitching with a ribcage injury!

They are even more ridiculous when you put them in the context that these are the best teams that he's pitching against and still getting those results. Rob Neyer posts a prorated 162-game season for Rivera's postseason stats: 9-1, 0.74 ERA, 102 games, 154 innings, and 45 saves. Although Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams and others have contributed to the Yankees success over the past 15 years, Neyer says:

I do suspect that Rivera has been the Yankees' most valuable postseason player, though, because you have to figure he's been roughly twice as valuable in the postseason as in the regular season. 

Neyer then takes it a step further and issues a challenge:

Rivera's been doing it for a long time and nearly all of his innings have come in high-leverage situations. Purely in terms of increasing his teams' chances of winning, he must be the most valuable pitcher in postseason history, and that might be true even if we adjust for the expanded postseason format. I'm still waiting for that analysis, though ...

Challenge set, others went about trying to quantify Rivera's worth. Rebecca at The Purist Bleeds Pinstripes has a four part look into the numbers starting here with a look at WAR and PREWAR and ends here with this conclusion:

This means, adjusted to a regular-season scale, the Yankees have won two of their last five World Series, potentially for no other reason than that Mariano Rivera, and not another closer, was on the mound in the ninth inning.

Now I don't know if I can agree with Rebecca's conclusion, necessarily. First of all I lost the analysis a couple of times only to come back at the end and really wonder whether we have the statistical tools to truly put Rivera's accomplishments in the correct context. I think that while statistics have come a long way in measuring position players and maybe even starting pitchers, I think that relievers--especially postseason relievers who usually max out at about 6 innings a series--still need to have a better base to measure their success compared to other players. I also leave the possiblity that it could be that Mariano Rivera is really ridiculously better than everyone else and that the stats don't lie. Greg over at Pending Pinstripes seems to have problems with the conclusion as well, but has more relevant reasons and statistical backup than "my feelings" that I just spouted.

So, in the end, I think we can all agree that Mariano Rivera is great. Like really great. Elegant, cool, intergalactically blessed. He's the best closer of all-time, the best postseason reliever of all-time, probably the best postseason pitcher of all time (or, as Joel Sherman puts better: "Rivera has been the biggest difference maker in the history of the postseason"), and as Jon Heyman writes, "He might be the most valuable player of his generation." I can't disagree with that. We are witnessing a unique player that we will probably only truly realize his greatness when he is gone.