Fuck Everyone Who Is Complaining That Mariano Rivera Was The First Unanimous Baseball Hall of Famer
Ever since Mariano Rivera was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame unanimously yesterday, people have had their panties in a bunch. KFC is one of them, but he’ll take the contrarian side to anything pro-Yankees related until he dies. It’s all white noise. White Sox Dave, however, seems to be up in arms about the decision and wrote a whole blog about it crying his eyes out. He’s just jealous that Bobby Jenks never amassed to anything close to Mo and was out of the league just seven years into his career. Or maybe that Mo had an ERA of 1.26 against the White Sox in 86 career innings holding them to a .174 batting average. In case you need a quick refresher, here’s why Mo is the first unanimous hall of famer.
13x All-Star
5x World Champion
1999 World Series MVP
2.21 career ERA
1,173 Career Strikeouts
652 Career Saves (most all-time)
0.70 Career Postseason ERA
Allowed fewer runs in his postseason career than men who have walked on the moon
Keep in mind he did this all during the steroid era with one pitch.
Are there people in the Baseball Hall of Fame who should have been voted in unanimously before Mo? No question. Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, Pedro, Ken Griffey Jr. there’s a whole list. Old baseball writers had this incorrect mentality that because those guys in the past weren’t voted in with 100% vote that no one should based on principle. Those people are moronic assholes. Thankfully, everyone banded together yesterday and went with logic over principle. Mo is a sure-fire hall of famer and not voting for him would have been doing an injustice to the sport.
Now let’s get to White Sox Dave’s idiotic reasoning
He was a reliever
I’m going to guess he didn’t have any complementary pitches in his arsenal to his cutter, which was why he didn’t succeed as a starter. But fortunately for relief pitchers, you really only need two pitches, so long as both are at least considered plus pitches, or in Mo’s case one double plus pitch, his aforementioned cutter. But if he were to have been a starter with just one pitch, his K rate would have dropped, his WHIP spiked, and we wouldn’t even be talking about him being a HOF’er, let alone a unanimous selection.
Dave starts out hot talking about something he’s uninformed on. I guess his “sources” didn’t tip him off on that #SCOOPCITY. Rivera didn’t have a cutter as a starting pitcher. He didn’t even have one when he first went to the bullpen. In Rivera’s introduction to baseball stardom, Game 6 of the ’96 World Series, Rivera didn’t have a cutter. He was just Mo.
He didn’t develop one until after that year, when he became the closer of the team following John Wetteland’s departure. Rivera was not dominant to start as the closer, he was actually struggling. He blew three of his first six saves. One day when he was having a catch with Ramiro Mendoza, his throwing partner, and noticed the ball start to tall out of nowhere. He had no control of it. It didn’t matter how he gripped the ball, it was moving like crazy with a late action that you normally see with a slider. He spent a month trying to eliminate the pitch, but it never went away. By late June of that year he had mastered the pitch and the rest is history. He’s a man of faith and to this day credits God for this pitch. I’m usually one to laugh at the notion of God, but Rivera’s cutter is my one saving grace for the big guy upstairs being real.
I don’t have proof of this but I’d guess if Chris Sale, Clemens, Pedro or a lot of other pitchers were to be the closer of Mariano Rivera’s Yankees’ teams… they would have been every bit as good as he was.
Wrong. They may have been good closers, but they wouldn’t have been as great as Mo. Especially if they were limited to one pitch. Dave you should know that as a closer you need a certain killer mentality. Sale, Clemens, Pedro are all bulldogs no doubt, but there is a certain mindset to being a full-time closer. The calmness Mo brought out to the mound was terrifying. Nothing could rattle him. You knew what was coming. The whole world knew, and you couldn’t do a damn thing about it. The notion that any good starting pitcher could just become a closer like that overnight is fucking nonsense. Up until he retired, Mo had saved 31 games in the postseason where he got more than three outs. Up until 2013, that had only happened 32 times in the Wild Card era from any other pitcher. These days if a closer goes beyond three outs in October you hold your breath and pray to god your team can hold on. That challenge didn’t bother Mo.
Also Dave, if you go by Adjusted ERA, Mo has been the single most dominant pitcher ever, starter or reliever. On a scale in which the average pitcher rates 100, Rivera’s Adjusted ERA, over a 19-season career, is 205. Not only is that the very best Adjusted ERA in history among pitchers with at least 1,000 career innings, but nobody else is within 50 points of him. Pedro Martinez is the closest at 154.
Mo Was a System Closer
Simple. Mo was on a few historically good Yankees teams. The lineups and rotations of those teams were the QBs that drove them down the field, and Mo was the goal line RB that punched it in the end zone from the one yard line. This isn’t his problem, but if he were on any other team in baseball over his career, his stats wouldn’t have been near the same. If you were to take Mike Trout and put him on the White Sox, the Reds, the Padres or any other shit team in baseball, he’d still be putting up MVP numbers year after year. Mo wouldn’t have had the chance to pile up save after save if he spent his entire career on a dog shit team. That’s inarguable.
I know Dave is trolling here because you can’t be this stupid. Whether you are on a good team or not has absolutely no correlation to how good of a closer you are. If you’re on a good team how does that affect what batters are coming up for the other team in the last inning of a close ball game? It didn’t matter where Rivera was pitching, who he was pitching for, or who was at the plate you weren’t hitting his cutter you dummy. The Yankees didn’t make Rivera great, he did it to them.
I agree with Dave that the voting process is stupid and that more people should have been unanimous before Mo, but him trying to take away from Rivera’s career is fucking nonsense. I simply won’t stand for this slander.