Mariano Rivera, the former Yankees closer, became the first baseball player ever to be elected into the Hall of Fame unanimously. Rivera holds the record for most saves of all time and won five World Series. This story appeared in the June 2001 issue of Esquire—not even halfway through Rivera's impossibly steady career. Little did we know how long he'd be so good.

Not enough has been written about the art of the autograph. Oh, we have had earnest disquisitions concerning the science of the autograph, an unfortunately integral element of which has become a twelve-year-old boy standing forlornly in the lobby of a hotel at two in the morning while his greasy pimp daddy lurks nearby behind a potted plant. And, alas, the economics of the autograph have taken an even more staggering turn for the worse: After the arrest of Jeffrey Dahmer, two officers at a Milwaukee jail were busted for having solicited the late cannibal's signature. There has been more than ample examination of the laissez-faire elements of the autograph industry. But the art of the thing, the aesthetic of the signature itself, has gone sadly unremarked upon.

Look at them, you suckers. Look at all the autographs on all the baseballs in all your sweaty little collections. What might be capital letters — and what might just as well be dancing caribou — followed by indistinct horizons of bumps, loops, and jagged peaks. Look at this one here. It's Orel Hershiser's. Of course, by all the observable evidence, it could also be John Philip Sousa's, Warren Harding's, Orville Wright's, Muddy Waters's, Charles the Simple's, or Rin Tin Tin's. A .240-hitting journeyman outfielder could sign himself as Charlemagne and it would be years before anyone noticed.

Part of it is the medium. It is hard to write legibly on something round, which is why important legal documents are never written on baseballs. More of it, though, is that autographs have become a volume industry. They are signed in bulk and in haste. Players can sign using only the far fringes of their peripheral vision, and the best players are the best ones at it, because they have the most practice.

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Which makes this all the more curious a scene. It is opening day — oh, pardon me, Opening Day — for the Tampa Bay Little League. The teams have had their parade, and they have scuffled around on the infield, raising clouds of dust into the bright morning air. They have pledged allegiance to the flag and to the Little League, which itself has an oath, just the way the Army does. Now, though, most of the league is lined up in front of a card table in the shade of a live oak tree where Mariano Rivera is signing whatever comes by.

He is old enough to be a parent coaching here. His eyes are set wide and dark, and his face is broad and open. In shorts and a sport shirt, in the cool shade of a tree, he looks more substantial than he does in a baseball uniform on the mound at Yankee Stadium, clinging to a one-run lead in the ninth inning of a World Series game, two men on and one man out, the forgotten starting pitcher back in the dugout icing his arm while he watches Rivera — who has ice in his heart. There he looks modest, slight, even mild, until he throws the ball and the game ends like a great iron door slamming shut.

We are in the fourth Yankee era, as dynasties are now reckoned. Given that the team has been the central pivot around which baseball has revolved over the past five years, and given Rivera's importance to the way the Yankees construct and win their games, a very compelling case can be made that Rivera is the single most valuable player in the sport. He doesn't throw a ball off the plate unless he wants to. There is very little about what he does that is accidental. In the last three years — which is to say, during the Yankees' three consecutive championships — Rivera has walked a total of sixty batters. Last season, he saved thirty-six of forty-one games, and he struck out fifty-eight batters in seventy-six innings pitched, and this in a year in which his ERA rose from 1.83 to 2.85. In fact, there was some talk that he was slipping, and even more talk that the four-year, $40 million contract he signed in February might well have been more of a reward for services rendered than anything else. It's a substantial commitment for a team to make to a thirty-one-year-old closer, but Rivera's value lies far beyond the mathematics dear to statisticians or accountants.

The rest of the case — the best part, the dramatic soul of it — comes from the fact that Rivera's presence changes every game long before he enters it. Consider: From July 8, 1999, until June 24, 2000, nearly a flat year, including the 1999 World Series, Rivera did not allow a single inherited runner to score. Not one. This means that teams must play the Yankees in accelerated time. They have to win in seven innings, or maybe in eight, and the pressure cracks many of them long before Rivera even begins to warm up. That thing that baseball's tiresome aesthetes profess to love — that each game, theoretically, could last forever, that it is timeless (Five minutes, Mr. Costner!) — is demolished when a team decides to place a mental curfew on itself to win the game before the end of the game , before New York goes to its bullpen and brings out the Hammer of God.

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"I had [Anaheim Angel] Darin Erstad in the All-Star game last year," says Yankees manager Joe Torre. "You'd have trouble getting two words out of the guy. Anyway, I was saying, 'Come on, let's get a couple more runs, guys.' And he comes up to me and says, 'Is Rivera pitching the last inning?' I said, 'Yeah.' He says, 'You don't need any more runs.' I found that pretty amusing."

He does not walk the ragged edge that many closers do. He is not the fearsome, wild-eyed, intimidating presence the position once appeared to demand. His power seems almost illusory, given his demeanor. He pitches briskly and efficiently, relying on a delicately manipulated fastball that he either throws straight past the hitter or cuts so it sails in on the hands and dives away. In the fourth game of last year's World Series, for example, facing Matt Franco of the Mets, Rivera threw a clutch of cut fastballs that danced like swallows and flummoxed Franco so completely that he looked wonderingly at the perfectly straight fastball that ultimately struck him out.

Knowing all that, then, watch him under the tree, signing baseballs, a breeze stirring the dust on the little infield behind him. Watch his fingers work. They are long and pianistic, unscarred and almost pristine in their movements. Watch as he brings the baseball up close to his eyes. See the rounded M and the R with the jaunty little downswept tail. Then watch every single tiny letter, shaped and sharpened, as though the letters were being sewn into the cover of the baseball like stitches. It's like watching a monk illuminate a manuscript, and it happens with every baseball, every time. Then think of those dozens of tiny, jeweled movements, a choreography of bone and muscle and tendon, making a baseball move at ninety-eight miles per hour, and see how the art of the autograph works to make the economics of the autograph possible.

"I like to be precise," Mariano Rivera says later. "I like to be neat."

Their place in Tampa is as quiet as a law firm these days, loud only with the swish and swirl of two fountains and raucous only with the call of large swamp birds. This is where the Yankees train now, but more important, this is the place where the Yankees are, and they are in a good place, and it's not just because they've won three world championships in a row.

Jorge Posada drops the ball into Rivera’s glove. Al Bello Getty Images

After all, they've had these dynastic exercises before, except that the previous ones all were attended by garish petulance, sybaritic barbarism, and the general charm and elegance apropos of the annual gathering of the Ostrogoths. The first bunch had Babe Ruth, all seven deadly sins rolled into a single beer gut. The teams from the forties through the sixties tore up New York at night as thoroughly as they did the American League during the day. And the seventies crew managed to win a lot of games despite giving the impression that the whole enterprise might one day dissolve into gunplay. That latter character persisted well into the eighties, long after the Yankees again had stopped winning pennants.

I can vividly recall being around the Yankees during the days of the extended fandango between George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin. I would see the Yankee beat writers at the beginning of the season, all bright-eyed and full of hope. By the All-Star break, they'd look as if they'd been with Napoleon on the retreat from Moscow.

Rivera celebrates with the trophy after their 7-3 win against the Philadelphia Phillies in Game Six of the 2009 MLB World Series. Getty Images

Now, though, either because Joe Torre has set a tone and stuck to it, or because there are conspicuously fewer outright lunatics in the clubhouse, or because the principal owner finally has found being a cartoon plutocrat more exhausting than being an actual one, the Yankees hum along like a great, efficient machine. This latest dynasty is the Rockefellers, not the Medicis.

"You feel it all through the minors," Rivera explains. "The Yankees are a dynasty. That's what it is all along, and being a Yankee, you're part of that. The Yankees are the Yankees."

He is of a piece with his team and with its times, bounding through the clubhouse, quiet and merry at the same time. Everybody is bro, the way everybody is dude to some other players. His English is good, laden with thoughtful pauses indicating that he doesn't think it's as good as it actually is. His team is relaxed, and he is relaxed, and there is no little correlation between the two. His presence puts the team at ease, as if it knows it has to hold a lead through only seven or eight innings. "In the seventh and eighth innings, we relax," says Jorge Posada, the catcher whose career in New York closely parallels Rivera's. "It's a nice way to play." If this Yankee team has a collective personality, Derek Jeter may be its public face and Bernie Williams its heart and soul, but Rivera is its definition.

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He's been part of it almost from its inception, signing a minor league contract in 1990 after no major league team drafted him. Rivera grew up in Puerto Caimito, a fishing village on the southern coast of Panama, where his father was captain of another man's boat. Mariano worked the boat himself as a teenager. He was an athlete before he was a baseball player, and he was a baseball player before he was a pitcher. He played soccer first, then moved on to baseball, where he began as a kind of all-purpose player. When he was nineteen, his team needed a pitcher, so he pitched, beginning his real baseball career relatively late. "It didn't matter if I was a position player or a pitcher, I just loved to play," he recalls. "One day, we didn't have no pitcher, so I pitched. Or, I guess, I threw the ball. That was it."

Within a year, he was tearing up the Gulf Coast League as a twenty-year-old starting pitcher, his ERA a ridiculous 0.17. Over the next six years, he moved slowly through the Yankee chain, where he saw the central pieces of this team begin to fit together. Williams came through, then Jeter. By 1996, Rivera was in his second major league season, and his obvious talents placed the Yankee bullpen in something of a delightful bind.

Torre arrived that same year, and he quickly saw that he had been blessed with what amounted to a two-headed closer out of his bullpen. Rivera would succeed the starter, pitch the seventh and eighth innings as a "bridge" man, then hand the ninth over to John Wetteland, a talented veteran. This arrangement helped narrow an opposing team's window of opportunity to six innings.

However, Rivera was so dominant in this strange, hybrid role that he gradually made Wetteland expendable. In 1996, his year as a bridge man, Rivera was 8 — 3, struck out 130 batters in 108 innings, and walked only 34. He even got some votes for the league's Most Valuable Player award. When Wetteland's free-agent number came up that winter, the Yankees gambled and let the veteran move on to Texas. Then they handed Rivera the ninth inning.

Rivera's success was not instant. He grew into the role throughout the 1997 season, finally having his defining closer's moment when Sandy Alomar beat him with a home run in the fourth game of that fall's divisional playoff series.

"It was a turning point for him, not just because he became more determined, but because he dismissed it," Torre says. "He was able to put it behind him and get that little incentive to go out and see how good he can be. Being a closer is more like be- ing a regular player than any other pitcher is. Going 0-for-4 as a regular player, you can go out there the next day and atone for it. On the other side of the coin, though, if you have a good day, you don't get a chance to enjoy it. You have to go lace them up again."

After 1997, and up until a brief slide last season, Rivera was nearly untouchable. Refining his fastball by "cutting" it — slipping his fingers sideways across the ball so that it sails — he has become a one-pitch pitcher with more than one pitch. Rivera's cut fastball behaves like a conventional slider except that it loses no velocity. His cut fastball remains a fastball — which, in Rivera's case, means ninety-five plus. He also warmed to the role of being a closer, a job for which, upon first glance, he would seem physically and emotionally ill suited.

Rivera with Yankees manager Joe Torre . Getty Images

"How you are doesn't have nothing to do with it," Rivera says. "You still have to throw the ball. It doesn't matter if you're cool or nasty out there, or if you're mean. You have to throw the ball over the plate.

"the game 's unpredictable. Sometimes you feel good, and that's one of your bad days. Sometimes you feel worse, and that's one of your good days. But if you try to be someone you're not, it's never going to work."

He is modest and mild. He is neat and quiet. Closers are not. They snarl and spit. They rage and howl. They are wild and unkempt, hooligan cowboys, living and dying with every pitch. One of them still hangs around the Yankees, helping the relief pitchers. The hair's thin now, and gray. The mustache still droops, and it's gray, too. He's the old rancher with a rifle above the door that nobody asks about. Be they as precise as Mariano Rivera or as fierce as this old gentleman, closers make their own special marks, always, as long as they sign in blood.

I saw him throw a fastball once, a high riser in a still moment, toward Carl Yastrzemski as the long shadows lengthened throughout Fenway Park. The pitch caught Yastrzemski tight on the hands — "sawing him off," as the old-timers say — and the Red Sox outfielder popped the ball high into the purpling autumn evening toward Graig Nettles at third base. It was the end of the prolonged and baroque 1978 season, Rich Gos- sage was on the mound, and suddenly we were all standing in the O. K. Corral, our ears ringing and cordite thick in the air.

Gossage has watched Rivera evolve into a different kind of closer. There is no talismanic moment — Gossage's glare, say, or Dennis Eckersley's slingshot delivery, with his hair flying like a cavalier's in a duel. Rivera is precise and careful, whereas they seemed more reckless. Rivera looks like a movie star, a tango dancer, whereas the old guys looked like the front row at a Metallica concert. But the sharp edges of the job are the same.

"The one thing you don't want to do is get beat on your fourth-best pitch," Gossage explains. "If I got beat in a ball game on my fastball, well, you just go out and do it again the next day. But if I got beat trying to throw a slider, it was a sleepless night. That's the biggest lesson Mo had to learn. That home run that Alomar hit in '97, I think Mo was trying something there instead of just throwing his fastball. He learned from that game. It made him a closer."

He is throwing batting practice now, serving them up on a back diamond to some Yankee farmhands with (at best) triple-A Columbus already in their eyes. It is as far from the chill of a playoff game as you can get, and even more distant from the great throb of those moments. There are perhaps fifteen people watching Rivera throw on a lazy February afternoon to batters of no consequence, one of whom catches a D-level fastball late, shattering his bat. There's a great cackle then from the homuncular presence of Don Zimmer, who looks more than anyone else like a human designed by committee.

"I heard that, Mo," Zimmer cries. "I heard what you did."

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On the mound, Rivera laughs as he flows into another pitch. His power seems like some sort of physical trompe l'oeil, its source a mystery locked inside the elegant movement of his pitching motion. The power is in there somewhere, coiled and mysterious and remorselessly reliable. Otherwise, he looks as if he's tossing a tennis ball against the side of his garage. If he has an identity as a closer, it is that he throws the same pitch at the same speed with the same fluid motion every time, impeccable and contained and neat, like his handwriting, like his career.

"You don't know about things," he says later. "Once you get to the mound, you still don't know how your pitch is going to feel. So that's the things you don't know."

They are waiting for him after he's done, lined up behind a metal barricade along the cinder path that leads back to the clubhouse. It is a place for scrawls and scribbles, tossed off with a major leaguer's disdainful aplomb. Sign this hat, this ball, these cards. Sign your name. Sign Charlemagne.

Who'll know?

He stands in front of them, one at a time. He takes every object and brings it up in front of his face. His fingers move in a tiny dance. The big M, then all the sharp, clear letters. Then the R, with the down-swooping tail. You can read his name clearly over his shoulder. One of them gets restless, impatient.

His eyes alight, he never looks away. He is finishing up that last a, and as much work goes into it as went into any of the other letters. The impatient girl waves a ball. He brings it toward his eyes. He starts to sign. You can read the M from across the path.

"Ma-ree-ahnn-ohh!" bleats the impatient young fan.

"Yes, mami," sighs the Hammer of God.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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