Yankees relief pitcher Mariano Rivera is pitching to former Red Sox backup catcher Doug Mirabelli in top of the 11th. The count is 1-2. No one is on base. The stadium's high-pressure sodium arc lamps illuminate the candy-striped infield grass that groundskeepers sprinkle with iron to keep green. The crowd is moving uniformly in detail. Rivera toes the rubber and adjusts his hat's brim as he confirms Jorge Posada's sign, his black Rawlings glove folded against his chest, his face fixed in the neutral expression of a passport photo. The at-capacity crowd rises to its feet. Mirabelli spits into his hands. It's Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series, mid-October. A deep sigh by Rivera now, a kick and the crack of leather ringing like a thousand detonating Cherry Bombs, followed by 100-decibel applause. Rivera points steeple-fingered toward the sky. He smiles. It's his second strikeout of the inning and his third scoreless inning of the night.
This is perhaps my favorite Mariano Rivera moment, but it's really just one example, as you watch the veteran Panamanian throw, of the times when your pulse quickens and legs tense and jaw drops unhinged. At age 41, Rivera is a sure-fire first-ballot Hall-of-Famer, easily the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history he ranks first in MLB history in games finished, games saved and postseason Earned Run Average. Nobody on this planet has been as consistently good at their job as Rivera has been over the past 17 years.
I've tried very hard to imagine what it must be like to best in the world at something, to have your name known, to wave along Broadway at admiring fans showering you with tickertape, to be a national hero. It's pretty tough just to think about it. To actually do it requires absolutely extraordinary perseverance and will and talent and luck and practice and dedication and experiencing commitment as a loss of other realities. It's even more amazing, in Rivera's case, when you think about all the mechanical factors that go into throwing a baseball location, velocity, movement and when you realize each of these factors is determined by other factors. For example, a pitch's height above the plate is the result of the pitcher's release point combined with some function of the ball's spin and speed in three-dimensional space, where the release point is itself the result of complex machinations.
We live in a society that tends to conflate professional success with personal success, and thus we're simultaneously repulsed by and obsessed with truly exceptional professional achievement. There's something both beautiful and a repugnant about people like Rivera. Their fame is, in a perverse way, sort of like godliness, the closest we can come to immortality. We covet it, of course, but most of us aren't willing to sacrifice nearly enough for it. This dilemma between desire and ability and motivation can be a profound but subtle source of unhappiness in our lives. After all, most of us at Dartmouth are competitive, ambitious and under lots of pressure to be this country's next generation of great thinkers, or to get into a highly-ranked graduate school or to make spectacular amounts of money. We may acknowledge that we're not going to be famous, but I would imagine very few of us, if any, are not hoping to be leaders in our respective fields.
What I find most impressive about Rivera then, more than his records or uncanny talent, is his remarkable psychic calm, which looks an awful lot like indifference but which manifests itself on-field as stoicism. Rivera's razor-sharp attention, self-awareness and supreme grace under pressure allow him to access bits of his inner self most of us usually aren't even sure we possess since we're only rarely tested so directly in these capacities (some exceptions being significant illnesses, natural disasters, freak accidents and war). Rivera transcends his team and his sport and speaks to something raw and large and ineffable inherent in us as human beings. In this sense he's something like an artist or clergyman.
Of course most of us, probably all of us, will never be able to do anything as well as Rivera throws a baseball. That's sad, but it's also really liberating, since it means we can accept our flaws without the burden of unalloyed greatness. I'm increasingly happy just to be here and appreciate it all such as a cutter that skips toward the plate as if remote-controlled even if life isn't always as exciting as Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS.
