The greatest reliever baseball ever has seen and probably ever will see had a modest career goal in mind when he dropped out of school in the ninth grade to work six days a week on a commercial fishing boat captained by his father.

Mariano Rivera II, born and raised in the poor Panama village of Puerto Caimito, never intended to be another Mariano Rivera Sr.

Fishing for sardines never was his thing even though it provided a little spending money for a few years.

As a teen, Rivera enjoyed playing baseball, but he only developed into a good-but-not-great amateur position player after learning the game as a kid often playing on beaches during low tide with gloves made from milk cartons, balls made from fishing net wrapped with electrical tape and using broom sticks or tree limbs for bats.

Pele was Rivera’s first sports hero and soccer was his favorite sport growing up, but any dream of making it big at that was killed by age 17 when ankle and knee injuries forced him to quit playing.

While Rivera was fishing on that commercial boat that his father was skippering, he figured he’d someday maybe make a living as a mechanic.

Three unexpected life events changed everything for Rivera, who went onto become a Yankees legend who was elected into the Baseball of Fame on Tuesday as a first-time candidate.

First, Rivera was convinced once and for all to quit fishing when he suffered injuries and lost an uncle when his dad’s boat capsized during a work day as a 19-year-old in 1988.

The next year, an unlikely baseball career began to blossom when a Yankees scout was in the stands as the shortstop/outfielder/catcher pitched for the first time playing a tournament game for his Panama Oeste Vaqueros club, which was part of his country’s best amateur league.

Seven years of baseball highs and lows later - after Rivera signed with the Yankees at age 20; after he finally reached the big leagues in 1995 as a right-handed starter; after he won his first World Series ring as a setup reliever in 1996 - Rivera was struggling as his club’s new closer in 1997 when he was playing catch before a game and noticed crazy late movement on his throws.

That was the birth of Mariano’s famous cutter, which soon would become one of the most lethal pitches in major league history and an ignitor for his legendary career, which included a record 652 saves, 13 All-Star games and incredible postseason success that keyed five Yankees World Series championships and seven pennants.

“The greatest weapon in modern baseball, the greatest I’ve ever seen or played against,” Alex Rodriguez said in a January 2005 Sports Illustrated article.

Rivera was so dominant during his career – and so classy all the while – that he was the first ever to be unanimously elected since the voting began in 1936.

“He’s the definition of consistency,” fellow Yankees legend Derek Jeter said in 2009. “You can line up all the players who ever played the game. Mo’s been as consistent as anyone. He does it in the regular season. He does it in the postseason. He does it in spring training. He did it in the minor leagues. He’s pretty much been successful everywhere he’s been.”

It all started back home in Panama for Rivera, who has an older sister and two younger brothers. He might have unwillingly stuck with fishing for a livelihood if his father’s boat hadn’t capsized. After all, about 90 percent of the workforce in his hometown of 17,000 is involved in the fishing industry.

The day that his father’s 120-ton boat overturned, ropes used to pull in fishing nets snapped from the hydraulics system injuring Rivera’s ribs and mouth.

“It was scary,” Rivera said a few years ago.

Rivera jumped overboard and swam to the safety of a nearby fishing boat, but his uncle, Miguel Rivera, was badly hurt and later died in a hospital from his injuries.

“From that moment, I think he became fearful,” Mariano Rivera Sr. told the Associated Press in 2013. “From then on he began to practice more and go to the stadium.”

Rivera never really stood out in baseball until he caught the eyes of Yankees Director of Latin America Operations Herb Raybourn throwing lively 85-to-87 mph fastballs while working seven shutout innings in his first ever game as a pitcher, a relief outing.

“The radar wasn’t really being lit up … but what I liked about Mariano was his looseness, a nice loose arm,” Raybourn told the New York Daily News in 2015. “And his fastball had a lot of movement. I could picture him pitching in the majors.”

Raybourn told a Yankees scout Chico Heron, who asked Rivera to attend a tryout a week later. About 25 miles from home in Panama City, Rivera impressed throwing for Heron. That led to a second audition, and a few days later the Yankees signed Rivera for $2,500 on Feb. 17, 1990.

Rivera, 20, promptly took his first flight and left his country for the first time traveling to the Dominican Republic for a spring training. Then by early summer in ‘90, the lanky 155 pounder who spoke no English was in Tampa to begin his pro career pitching rookie ball for the Gulf Coast League Yankees.

Rivera spent four full seasons and part of his fifth working his way up the Yankees’ farm system mostly as a starting pitcher, and injuries contributed to the slow development. In August 1992, he had elbow surgery to repair a frayed ulnar collateral ligament, which erroneously was reported by many outlets as Tommy John surgery. Regardless of the severity, Rivera wasn’t regarded as a top prospect and thus passed over by the Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies when he was left unprotected for the 1992 Expansion Draft.

After pitching to a 2.10 ERA over his first seven Triple-A starts in 1995, Rivera got his first big-league call-up on May 16. A week later, Rivera made a humbling major league debut as the Yankees’ emergency starter for injured left-hander Jimmy Key, as he was roughed up for five runs over 3 1/3 innings in a 10-0 loss to the California Angels in Anaheim, Calif.

Rivera’s rookie season included a lot of struggles, as he was 5-3 with a 5.51 ERA in 19 outings, 10 as a starter. The Yankees, however, liked seeing his velocity suddenly jump from about 90 mph to 95 during a short return to Triple-A. They also liked some of his September outings as a reliever and they loved his 5 1/3 shutout innings over three appearances in the playoffs against the Seattle Mariners.

All of that built momentum for Rivera, won a job in the Yankees’ bullpen during spring training 1996 and then he did so well early in the season that was promoted from a middle-relief role to being closer John Wetteland’s setup man. By late in the season, Rivera was a rookie phenom on a Yankees club that ended a 17-year championship drought. He finished with a 2.09 ERA over 61 outings and amazingly was third in the American League Cy Young voting, which is unheard of for a non-closing reliever.

Realizing they had something special, the Yankees let Wetteland walk as a free agent in December of ’96 even though he was the reigning World Series MVP because management believed Rivera was ready to handle closing.

Rivera’s greatness as a closer took a little time, as he blew four of his first six save opportunities in 1997. Encouragement from manager Joe Torre and pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre proved huge.

“I told them I felt horrible because I wasn't doing my job," Rivera told the AP in 2003. “The harder I tried, the tougher it got. It was like moving in quicksand. I kept sinking. Joe told me, 'As long as you are here, you'll be the closer.' That's exactly what I needed to hear."

The vote of confidence led to a resurgence.

Then Rivera got a lot better when he shockingly discovered he could throw a nasty cut fastball while playing catch with fellow reliever Ramiro Mendoza before a June 1997 game. Rivera initially tried to change his grip to stop the ball from moving so much before a lightbulb in his head went off. Quickly, this pitch was used in games, and it became an incredible weapon against left-handed hitters, who had to deal with so much late inside movement that swings often led to broken bats after contact on the handle.

“It runs in on left-handed hitters, and if you swing at it there is a chance you will lose a finger," former Minnesota Twins switch-hitting outfielder Denny Hocking told ESPN.com in 2003.

Added former Phillies catcher Mike Lieberthal, who was a right-handed hitter, “He’s got great accuracy with (his cutter) and it’s 95 miles an hour with cut action. So you’ve almost got to say to yourself, 'OK, if it starts at my hip, if it looks like it’s going to hit me in the hip, I should swing.’”

The rest is baseball history that probably never will be matched, as Rivera achieved a level of regular season and postseason greatness that no reliever has come close to matching over a 19-year career that ended in 2013 with him pitching to a 2.11 ERA and saving 44 games as a 43-year-old.

“There ain’t no secret to (my success),” Rivera told Sports Illustrated in a 1997 interview. “Just play baseball. Throw strikes. Go after hitters. When they’re in the batter’s box, they’re the enemy. If you give them a chance, they’ll kill you. Don’t let them breathe. Never get beat with your second-best pitch. … God gave me this talent, so I use it.”

Rivera’s most impressive statistics have to be his 8-1 record, 0.70 ERA and 42 saves over 96 career postseason games. He was on the mound when the Yankees won the 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2009 World Series.

"If you don’t think about (pressure) … you can have success,” Rivera told the USA Today in 2016.

Rivera did give up the game-winning hit to Arizona Diamondbacks outfielder Luis Gonzalez in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, but on a cheap blooper off a jam shot.

Rivera isn’t haunted by disappointing outcome. In fact, believe it or not, a part of Rivera is very relieved that the Yankees lost that World Series. If they’d won Game 7, the Yankees would have returned to New York for a parade, which would have led to teammate Enrique Wilson going through his plans to fly back home to the Dominican Republic on Nov. 11. The plane that Wilson would have been on - American Airlines Flight 587 - crashed into a Queens neighborhood after taking off from JFK Airport exactly one month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and all 260 passengers perished.

"I am glad we lost the World Series, because it means that I still have a friend,” Rivera told Wilson following the crash.

Rivera’s character was applauded throughout his career. A devout Christian, his faith strengthened in July 1999 while he was having a poor outing during an interleague game at Yankee Stadium against the Atlanta Braves. He claims that the Holy Spirit came to him that night when he was on the mound struggling.

In his autobiography “The Closer”, Rivera wrote, “I am concentrating deeply and can feel my heart opening up. Suddenly I feel the overpowering presence of the Holy Spirit. My English isn’t good enough to describe what this feels like. Neither is my Spanish. You just have this supercharged sense of the Spirit in your heart, pouring into your soul.

“’I am the One who has put you here,’ the Spirit says. I stop. I turn around and look up at the 50,000 people surrounding me. I know what I just heard, and know that I am the only one who heard it. The tone of the voice is joyful, but it is also admonishing. I am at a point in the season and in my career at which I feel very much in charge of what I am doing on the mound. I don’t express this outwardly, but I am so full of confidence and vigor that it’s as if I am the one calling all the shots. In this moment, the Lord has apparently decided that I’ve gotten a bit too big for my closer’s britches, and that I need to be reminded that He is the one who is all-powerful, not me.”

Rivera and wife Clara now runs a church in New Rochelle, N.Y., Refugio de Esperanza. He also donated $850,000 to open a church in his hometown and annually gives more than $500,000 to church ventures in Panama and the New York region through his charity, The Mariano Rivera Foundation.

The reliever who was better than everyone lives by the motto that he’s not better than anyone else.

"That's important," Rivera told Sports Illustrated in 2011. “I always do that. I don't wait for people to give me respect. I always give them respect. Any player. Even a rookie, an old player, a veteran . . . I always respect them. I never try to show up nobody. I go to my business. I always take time for somebody who wants to talk to me. That's my thing."

As deservedly as anyone, Rivera will be getting the ultimate baseball respect come July when he’s inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“He threw one pitch, man,” retired Red Sox great David Ortiz wrote in a 2015 Players’ Tribune blog. “And it was so damn good that it didn’t matter. That’s why, to me, he’s the most amazing pitcher in the history of the game.

“You knew the cutter was coming. The ball would come out of Mariano’s hand and you were sure it was going right over the plate. All of a sudden, you were hitting it with your finger. Jam sandwich. … It didn’t matter what adjustments you tried to make — move back, crowd the plate, whatever — he was already a step ahead of you. Mariano had the command of a starting pitcher.

“His cutter was the single best pitch I’ve ever seen, but the really amazing thing is how he was able to do it for so many years. Are there guys now who have stuff as nasty as Mariano? Maybe for one year, two years. But nobody could maintain it like he did. I mean, 652 saves? That’s stupid.”

Randy Miller may be reached at rmiller@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @RandyJMiller. Find NJ.com on Facebook.