CONTRIBUTING WRITER

You may not be a baseball fan. You may not even be a sports fan, but you should still take note when Mariano Rivera exits stage left this fall after a 19-year career as the greatest closer in baseball history. He stands for all that is right in sports. Anyone who participates in any team-oriented activity should model themselves after him.

Sure, his statistical feats are probably the reason he is so well-liked by baseball fans young and old, but this is a man whose success story is intriguing because of where he started and how he rose up from a poor childhood to become the person he is today.

He played baseball with milk cartons for gloves and tree branches for bats while growing up in a small fishing village in Panama. That is a very difficult childhood to imagine, and it is where Rivera gets his humble nature. He knows where he came from, and there is no doubt he takes that with him wherever he goes.

Mo is the definition of what it means to be a team player. First of all, he respects the game. In a day and age when just about every player in baseball can be connected to performance enhancing drugs, no one will ever utter his name in the same sentence as the word “steroids.”

He is the ultimate teammate. When news broke over the summer about Alex Rodriguez and the eventual ban from baseball he would be facing for use of performance enhancing drugs, the media wondered how other Yankee players would react.

When asked for his thoughts on the scandal, Mo was all class. He gave full support to his teammate while at the same time accepting the fact that the whole story has not been told yet and said “we need to see what happens.”

Mariano, and the way he carries himself, do not resemble the personality of some star we put on a mantle. He embodies a real, down-to-earth human being. He is not a larger than life figure. In fact, he is more than approachable. Covering the Yankees for WFUV, I got used to being around Mo after games, and he was always surprised when reporters wanted to talk to him after a game. It was never about him.

Nolan Silbernagel, FCRH ‘14, my colleague on the Yankees beat for WFUV, echoes those same sentiments.

“He never looked down on anyone despite everything he had done,” Silbernagel said. “Whenever people would ask him about his milestones, he would just say that the bottom line is it means we won the game. That’s all he cared about.”

Rivera’s attitude about winning, and even losing, is admirable. An example of this came earlier in the season, when he blew three straight saves.

Fans cringed as they watched. If any other pitcher was on the mound, it is safe to say he would not have been given much of a chance with fans after that. However, this is a man who knows how to handle failure. For Mo, it is simple: get back out there the next day and execute.

This is the message that so many players in baseball, whether pitchers or position players, live by, including Jonathon Broxton, the former closer for the Los Angeles Dodgers who spoke with Rivera in 2010.

One year prior, in game four of the 2009 National League Championship Series, Broxton blew a save against the Philadelphia Phillies. A crucial point in the game came when Broxton walked Matt Stairs on four pitches to set up a Philadelphia walkoff win.

The backstory here is that Broxton had faced Stairs a year earlier in 2008, and Stairs hit a home run.

Mo did his homework and met Broxton at Dodger Stadium in LA. The two immediately began talking about the at-bat against Stairs. Rivera asked the Dodger closer why he walked Stairs. Broxton shrugged with no answer. Rivera then gave him the answer, which was that Broxton had the 2008 at-bat in the back of his mind and didn’t want to make another mistake.

The great Rivera, in a father-son moment, then said to Broxton, “One thing you have to do as a closer is if a guy beats you the day before, he has to be the guy you want to face the next day. It’s OK, you got me, but let’s go again.”

Most would agree this strategy is one that has worked for the past 19 seasons.

Mariano Rivera is a reminder of what it means to be a genuine team player, as well as a reminder that the all-around good guy in sports never gets old.