At Home Plate - Anything Goes: Oh, Mo

At Home Plate

Written by Adam Adkins (Contact & Archive) on May 09, 2009

I’ll only spend a moment on the Manny Ramirez suspension, because as my readers well know, I detest the entire hoopla around steroids and all of that jazz. This is mostly media created, and it took ESPN, SI, Fox and whomever else taking a collective dump in their drawers to get MLB to throw the covers off the squirming scandal beneath. However, I love baseball, and if I am going to talk baseball, I want to talk baseball, not steroids. So, it hurts the Dodgers, but luckily the other NL West teams aren’t likely to win even the College World Series, so they’ll be fine. So it’s 94 wins instead of 96.

Mariano Rivera is probably the best one-pitch-pitcher ever.

Photo by Keith Allison, used under creative commons license.

We all know the name Mariano Rivera. But do we really know him? Let’s go through what most people know of him.

•    He pitches for the Yankees
•    He is a closer from the past dynasty
•    He wears #42, the only player in the league still doing so
•    He throws one pitch, and one pitch only

The first three are true. The last one is not. Mariano Rivera does throw a cutter, and that is one pitch, but he makes it do so many things, it is unreal. I watched him Wednesday night against the Rays, and in one at-bat, he threw a standard left-to-right lefty-killing cutter, a standard two-seamer that broke right-to-left and a sinker that broke, say, down four and to the left two, if that makes sense.

But here is the kicker: They are all cutters, just different varieties. It is damn well unreasonable to think that the most dominant reliever of all time has been throwing one pitch, at one velocity, with one specific movement since 1996. Come, on.

He’s lost velocity over the years—in 1996 and ’97, he was basically just a gas thrower— but Rivera survived. When he developed the cutter, which is dominant on left-handers that most switch-hitters face Rivera from the right side, he went from really good to legendary.

But the key to Rivera’s success is not the movement. It’s not the velocity, because at age 39 Rivera isn’t hitting 93 anymore. It’s command, and no one in baseball has as tight a command on his repertoire as the Sandman. He hardly ever walks anyone—six batters in 70 innings last year—and that is his strength. Given the movement, which is usually half of the plate, plus his impeccable control, it is no surprise that Rivera is nearly untouchable.

But how long can this last? He’s done as good as job as humanly possible of maintaining production while losing skill, albeit little skill. But what if he is throwing 85 next year? I do think he could at least survive there, because of the command and movement. I think right now Rivera is making his bones by keeping hitters off balance, and some of that is his velocity, sure, but I’d say much more of it is that the hitter realizes that Rivera can put any pitch he wants where ever he desires.

I’d say Rivera is likely to close out his contract with the Yankees in a highly productive fashion, but when it goes for Mo, I have to think it won’t be pretty. But he appears to be a smart guy—this contract might be his last. I don’t think he’d enjoy being blasted into retirement. The Hammer of God, as Yankees radio voice John Sterling calls him, would do just fine leaving the game and in five years walking into Cooperstown.

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