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Down The Rabbit Hole and Ito The Surreal World Of The American Political Class
November 22, 2010 | 
Author If they were asked to take a hard and honest look at the problems facing this country in today’s world, it is easy for most people to identify the five or six overriding issues that deeply affect the most Americans. I would bet that the following issues would make most people’s top ten:
- Two ongoing wars in the Middle East.
- A continuing battle against terrorism.
- Our failing public education system.
- An ongoing battle against the plague of illegal drug usage.
- Escalating health care costs.
- Both Social Security and Medicare heading for insolvency.
- Skyrocketing national debt and deficit spending.
- High unemployment.
- The lack of a national and rational strategic energy plan.
- Illegal immigrants and the problems caused by the lack of a national border security capability.
Wherever you fall on each of these major issues (e.g. against the wars or for the wars, against legalization of drugs or against legalization, etc.), most sane people would agree that if we could focus and solve just this small handful of issues, the real world would be so much better.
However, when you listen to politicians speak, you sometimes wonder what world and reality they are dealing with and living in. Have they fallen down the proverbial rabbit hole from Alice In Wonderland to a world that is different from the ones most Americans inhabit everyday? Could it be that these major problems facing the nation listed above, the same ones that have not been solved by the political class for decades, have not been resolved because the political class lives in a different dimension than us? Consider the following events relative to the American political class that have recently popped out of the rabbit hole of politics:
1) A county politician in Wisconsin, running for a political office, opines in a public forum and on camera that Arizona is definitely not a border state with Mexico.. In all of the maps of the country I have seen throughout my life, Arizona is shown to have a very long common border with Mexico. In this Wisconsin politician’s world, that is not the case, making it tough to solve the illegal immigration problem when we are looking at totally different maps.
2) When the Democrats took over both houses of Congress in 2006, the Speaker of The House, Nancy Pelosi, proclaimed that the Democrats would reign in the outrageous deficit spending habits of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress. She vowed that there would be no new Federal government spending unless other areas of the Federal budget were reduced in order to pay for the new government spending, her highly touted “pay as you go” approach to curtailing the size of government. She proudly proclaimed on her website: “While the President’s (Bush) budgets have turned surpluses into deficits, the Democrats’ budget takes America in a new direction, returning fiscal responsibility to Washington and the right priorities for our nation.” Given the fact that Federal government spending has grown significantly and budget deficits have skyrocketed (tripled) since this Democratic Party Congressional takeover and into the first two budgets of the Obama administration, it is apparent that Nancy Pelosi exists in a different universe from us. Most of us would agree that fiscal responsibility does NOT mean tripling the size of the deficit within four short years as it does in Pelosi’s mind. However, we would agree with her assertion that the Democrats’ budget is taking us in a new direction, the fast track to national bankruptcy.
3) Let’s stay with Pelosi for another trip down the rabbit hole because her world is so fascinating and different than ours. The Speaker recently announced that high unemployment is good, and that, in fact, high unemployment is one of the best ways to create jobs. You cannot make this stuff up, check out her press conference on YouTube where she seriously made this claim. Thus, in her world, the more people that are unemployed, the more jobs are created for those in need of a job. In her world, if we can get to 100% unemployment, everyone might have a job created as a result. Obviously, economic theory is different where she exists.
4) In Georgia Congressman Hank Johnson’s world, physical laws of nature are suspended. In a recent Congressional hearing, the Congressman expressed his worry that the U.S. island of Guam might tip over in the ocean. Again, you cannot make this stuff up, check the YouTube video of the hearing.
5) The Associated Press reported on July 15, 2010 that Federal prosecutions of illegal immigrants jumped to new high levels in the spring as the “Obama administration continued an aggressive enforcement strategy championed under President George W. Bush.” Apparently, in our world, 4,145 cases were referred to Federal prosecutors in March and April. This was the highest number of cases for any two month stretch in the past five years. The article also reported that deportations have also climbed significantly, from 185,944 in 2007 to 387,790 in 2009. So let me get this right: the Federal government is prosecuting and deporting more illegal aliens than ever but has the chutzpah to turn around and sue the state of Arizona for trying to reign in the same large wave of illegal immigrants coming into its state from Mexico? Seems kind of contradictory, at least in our world of reason. Apparently, it makes perfectly good sense in Washington, send home illegal immigrants with one hand and slap the state of Arizona with the other hand for doing the same thing.
6) On July 13, 2010, the Associated Press reported that over 100,000 pieces of children’s jewelry had to be recalled from retail shelves because the jewelry contained high levels of cadmium, a dangerous heavy metal if ingested. That’s the good news. the bad news is that in the world of government safety regulation (e.g. U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission), one does not learn from past mistakes. Several years ago, U.S. government safety organizations failed to realize that there were many, many children’s toys being sold in this country that had high levels of lead, another substance that can cause severe damage to a child if ingested. After that recall, it turns out that the same manufacturers replaced lead with cadmium, resulting in another recall earlier this year, a recall that included millions and millions of products. One would have hope that after the lead scare, the safety organizations would have been more on alert about similar type products. No such luck. After we got through the first cadmium scare, we now have another one. In the product safety dimension, learning does not happen, disasters just repeat over and over again.
7) In the surreal world of the American political class, all Republicans are vehemently against homosexuals and Democrats are the only advocates for the gay way of life. However, in our reality, this is not the case. An Associated Press report from July 13, 2010, reported that a Republican gay rights group, Log Cabin Republicans, is suing the administration in Federal court over the refusal of the Obama administration to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” military doctrine on gays serving in the armed forces. This will set up the surreal situation where a Democratic administration will be using taxpayer funds to defend a policy, a policy it also wants to see repealed, against a group that is traditionally been painted as anti-gay. Got that, makes no sense to me either.
And finally, lets leave this post with some Orwellian and otherworldly snippets from President Obama. George Orwell in his novel, 1984, was very precise when he showed how by manipulating how you say things, e.g. war is peace, freedom is slavery, etc., you can make the unreal become real. In President Obama’s world, getting our military out of Iraq means staying in Iraq, closing the Guantanamo Bay prison means leaving it open, not hiring lobbyists to serve in his administration means hiring lobbyists to serve in his administration, significantly reducing earmarks means increasing earmarks, being fully engaged in helping the Gulf Coast residents survive the BP oil spill means taking two vacations, playing seven rounds of golf, participating in several athletic photo ops with various teams, and taking at least two trips to California to campaign for other Democrats, and not raising taxes for anyone earning under 0,000 a year means raising the taxes for those same people’s kids and grandkids by allowing unprecedented government spending and national debt increases, increases that every American, present and future, will eventually have to pay.
The sad thing is that the political class lives in their own world, a world where the pay is very good, the benefits are great, you can almost never get fired since you have rigged the election process, and you don’t have to care what your constituents think and the issues they face. You also do not have to solve real problems like the war on drugs, failing public education, wide open borders, etc. even though these problems have plagued the nation for decades. That is why imposing term limits on all Federally elected politicians is becoming more and more critical, forcing them out of their worlds and other dimensions after one term, hopefully replaced by regular people that are grounded in this world and the major issues listed above. It is time to bury the rabbit hole once a fall all, stop wasting taxes and start tackling real issues and problems.
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American Food in American Literature
The months between the cherries and the peaches
Are brimming cornucopias which spill
Fruits red and purple, somber-bloomed and black;
Then, down rich fields and frosty river beaches
We’ll trample bright persimmons, while you kill
Bronze partridge, speckled quail, and canvasback.
—Elinor Wylie1
I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’s practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of course.
—Jack Kerouac2
In October of 1998, Jiao-Tong, the literary editor of the China Times in Taipei, Taiwan, invited me to write an essay on American food in American literature for presentation at the first International Conference on Food and Literature that was held in Taipei in May of 1999. I thought that I would find many secondary source books on this topic. After extensive searches of the net and communications with several professors of American literature at universities in the United States and Canada, I was quite surprised to find no book in print on the topic. Not only was there no book about it there was also no single article that directly addressed my topic. The absence of secondary sources explains why most of the references in this essay are to primary sources. The limitations on time and space for this writing further explain why I have limited my survey of American literature to novels, short stories and poetry. I have tried to make a representative selection among novelists, short story writers and poets including writers from almost two hundred years of American literature, both genders and a variety of ethnic groups. Because there are so many versions of primary works that I cite, I have limited those citations to author’s name, title of work and internal part such as verse, chapter, or section and omitted page numbers of the particular versions that I used. Less well-known works, collections and anthologies receive standard citation format.
To bring some order to this vast quantity of material, I have created three themes around which I can weave what I have found about American food in American literature: continuity and discontinuity; purity and impurity; and, abundance and scarcity. These three themes allow several important truths about the American experience through time to appear as preoccupations of its writers as well. For example, the great changes wrought on the land and the indigenous peoples were accompanied by profound and lasting attachments to European food habits. Also, the tremendous abundance of natural resources and artificial wealth in America has long coexisted with devastated land and utter poverty. The greatest American writers, such as Melville, Faulkner, Hemingway and Steinbeck, have repeatedly recognized and embodied these extremes in their plots and in their characters, much as they are embodied in the every day lives and personalities of Americans.
As an introductory frame for my presentation, I would like to offer some possible explanations for the lack of secondary sources. First, I think that most of the famous and popular American foods, such as pizza, hot dogs, hamburgers and ice cream are derivative from European foods. The pizza came from Italy. The hot dog is a version of the German sausage. Hamburgers are reformed meatballs joined with bread that is as old as agricultural civilization itself. And ice cream also has its counterparts in the cuisine of European nations. So the first reason for the lack of secondary sources is that most American foods are derivative and not original to America.
An ironic counterexample in this context is the Chinese fortune cookie. As a food item, it has very little nutrition, but as a part of the American idea of Chinese food it has become a necessity at American Chinese restaurants. However, I have asked several owners, waiters and waitresses in American Chinese restaurants whether Chinese fortune cookies came from China. All of them have told me that they did not. They were invented in America and most likely, according to this oral history, in San Francisco. This seems to me to be a credible history. San Francisco grew as a city on the money generated by high-risk professions such as whaling, shipping, gold mining and offshore ocean fishing. We can easily imagine an enterprising Chinese person noting how concerned the Americans in these professions were with their future good luck or bad luck, putting this understanding together with a well-established American liking for sweet desserts, and creating a sweet dessert that looked different and contained words of wisdom about the consumer’s fate.
Second, until the last few decades, American literature and literary criticism were dominated by males whose worldview connected food with women and put them both in the kitchen and out of sight. Most of the male writers whom I read for this essay used food and activities around food to highlight aspects of character or plot. They did not present food gathering and preparation, cooking, serving, eating, drinking and cleaning up as activities that substantially reinforced aspects of their main characters, most of whom are men, or as events that substantially advanced the plot, story-line or themes of their writing.
Indeed, a related topic could be included in this kind of study that has to do with care of the body generally. For example, it is extremely rare for any American writer to mention such bodily functions as excretion or urination. Different kinds of breathing are certainly associated with different kinds of emotional and physical conditions, such as fear, sorrow, fatigue, exertion or contemplation. But like food, other bodily processes are usually ignored, taken for granted or glossed. I mention this topic only in passing, and do not have the time or space here to dwell on it, but simply to point out that focusing on food as a topic in relation to literature is an important innovation that signifies a range of human activities whose presence or silence in literature would be an interesting expansion of this focus.
Third, as an American, I feel that most Americans take food for granted. We tend to view it as an unavoidable burden placed on our freedom of activity by the condition of having a physical body. We tend, especially in the last decade of the 20th century, to try to minimize as much as possible the time and energy required for all phases of life connected with physical nourishment of our bodies. The growth, popularity and power of the fast food industry in America reflect this disdain for the necessities of physical nourishment.
After the Allied victory in World War II, the US experienced unprecedented prosperity while applications of new technology allowed older tasks to be done with increasing speed. The complete acceptance of free market competition, in an ideological, political and economic opposition to centralized, planned economies and societies, the tremendous success of rapid, large-scale mass production in support of military forces during the war, and the increasingly tense and complicated struggle between capitalism and communism began to change the values of American society from the slower, simpler values of agricultural life and rural living to the faster, more complicated values of industrial production and urban living. Speed began its emergence as a paramount American value. For example, in 1955, shortly before the experiences recorded in Kerouac’s On the Road, the two fast food companies that are now the largest in America—McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken—were founded. “By the early 1980s there were about 440 food franchising companies with a combined total of more than 70,000 retail outlets in the United States.”3 Americans from smaller, more congested living situations in Europe slowly adjusted to the scope of the American land and its resources. Size, especially bigness, became a common value in all areas of American life. With the advent of speed as a value, the American ideology for the remainder of the 20th century gained its primary outlines—the bigger the better, the faster the better. From automobiles to hamburgers, this ideology began increasingly to govern how Americans thought about everything they did. Both values play significant and signifying roles in the relationship between American food and American literature.
Besides the social environment of European derivation, male dominance and indifference toward food, there is the traditional character of the successful American writer. Most of America’s most famous writers were and continue to be male. Most of these male writers, such as Hawthorne, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Poe, and Miller, continually placed their leading characters, most of whom were males, in positions that required the creation of a stable and meaningful life. Like the first colonists, like the pioneers, like the immigrants, their characters are continually faced with challenges to their survival, their ability and their manhood where the latter is defined in terms of overt verbal and physical superiority rather than mutual, cooperative care or nurturing. An ironic counter-example is Ayn Rand, a female writer who totally accepted the values of competition, personal power and rugged individualism. Her powerful male characters, such as the nearly godlike architect in Atlas Shrugged, are faced with problems and situations that demand forceful, individual creation and production on large scales.
The fact that creation and production also consumed energy, resources, time and money was not a central concern until the beginnings of the environmental movement in the late 50’s and early 60’s. The fact that creation and production often resulted in the emotional and physical deprivation of less independent beings, such as children, animals, women, the poor, and members of minority ethnic groups was also not a central concern of American writers or critics until the late 50’s and early 60’s. The earlier writers felt driven to produce and reproduce the feelings, drives, imagery and characters of male-oriented, individualistic creation and production in their writings. As a consequence, many of the facts of life, such as eating, drinking, digesting, excreting and nurturing were consistently absent, implied, glossed or ignored.
These are at least four reasons why there is such a scarcity of secondary sources on the topic of American food in American literature. It is, in effect, a book waiting to be written.
Fortunately, however, there are many instances of food in American literature and they do show some interesting patterns and features. I have created three themes to focus these patterns and features: continuity and discontinuity; purity and impurity; and, abundance and scarcity. First I am going to briefly described the substance and justification of each theme and then proceed with the literary material that especially illustrates and is illuminated by each theme.
A. Continuity and Discontinuity. The first European colonists on the East Coast of America experienced several discontinuities and began creating others. From crowded European cities and farmlands they came to vast, sparsely inhabited forests, mountains and valleys. From the rigidly intolerant societies of many 16th and 17th century European countries they came to a land whose societies, those of the indigenous peoples, were completely strange and closed to them. From lives of poverty and scarcity they came to a land that gradually disclosed resources and riches beyond their wildest dreams. From old, settled areas in Europe that had long ago been tamed by the sword, the plow, the cross and the crown they came to wilderness that seemed indifferent to the grandeur and traditions of European civilization.
Within these discontinuities they also created discontinuities in the lives of the indigenous peoples, by war, trade and intermarriage. In the natural life cycles of the new land, they also began creating discontinuities by the invasive activities of logging, farming, mining, urbanization, hunting and fishing. The cultivation of extremes that have
become fixtures of American life began at this time. There were Americans who loved the wilderness and the indigenous ways and shed as many of their European ways as possible. There were Americans who loathed the wilderness and the native ways and strove either to change them or destroy them. These latter among the early colonists insisted on the continuation of European religions and languages, official protocols, social forms and manners and whatever foods they could make in the new world, such as bread, or have shipped from Europe without spoilage, such as tea.
The indigenous people fell before the larger and larger waves of Europeans most of whom firmly believed that the best Indian was a dead Indian. For example, it is estimated that in 1600 there were approximately 10,000,000 indigenous people living in many different groups, or tribes, across the American continent. By 1900, under an official US government policy of extermination, that total had fallen to approximately 500,000. The impact of the new inhabitants on the land has been no less powerful. In 1600, most of the land east of the Mississippi River and west of the Rocky Mountains was covered with mixed hardwood and deciduous forests. By 1990, less than 3% of the original trees remained standing.
Besides the clash of Europeans and indigenous peoples, the growing population of Americans cultivating land for crops, especially cotton and tobacco, sold to a growing population of consumers in Europe provided a market for human labor—slaves. The slave trade, initiated by the Dutch and pursued by almost every Western European country with seafaring expertise, created extreme discontinuities in many aspects of African life that are beyond the scope of this essay. But the importation of Africans as slaves created an entirely new stream of Americans, subjected for two hundred years to plantation conditions of near starvation, who invented and innovated with the meager edible material accessible to them. Their creativity has contributed many different kinds of distinctively American foods, such as chitlins, greens, and an entire range of foods centered in the bayou area of Louisiana known as Cajun food. Along with original contributions made by the indigenous peoples to the first colonists’ and pioneers’ diets such as corn, some of these food items that have lasted longer than the institution of slavery itself have also found places in American literature.
B. Purity and Impurity. The early colonists on the American East Coast brought with them a deep fear of hell and a deep desire to purify their lives of any elements that prevented the practice of true Christianity. True Christianity meant for them a literal reading of the bible and a literal construction of human social life around the teachings and tenets of the bible. Red, for them, was the color of the devil, the color of evil and the color of the indigenous people. Pure black and pure white were their colors of choice.
Those Americans who loved the wilderness, however, quickly adopted the use of multi-colored animal skins for clothing and natural dyes for coloring cloth or their skin. It was therefore no mere historical accident that the American cultural revolution of the 60’s adopted wildly colored clothing, vehicles, hair and language as an obvious and dramatic signifier against the dark suits, white shirts, dark ties and dark shoes of establishment figures. It was no historical accident that the beatniks and hippies both reached out for foods that differed greatly in flavor, color, smell, taste and texture from white bread, roast beef, boiled potatoes, oatmeal, milk and tea. It was also no historical accident that some of the most influential writers of this era, such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, found deep and lasting inspiration from the literature and the food of lands and peoples far beyond the American shores.
C. Abundance and Scarcity. From 1895 to 1915, approximately 23,000,000 immigrants moved from Europe to the United States. These people came from all parts of Europe. They left living conditions characterized by poverty, political turmoil and oppression and lack of any kind of opportunity for improvement. America was a land that promised to make their dreams of prosperity, wealth, abundance and freedom come true. Many of those immigrants made their fortunes in America then returned with them to their families in Europe. But many others stayed in America, had their families there and began contributing tastes, colors and flavors to an increasingly heterogeneous American scene. This period of intense migration saw the beginnings of neighborhoods in major cities, such as New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. These were ethnic enclaves for Italians, Poles, Germans, Jews, as well as Blacks trying to find an alternative to the militarily defeated but still powerful racism of their former southern masters, or others whose strong sense of group identity always brought with it special foods that were amplified by the increasingly large scales of American life.
At the same time, the rapid growth of large-scale manufacturing, in factories employing tens of thousands of immigrants who were poorly paid and allowed only a minimal education beyond the background of their European origins, turned some of these neighborhoods into the first American slums and ghettos. Extremely low wages, non-existent social services, waves of unemployment and the increasing pressure of large families and new arrivals frequently put many of these new Americans on the edges of malnutrition, hunger and even starvation. Abundance and scarcity began to appear as poles of a socioeconomic oscillation driven not by such obvious institutions as slavery but by beliefs, prejudices and attitudes about the superiority and inferiority of different kinds of peoples coupled with firmly established patterns of access and lack of access to resources. The negative shock of World War I was followed by the positive euphoria of the roaring 20’s. That decade of unprecedented prosperity and national expansion was followed by the great depression of the 30’s. America was clearly moving into the vanguard of a world order whose extremes ranged from genocide to population explosion, from starvation to rotting surpluses and from worn feet in foul mud to toenail polish in satin slippers on polished marble.
A first glimpse of the theme of continuity and discontinuity can be seen by comparing the two citations at the beginning of this essay. Elinor Wylie lived from 1885 to 1928. Jack Kerouac lived from 1922 to 1969. Ripe fruit appears as an edible food from the tree in Wylie’s poem and as an ingredient of pie in Kerouac’s novel. Wylie’s cherries and peaches are closer to unprocessed nature than Kerouac’s baked apple pie. Wylie’s poem signifies the rootedness of the early European colonists in a land that provided ample foodstuffs. Kerouac’s novel signifies the restlessness of urban Americans for whom food had become an uninteresting necessity.
Wylie’s poem signifies abundance and therefore the value of bigness without the addition of speed that played such an important role in the life of Kerouac’s main character, Dean Moriarty.
In fact, Dean Moriarty was based on the real man, Neal Cassady. In 1964, I was living in Palo Alto, California, having dropped out of Stanford University to try my hand at writing fiction and poetry. I met a lovely young woman who was a first year student at Stanford and invited her to a party. The party was in a house in the east side of Palo Alto that was increasingly known as a suitable place for non-conformists and beatniks. The party featured many people whom neither my friend nor I knew along with much wine. It also featured some very unusual people. At one point during the party we were drinking wine in the small, brightly-lit kitchen. In a commotion of laughing, talking people, a young man with a brilliant smile and ringing laughter, whose feet seemed barely able to stay on the floor, floated and flew through the room while the man who had invited me to the party introduced him to me as Neal Cassady. He acknowledged me and disappeared out another door. I never saw him again but retain to this day the vivid impression of light and speed that he also seems to have given to Kerouac.
The continuity between Wylie’s poem and Kerouac’s novel is indicated by the American saying, “It’s as American as apple pie!” Another kind of continuity appears, moreover, when the verse after the one quoted above from Wylie’s poem is considered:
Down to the Puritan marrow of my bones
There’s something in this richness that I hate.
I love the look, austere, immaculate,
Of landscapes drawn in pearly monotones.
There’s something in my very blood that owns
Bare hills, cold silver on a sky of slate,
A thread of water, churned to milky spate
Streaming through slanted pastures fenced with stones.4
Taken together, this verse and the one quoted at the beginning of this essay dramatically display all three themes. There is continuity and discontinuity between the doctrines of a European religious heritage, Puritanism, that emphasized great worldly achievements but as little worldly display as possible. One of Max Weber’s most important contributions to our understanding of the modern Protestant viewpoint is his clear delineation of the conflict in early Protestantism between acquiring great wealth to signify being in god’s favor and displaying only humility to the rest of the world without the material ostentation that the Pietists, the Puritans, the Luddites and many other Protestant groups found so distasteful in Catholicism.
Weber argues, convincingly, I think, that the “Puritan, like every rational type of asceticism, tried to enable a man [sic] to maintain and act upon his constant motives, especially those which it taught himself itself, against the emotions.”5 The goal of this action was to lead a certain kind of life “freed from all the temptations of the world and in all its details dictated by God’s will, and thus to be made certain of their own rebirth [in heaven after the last judgment] by external signs manifested in their daily conduct.”6 From the Bible as well as from all other religious literature, success in difficult tasks is a clear sign of God’s favor. For Protestants, such signs do not guarantee salvation but they are the closest to a guarantee that a Protestant can get. Indeed, that “God Himself blessed his chosen ones through the success of their labours was…undeniable…to the Puritans.”7 This doctrine that combined asceticism with success in worldly endeavors positioned Protestantism to be the driving religious force behind capitalism and the great creations and accumulations of material wealth that have occurred in modernity. But it is no less true that this combination can be a rhythm, an oscillation, a confusion or conflict. This combination clearly provides much of the historical substance for our themes of abundance and scarcity and purity and impurity.
A condensed example of the oscillation between abundance and the austerity of American Puritanism can be seen in a brief passage from the short story, The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether, by Edgar Allen Poe (1809-49). This passage also underlines the way in which food and the activities surrounding food have been treated by many of America’s greatest male writers—as unavoidable but uninteresting necessities, even in a fictional setting: “The table was superbly set out. It was loaded with plate, and more than loaded with delicacies. The profusion was absolutely barbaric. There were enough meats to have feasted the Anakim. Never, in all my life, had I witnessed so lavish, so wasteful an expenditure of the good things of life.”8
The tension between the narrator and his hosts in Poe’s tale is echoed by the tension between the narrator and the main character in On the Road. The quote from Jack Kerouac is part of the first-person narration of the novel by Sal Paradise, the supporting, secondary character that is based on Kerouac himself. For the duration of his cross-country hitchhiking trip, he lives on apple pie and ice cream. This diet reflects not only Sal’s poverty, but also clearly situates the novel in a continuous American tradition that de-emphasizes the bodily, physical or material world. A discontinuity, however, occurs between the naturalness of the fruits in Wylie’s poem and the impersonal, processed food that Sal Paradise ate. A further discontinuity appears in the fact that Sal is taking his food on the road, on the run, at high speed, while Wylie is painting a picture of humans relating to trees that by their nature cannot move from where they are.
Wylie’s poetic picture is drawn from her life in New England. Many of the first colonists stayed on or close to the coast because it allowed them to continue the seafaring lives and occupations they had practiced in Europe and because it provided an abundance of food. However, their Puritan ideology often resulted in lives that were lived as far from that abundance as Wylie’s “cold silver on a sky of slate.” Another American poetess, Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), was born in Massachusetts and raised by her grandparents in Nova Scotia, the eastern, seafaring Province of Canada. Her life partly overlapped Wylie’s and she also paints the spirit of that area specifically in terms of food but with an emphasis on the austerity of their diet:
From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,9
Moreover, the abundance that Wylie hates is also rejected by Kerouac in an off-hand, casual way as though the less time a man spent on something as mundane as food the better or higher quality a person he was. However, the oscillation between abundance and scarcity appears in Kerouac’s novel in the contrast between Sal Paradise and the main character of On the Road, Dean Moriarty.
“…but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn’t care one way or the other, ‘so long’s I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there tween her legs, boy,’ and ‘so long’s we can eat, son, y’ear me? I’m hungry, I’m starving, let’s eat right now!”—and off we’d rush to eat, whereof, as saith Ecclesiastes, ‘It is your portion in the sun.’” (Ch. 1 (italics in original))
It is also certainly worth noticing in passing that in both writers, differentiated by gender, by background, and by time, there is a strong connection between religion and food. This commonality and this continuity clearly occur in the traditional American feast days of Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter. All three feature unusually large and lengthy meals as well as strong connections with the Christian, Protestant backgrounds of the early American colonists, settlers and pioneers. As with the bodily functions mentioned before, bringing the topic of food and literature into the foreground also illuminates the strong presence of Judeo-Christianity in American life and literature. Again, this innovative topic proves to be a powerful lens for viewing a wide range of signifiers that occur repeatedly and pervasively in American literature.
Indeed, the theological basis of Wylie’s hatred of “this richness” is the Puritan soul struggling for release from all of its attachments, involvements, entanglements and preoccupations to, with and in the material world. Metaphysical battles are fought on empirical battlefields. In this case, the metaphysical battle between the ontological powers of good and evil is fought on the empirical battlefield of the relationship between a poetess and edible, natural fruit. The apple signifies the fall of man at the hand of woman. The hatred of “this richness” is therefore a self-hatred that drives the woman farther from impure nature and closer to the immaterial purity of the austere, unadorned Protestant soul. The continuity of the human body with nature is displaced by the discontinuity of the immaterial soul with the body. The abundance of human bodies and souls is displaced by the scarcity of the elect, those in Protestant doctrine chosen by God from the foundations of the world to survive the last judgment and live eternally in heaven.
Serious reflection on the relationship between food and literature brings us to a range of signifiers that underpins all literature, namely, religion. Why? Because writing originally served the purpose of passing on what is most valuable in the viewpoint and experience of the group. The most valuable possession of all is that which most certainly promotes the survival of the group. All human groups discovered long ago that humans are dependent on greater powers for survival. All humans need air, water, food, warmth and sleep. The fear of, respect for, worship of and sacrifice to the powers that govern life, both visible and invisible, is the ancient substance of all religions. The ancient truth and pervasive message of all religions is the dependency of humans on those powers, including the power of reproduction that is represented in ancestor worship. Religion embodies, ritualizes and carries forward that fundamental truth of human dependency. The denial of that dependency can lead to greatly innovative creativity and profoundly transformative spirituality as well as to self-destruction and madness. Humans can imagine absolute freedom but to try to live it, as Nietzsche showed, leads only to self-destruction and madness.
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) struggled with madness all her life and eventually ended her life by committing suicide. The following poem opens with the kind of paean to natural abundance that we saw in Wylie’s poem and closes with a similar feeling of empty space and cold silver. The contrast between the terms “nothing” and “blackberries” in the first line signifies the tension between abundance and emptiness. This signifier in turn connects with the tension between purity and impurity through the signifier of nothingness as a desirable and advanced spiritual state and as the material condition of spiritual devotees on earth. In this poem, these themes are again carried by concrete, local wild food and abstract, created imagery that moves the reader away from an abundant present to an absent but implied purity above or beyond the physical earth:
Blackberrying
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.
Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.
The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.10
It is no accident, in this perspective, that Neal Cassady, the living person behind Kerouac’s character Dean Moriarty, died of a drug overdose on the hot, shining steel rails of a railroad track in central Mexico. The use of drugs in all groups has traditionally been associated with personal and group alignment to the greater powers for the purpose of amplifying the ability of the group to survive. Cut from their traditional moorings in religion, drugs have become a way to experiment with the physical, psychic and spiritual dimensions of absolute freedom. The fact that many drugs, such as LSD, cocaine, methamphetamine and opium, make the user feel that they need no food or other natural supports for their existence, shows precisely how they fit into the attempt to deny dependency and achieve absolute freedom. The discontinuity of the American experience in relation to older traditions, the abundance of material wealth and the usually unacknowledged background ideal of a pure, immaterial soul have worked together to produce in its literature characters like Dean Moriarty who make a life—and a death—of treading the edge between innovation and self-destruction.
Or, to condense our themes in the pithy and quintessentially American poetic language of William Carlos Williams: “the pure products of America go mad” (from “On The Road To The Mental Hospital”)
Apple pie and ice cream, moreover, also provide Kerouac with an opportunity to make a statement of value that clearly displays abundance as bigness: “I ate apple pie and ice cream—it was getting better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer.” (Ch. 3) “Better,” “deeper,” “bigger,” and “richer,” work together to define a system of values that was both American—bigger is better—and Romantic—depth and richness.11
The theme of abundance can be found in all periods of American literature. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, Scarlet Letter, for example, a character who is the “father of the Custom House—the patriarch, not only of his little squad of officials, but, I am bold to say, of the respectable body of tide-waiters all over the United States—was a certain permanent Inspector.”12 The Custom-House was the official federal government office responsible for inspecting all cargo coming into the country by ship and determining what if any duties had to be paid. In the novel, this particular Custom-House is located on a wharf in the harbor of Salem, Massachusetts. In this particular character, Hawthorne signifies one of the most important aspects of the American diet that also repeatedly appears in its literature—the consumption of large quantities of meat. The Inspector had the unusual ability to remember in great detail
“the good dinners which it had made no small portion of the happiness of his life to eat….to hear him talk of roast meat was as appetizing as a pickle or an oyster….it always satisfied me to hear him expatiate on fish, poultry, and butcher’s meat, and the most eligible methods of preparing them for the table. His reminiscences of good cheer, however ancient the date of the actual banquet, seemed to bring the savor of pig or turkey under one’s very nostrils….A tenderloin of beef, a hindquarter of veal, a sparerib of pork, a particular chicken, or a remarkably praiseworthy turkey, which had perhaps adorned his board…would be remembered….”13
The dominance of meat in the American diet can be seen in several ways. One is the following chart of specialty foods in the individual franchises of the top thirty fast-food companies in the US:
Type of Food Number of Franchises
Chicken 8,683
Hamburger/Hot Dog/Roast Beef 29,600
Pizza [usually served with a
meat topping] 11,593
Tacos [usually served with a
meat filler] 3,620
Seafood 2,630
Pancakes/Waffles [usually eaten
with bacon,
sausage or ham] 1,63014
Another view of this American food habit comes from considering the quantities of meat consumption and production in the United States. For example,
“Americans spend about 25 percent of their food budget on red meat. The per capita consumption of beef in the United States has increased steadily, while that of pork has declined….Only in Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina is per capita consumption higher than in the United States. The United States normally produces about 27 percent of the world’s meat.” (Ibid., (13) 190)
From the United States Chamber of Commerce, the source of these statistics in Compton’s Encyclopedia and from the 19th century work of Hawthorne, we can move to the late 20th century. In the late 1980’s, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café, by a California writer, Fannie Flagg, was published. In the first section of the novel, a reproduction of an article from the weekly newspaper in her fictional southern US town of Weems, Flagg describes the basic menu of the newly opened Whistle Stop Cafe:
…the breakfast hours are from 5:30 to 7:30, and you can get eggs, grits, biscuits, bacon, sausage, ham and red-eye gravy, and coffee….
For lunch and supper you can have: fried chicken; pork chops and gravy; catfish, chicken and dumplings; or a barbecue plate; and your choice of three vegetables, biscuits or cornbread, and your drink and dessert….
…the vegetables are: creamed corn; fried green tomatoes; fried okra; collard or turnip greens; black-eyed peas; candied yams; butter beans or lima beans.15
Later in the novel, the items in a particular meal served to a customer are described as “fried chicken, black-eyed peas, turnip greens, fried green tomatoes, cornbread, and iced tea.”16
The fatness, abundance and purity of meat in the American diet have also been used by some writers as a counterfoil to other kinds of scarcity and impurity. Sylvia Plath uses the tradition of a large meat meal on Sunday, as a once a week special gathering for American families, that often features a large, oven-roasted turkey, to give stark contrast to another kind of oven:
Mary’s Song
The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity…
A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire
Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float
Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany,
They do not die.
Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth ash, ash of eye.
They settle. On the high
Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.
It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat.17
One of America’s most gifted and enigmatic of contemporary poets, the Pulitzer Prize winner John Ashbery (1927-), turns America’s abundance into a counterfoil not of impurity but of scarcity as a lack of certainty:
Hardly anything grows here,
Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,
The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.
The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;
Birds darken the sky. Is it enough
That the dish of milk is set out at night,
That we think of him sometimes,
Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?18
Besides the prominence and priority of meat, the Plath poem and the lists from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café foreground an important continuity and discontinuity in American food. The important continuity stems from the fact that the early colonists and pioneers, trying to live in a strange land before it had been developed for agriculture, made their bread primarily from locally available grains, especially corn. Wheat and other related grains were too hard to grind by hand and required a heavy, complicated mill that the early settlers could not carry with them. Corn became a staple food as important to the early European colonizers as it already was to the indigenous people:
Young, ripe corn was eaten as roasting ears. In winter the husks of the kernels were soaked off with lye to make hominy. For breakfast and supper there was boiled corn-meal mush. Sometimes the mush was fried and served with butter or pork drippings. The most common dish, however, was hot corn bread. Baked on a hoe blade before the fire, this was called hoecake. Mixed with water into a stiff batter and covered with hot ashes, it was ash cake. From the Dutch oven it emerged as corn pone or corn loaf. Small cakes of corn pone were called corn dodgers.19
In the passage from Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter both fish and turkey are mentioned along with pork and chicken. The fish and turkey were most likely caught and shot in their natural habitats. The pork and chicken were most likely raised and butchered in a domestic animal keep. This combination of wild and domestic meat began with the first colonists and continues to the present day. Indeed, the pioneers who traveled by foot, wagon and horse from the east westward on the American continent found a great abundance of wild game for meat. Still they tried to carry enough familiar, nutritious foodstuffs to last them for the journey to their new homestead and to carry them through periods when wild game was unavailable. A typical load for one adult traveling by oxen-drawn wagon westward was:
“…200 pounds of flour, 30 pounds of pilot bread, 75 pounds of bacon, 10 pounds of rice, 5 pounds of coffee, 2 pounds of tea, 25 pounds of sugar, half bushel of dried beans, one bushel dried fruit, 2 pounds of baking soda, 10 pounds salt, half a bushel of cornmeal. And it is well to have a half bushel of corn, parched and ground. A small keg of vinegar should also be taken.”20
In many rural or sparsely inhabited parts of America the mixing of wild and domestic meats continues to this day. In Alaska, for example, where I have lived for many years and which is one-third the area of the entire contiguous forty-eight states of the US, many people still rely on hunting for a large portion of their meat supply. John Haines, past Poet Laureate of the State of Alaska and Alaska’s best known poet, began homesteading near Fairbanks, Alaska in the 1950’s. I have known him personally for many years and read poetry with him on the stage of the Loussac Library in Anchorage in 1986. His poetry clearly reflects how the dependence on wild meat can crystallize the themes of abundance and purity in an identification with the predator:
If the Owl Calls Again
at dusk
from the island in the river,
and it’s not too cold,
I’ll wait for the moon
to rise,
then take wing and glide
to meet him
We will not speak,
but hooded against the frost
soar above
the alder flats, searching.
with tawny eyes
And then we’ll sit
in the shadowy spruce and
pick the bones
of careless mice,
while the long moon drifts
toward Asia
and the river mutters
in its icy bed.
And when morning climbs
the limbs
we’ll part without a sound,
fulfilled, floating
homeward as
the cold world awakens.21
Long before Haines or any other European settled in Alaska, however, the indigenous people had long lived on whatever meat animals they could kill and prepare. In fact, when the first French explorers met and spent time with the indigenous people in the north of what is now Canada, they were so impressed by the predominance of uncooked meat in their diets that they called them “Esquimeaux,” which is French for “eaters of raw meat.” Further down the coasts of Canada and Alaska, however, salmon run by the millions up the great rivers and are caught and used by the local people. These Americans now eat their salmon after it has been smoked or cooked, as told in the following poem, “Subsistence #2” by Andrew Hope, III (1949-), of Sitka, Alaska:
Dog salmon colors
Glistening
Evening sun
Incoming tide
Washing the beach
Dog salmon shine
Silver purple flash
Reaching
Lifting a big one
By the tail
Incoming tide
Washing the beach
Time to eat
Fried dog salmon
For dinner22
There are five kinds of salmon that migrate into Alaskan fresh waters and are used there for food. Each kind has its own name and some kinds have different names in different areas of Alaska. Thus, discontinuities through time in preparation—from raw to cooked—have occurred along with discontinuities in time among practices of naming the same foodstuff. Dog salmon are so-called because they were once used by the thousands to feed the many dogs upon which the indigenous Alaskan people relied for transportation during the long winters. This kind of salmon, however, is perfectly fit for human consumption and now that many indigenous people in Alaska travel only by motorized vehicles in all seasons, dog salmon have become a staple of human nutrition.
These discontinuities connect with the discontinuity signified by the meal ingredients in the first and second quotes from Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café which is variation in regional foods. Grits, for example, is a kind of cereal or mush made from corn or wheat that is coarsely ground. Grits is considered by most Americans to be a food characteristic of the American South. Its public presence in northern cities is usually the result of southerners moving north and opening restaurants that feature American Southern cuisine. Other typical regional American foods are codfish associated with the northeastern seafood cuisine, key lime pie associated with the cuisine of the Florida Keys, tortillas and red beans associated with the southwest cuisine derived from America’s Hispanic heritage, and salmon associated with the northwest and Alaskan cuisines.
One of Alaska’s Native American poets, Charlie Blatchford, a Yupik Eskimo whom I knew personally and who is now deceased, stated the case for meat very simply in one of his few published poems:
Forgotten Words
Our language, of what I know,
has been prepared
with wisdom and grace.
The fine skin has been fleshed
and lies to one side.
The innards have carefully
been exposed.
Their sweet flesh
ready for feast.
Meat, the staple of life,
is consumed with satisfaction…
Sedating our need
for new words.23
In the hands of more contemporary poets who are not Native American, as Charlie Blatchford was, meat continues to signify substantial food and is often joined by a kind of substance that could serve as a separate topic alongside food—intoxicants such as alcohol and drugs. In Whitman, Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg and many other writers, wine, beer and other kinds of mind-altering substances often accompany food and especially meat. This range of consumable signifiers has a history in all literatures that is as ancient, as interesting and as important as that of meat and other foods. Indeed, putting the light of interest on food has again brought into focus an important stream in the lives of all peoples that could well serve as a topic for extensive further research, discussion and writing. In many poets, the connection between meat and wine is briefly made, as in the fourth verse of “Asylum” by Herman Fong (1963-):
At meals they barely feed her,
give her the smallest cuts of meat,
mostly fat, and a few red drops of wine.24
A concentration on the details of ordinary life characterizes the style of many American writers, both older and younger. John Steinbeck, a Nobel laureate and one of the pre-eminent American literary voices of the 20th century, frequently drew for his characters and settings from the everyday lives of people in California. Some of his best and most popular writings, novels such as Cannery Row, Grapes of Wrath, and Of Mice and Men, and the short story collection, The Long Valley, feature characters and settings in coastal, southern and central California. Tortilla Flats features the lives of “paisanos” who lived near the central California coastal town of Monterey. According to Steinbeck, a paisano was a “mixture of Spanish, Indian, Mexican and assorted Caucasian bloods” (Ch. 1). The main character, Danny, and his friends hear about a ship that has been wrecked on the nearby coast. They go to the beach and salvage flotsam from the wreck then sell it. The sale puts five dollars into Danny’s possession, an unusually large amount of money:
The five dollars from the salvage had lain like fire in Danny’s pocket, but now he knew what to do with it. He and Pilon went to the market and bought seven pounds of hamburger and a bag of onions and bread and a big paper of candy. Pablo and Jesus Maria went to Torrelli’s for two gallons of wine, and not a drop did they drink on the way home, either. (Ch. 5)
Part of Steinbeck’s genius as a writer and one of the aspects of his stories that set them apart from other American writings is the deliberate use of food items and activities for characterization and plot development. Tortilla Flats provides an example of his style as well as continuing to demonstrate the importance of meat in the American diet across all geographic regions and ethnic groups:
Danny’s business was fairly direct. He went to the back door of a restaurant. “Got any old bread I can give my dog?” he asked the cook. And while that gullible man was wrapping up the food, Danny stole two slices of ham, four eggs, a lamb chop and a fly swatter.
“I will pay you sometime,” he said.
“No need to pay for scraps. I throw them away if you don’t take them.”
Danny felt better about the theft then. If that was the way they felt, on the surface he was guiltless. He went back to Torelli’s [the wine merchant], traded the four eggs, the lamb chop and the fly swatter for a water glass of grappa and retired toward the woods to cook his supper. (Ch.1)
The particular food item of onions appears in the first passage from Tortilla Flats as a small detail that signifies a range of regional foods in an American southwest first colonized by European settlers from Spain not from England. Between hamburger and onions are both the continuity of easily prepared and consumed meat and the discontinuity of regional American cuisines. Another great American literary voice, that of William Carlos Williams, also picked out this range of southwestern signifiers on his one and only trip to that part of America. Besides a fine ear for the peculiarities that distinguish American English from all other kinds of English, Williams also had a keen eye for the small details of place that brought the reader in close to the object of Williams’ writing. The following passage is from “The Desert Music” which was based on Williams’ trip to the American southwest and his sojourning in towns that, at that time, were far more Hispanic than Caucasian:
–paper flowers (para los santos)
baked red-clay utensils, daubed
with blue, silverware,
dried peppers, onions, print goods, children’s
clothing . the place deserted all but
for a few Indians squatted in the
booths, unnoticing (don’t you think it)
as though they slept there .25
The use of activities around food to develop plot and character is also part of the style of another American novelist who received a Nobel Prize for literature, William Faulkner (1897-1962). From the deserts and sparse valleys of the southwest to the lush forests, swamps and meadows of the deep south, American literature, like the perduring literature of every language, has consistently insisted that the physical place and its features are part of the story. In the following passage from Light in August, Faulkner uses Mrs. McEachern’s attempt to nourish Joe as a reflector for both characters:
He was lying so, on his back, his hands crossed on his breast like a tomb effigy, when he heard again feet on the cramped stairs….
Without turning his head the boy heard Mrs. McEachern toil slowly up the stairs. He heard her approach across the floor. He did not look, though after a time her shadow came and fell upon the wall where he could see it, and he saw that she was carrying something. It was a tray of food. She set the tray on the bed. He had not once looked at her. He had not moved. “Joe,” she said. He didn’t move. “Joe,” she said. She could see that his eyes were open. She did not touch him.
“I aint hungry,” he said.
She didn’t move. She stood, her hands folded into her apron. She didn’t seem to be looking at him, either. She seemed to be speaking to the wall beyond the bed. “I know what you think. It aint that. He never told me to bring it to you. It was me that thought to do it. He dont know. It aint any food he sent you.” He didn’t move. His was calm as a graven face, looking up at the steep pitch of the plank ceiling. “You haven’t eaten today. Sit up and eat. It wasn’t him that told me to bring it to you. He dont know it. I waited until he was gone and then I fixed it myself.”
He sat up then. While she watched him he rose from the bed and took the tray and carried it to the corner and turned it upside down, dumping the dishes and the food and all onto the floor. Then he returned to the bed, carrying the empty tray as though it were a monstrance and he the bearer, his surplice the cut down undergarment which had been bought for a man to wear. She was watching him now, though she had not moved. Her hands were still rolled into her apron. He got back into bed and lay again on his back, his eyes wide and still upon the ceiling. He could see her motionless shadow, shapeless, a little hunched. Then it went away. He did not look, but he could hear her kneel in the corner, gathering the broken dishes back into the tray. Then she left the room. It was quite still then.26
Faulkner lived and wrote in the Bible Belt. The Bible Belt signified the fact that most people in the south were fundamentalist Christian Protestants who girded themselves with the spirit of austerity and yearning for an otherworldly paradise of simplicity and peace articulated so strongly by New England writers such as Wylie and Bishop. Although food occurs frequently in Faulkner’s work, it is rarely ample, elaborate or wasted. Usually it serves to highlight the physical scarcity and tenuous moral condition of people who live on the edge of a society whose abundance seldom appears in his work:
And Judith. She lived alone now. Perhaps she had lived alone ever since that Christmas day last year and then year before last and then three years and then four years ago, since though Sutpen was gone now…she lived in anything but solitude, what with Ellen in bed in the shuttered room, requiring the unremitting attention of a child while she waited with that amazed and passive uncomprehension to die; and she (Judith) and Clytie making and keeping a kitchen garden of sorts to keep them alive; and Wash Jones, living in the abandoned and rotting fishing camp in the river bottom which Sutpen had built after the first woman—Ellen—entered his house and the last deer and bear hunter went out of it, where he now permitted Wash and his daughter and infant granddaughter to live, performing the heavy garden work and supplying Ellen and Judith and then Judith with fish and game now and then, even entering the house now, who until Sutpen went away, had never approached nearer than the scuppernong arbor behind the kitchen where on Sunday afternoons he and Sutpen would drink from the demi-john and the bucket of spring water which Wash fetched from almost a mile away….”27
Another indication of Faulkner’s genius is his ability to see in an event as ordinary as a young man ordering pie and coffee from a waitress with whom he secretly wants some kind of relationship the potential for fine, deep drama. Faulkner’s preference for scant food and small food items continues to display the themes of scarcity and purity that were inescapable in his social and historical environment. In the following passage, Faulkner describes Joe, the boy in the passage just presented, who has come to a restaurant to be served by the waitress, in terms that transparently bring into play the signifiers of purity as immaterial dimension and food as binding, burdensome material necessity:
He believed that the men at the back…were laughing at him. So he sat quite still on the stool, looking down, the dime clutched in his palm. He did not see the waitress until the two overlarge hands appeared upon the counter opposite him and into sight. He could see the figured pattern of her dress and the bib of an apron and the two bigknuckled hands lying on the edge of the counter as completely immobile as if they were something she had fetched in from the kitchen. “Coffee and pie,” he said.
Her voice sounded downcast, quite empty. “Lemon coconut chocolate.”
In proportion to the height from which her voice came, the hands could not be her hands at all. “Yes,” Joe said.
The hands did not move. The voice did not move. “Lemon coconut chocolate. Which kind.” To the others they must have looked quite strange. Facing one another across the dark, stained, greasecrusted and frictionsmooth counter, they must have looked a little like they were praying: the youth countryfaced, in clean Spartan clothing, with an awkwardness which invested him with a quality unworldly and innocent; and the woman opposite him, downcast, still, waiting, who because of her smallness partook likewise of that quality of his, of something beyond flesh. Her face was highboned, gaunt. The flesh was taut across her
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Mariano Rivera
Early life
Rivera was born in Panama City, Panama on November 29, 1969 to Mariano, Sr., a ship captain in the fishing industry, and Delia. Rivera grew up in the Panamanian fishing village of Puerto Caimito, frequently playing soccer with his friends. They also played baseball in the streets by substituting milk cartons for gloves and tree branches for bats, and taping beat-up baseballs. Rivera used this makeshift equipment until his father bought him his first leather glove when he was 12 years old. He thought of baseball as a pastime and did not seriously consider playing professionally. After graduating from Pablo Sanchez High School at age 16, he worked 12-hour days on a commercial shrimping boat on which his father was captain. Rivera did not consider taking up the profession as an adult, though, calling the job “way too tough”. As a 19-year-old, he had to abandon a capsizing 120-ton commercial boat, all but convincing him to give the job up.
As a shortstop, in 1988, Rivera began to play baseball for an amateur team, Panam Oeste, representing his local district. Herb Raybourn, the New York Yankees’ director of Latin American operations, saw athleticism in Rivera but did not project him to be a Major League shortstop. A year later, Panam Oeste’s pitcher performed so poorly that Rivera volunteered to pitch. Yankees scout Chico Heron attended one of his games and after watching Rivera throw, Heron arranged for him to attend a Yankees tryout camp in Panama City where Raybourn was visiting. Raybourn was surprised that scouts had shown interest in Rivera as a pitcher a year later, considering they passed on him as a shortstop. Although Rivera had no formal pitching training and only threw 8587 miles per hour (MPH), Raybourn was impressed by Rivera’s athleticism and smooth pitching motion, along with the ease with which he threw the ball, so he considered him a raw talent. Raybourn signed the amateur free agent to a contract with a US,000 signing bonus (,892 in current dollar terms) on February 17, 1990, in Rivera’s living room.
Professional baseball career
Minor leagues (19901995)
After signing his contract in Panama with the Yankees organization, Rivera, who spoke no English at the time, left home for the first time. He flew to the United States to begin pitching for the Rookie level Yankees of the Gulf Coast League, a minor league affiliate of the New York Yankees. At that point in his career, he was considered by scouts to be a “fringe prospect” at best, but he made good progress with a strong 1990 season for the GCL Yankees. Pitching mostly in relief, he allowed a 0.17 earned run average (ERA) in 52 innings pitched, and he allowed only 24 baserunners. The following year, he ascended to the Class A level Greensboro Hornets of the South Atlantic League, where he started 15 of the 29 games he pitched in. Despite a 49 win-loss record, he recorded a 2.75 ERA in 114+23 innings pitched and struck out 123 batters while walking only 36 batters. New York Yankees manager Buck Showalter took notice of Rivera’s strong strikeout-to-walk ratio, calling it “impressive in any league” and stating, “This guy is going to make it.”
In 1992, Rivera moved up to the Class A-Advanced Fort Lauderdale Yankees of the Florida State League. He started 10 games in Fort Lauderdale, compiling a 53 win-loss record and a 2.28 ERA. He attempted to improve the movement on his slider by snapping his wrist in his pitching motion, but he inadvertently caused damage to the ulnar collateral ligament in his throwing elbow. He had elbow surgery in August 1992 to repair the damage, ending his season and briefly interrupting his minor league career. It was expected that he would require Tommy John surgery, but during the procedure, it was realized that the ligament did not need to be replaced, but rather “moved”. His rehabilitation coincided with the 1992 expansion draft to fill the rosters for the Florida Marlins and Colorado Rockies expansion teams. Rivera was left unprotected by the Yankees but was not drafted. He successfully rehabilitated his arm in the early part of 1993 and resumed pitching that year. He first joined the Rookie level Yankees to make two abbreviated starts, before returning to the Class A level Hornets to start 10 more games.
In 1994, he ascended from the Class A-Advanced level Tampa Yankees of the Florida State League to the Double-A level Albany-Colonie Yankees of the Eastern League, and then to the Triple-A level Columbus Clippers of the International League. Over the course of the year, Rivera finished with a strong 102 record in 22 starts, although he struggled with Columbus, recording a 5.81 ERA in six starts. He began the 1995 season with Columbus with the ranking of ninth-best prospect in the Yankees organization by Baseball America.
Major leagues (1995-present)
19951997
Rivera made his Major League debut against the California Angels on May 23, 1995 as a starting pitcher in place of an injured Jimmy Key, but he pitched poorly in a 100 loss. He experienced mixed success as a Major League starter and therefore found himself splitting time between the Yankees and their Columbus minor league affiliate. As a 25-year-old rookie with prior major arm surgery, Rivera’s role on the team was not guaranteed. Yankees management once considered trading him to the Detroit Tigers for David Wells, but Yankees general manager Gene Michael quickly called off negotiations when he learned that Rivera had begun to throw at 9596 MPH in one of his starts, six MPH faster than his previous average velocity. Rivera attributes his inexplicable improvement to God. He also participated in a two-hit shutout of the Chicago White Sox on July 4, when he recorded a career-high 11 strikeouts. Overall, he finished his first season in the Major Leagues with a 53 record and a 5.51 ERA. His improvement during the year and his success in the 1995 American League Division Series, in which he pitched 5+13 scoreless innings of relief, convinced Yankees management to keep him and move him into the bullpen the following season as a full-time relief pitcher.
“He needs to pitch in a higher league, if there is one. Ban him from baseball. He should be illegal.”
om Kelly, manager of Minnesota Twins, after his team faced Rivera in April 1996
Prior to the 1996 season, the Seattle Mariners, sensing the Yankees’ unease with starting rookie Derek Jeter at shortstop, offered to trade veteran shortstop Flix Fermn to the Yankees for Rivera, but no deal was ever agreed upon. In 1996, Rivera served primarily as a setup pitcher for closer John Wetteland, typically pitching in the seventh and eighth innings before Wetteland pitched in the ninth. Their effectiveness gave the Yankees a 703 win-loss record that season when leading after the sixth inning, essentially shortening the games for their opponents by three innings. Across games between April 15 and May 21, Rivera pitched 26 consecutive scoreless innings, including 15 consecutive hit-less innings. He played an important role in the Yankees advancing to and winning the 1996 World Series against the Atlanta Braves for the franchise’s first World Series championship since 1978. In the regular season, Rivera finished with a 2.09 ERA in 107+23 innings pitched, recorded a league-leading 26 holds, and set a Yankees single-season record for strikeouts by a reliever (130). In the postseason, he allowed just one earned run in 14+13 innings pitched. He finished third in the voting for the American League (AL) Cy Young Award, given annually to the league’s best pitcher based on voting by baseball writers.
Rivera impressed Yankees management enough that they chose not to re-sign Wetteland, an offseason free agent. They subsequently installed Rivera in the role of the Yankees’ closer for the 1997 season to typically pitch the ninth innings of games. In April, MLB retired the uniform number 42 league-wide to honor Jackie Robinson, although Rivera has been allowed to continue wearing the number per a grandfather clause. Rivera’s transition from setup man to closer was not seamless; he blew three of his first six save opportunities, and he indicated that he was initially uncomfortable in the role. Eventually, he settled into his new duties, accidentally discovering how to throw a cut fastball, earning his first All-Star selection, and finishing with 43 saves in 52 opportunities and a 1.88 ERA in the regular season. However, his postseason was not as successful as his regular season. In the 1997 American League Division Series against the Cleveland Indians, he blew a save in Game 4 by allowing a game-tying home run to Sandy Alomar, Jr., with the Yankees four outs from advancing to the next round. The Yankees eventually lost that game and the next, eliminating them from the playoffs.
19982001
Members of the Yankees coaching staff were concerned that the disappointment of the previous season’s end would affect Rivera’s performance in the future. He put any such concerns to rest in the following seasons, as he became one of the best closers in the Major Leagues by regularly throwing a sharp-breaking cutter, which quickly became his signature pitch and earned a reputation for breaking the bats of hitters. In 1998, he saved 36 games in 41 opportunities and finished with a 1.91 ERA. Along with his success and cutter, Rivera’s entrance music became part of his identity as a closer; Metallica’s song “Enter Sandman” was selected for him by Yankee Stadium public address staff, as he was indifferent about his entrance music. Rivera became the centerpiece of a shut-down bullpen that played a large role in the Yankees’ success in the late 1990s, with relievers Jeff Nelson, Mike Stanton, and Ramiro Mendoza providing solid middle relief. In the 1998 postseason, Rivera saved six games and pitched 13+13 scoreless innings, and he clinched the Yankees’ sweep of the San Diego Padres in the 1998 World Series, capping off a season in which the Yankees won a Major League record-125 wins between the regular season and the postseason.
In 1999, Rivera was voted as an All-Star, led the Major Leagues with 45 saves in 49 opportunities, and recorded a 1.83 ERA to win his first AL Rolaids Relief Man Award, an annual award for the league’s best closer based on their statistical performance. He was also given the World Series MVP Award for earning two saves and a win against the Braves in the 1999 World Series, in which he closed out the team’s championship title, his third. He finished 1999 by pitching 43 consecutive scoreless innings between the regular season and postseason, and he finished third in voting for the AL Cy Young Award. In the offseason, he lost his arbitration case, in which he requested an annual salary of .25 million, but the .25 million salary that the arbitrators awarded him instead set a baseball record for the highest arbitration award. In the 2000 season, Rivera was again selected as an All-Star, and he ended the season with 36 saves in 41 opportunities and a 2.85 ERA. In the postseason, he saved six games and allowed three earned runs in 15+23 innings. He helped the Yankees defeat the New York Mets in the 2000 World Series by closing out a World Series championship for his team for the third consecutive year. It was his fourth championship title overall.
Rivera’s postseason success during the Yankees’ titles run earned him a reputation as an exceptional postseason performer. Through the 1998 postseason, he had only allowed two earned runs in 35 postseason innings for a 0.51 ERA, qualifying him for the Major League’s record for lowest career postseason ERA; it is a record he still holds through 133+13 postseason innings. From 1998 to 2001, he converted 23 consecutive postseason saves, and from 1998 to 2000, he pitched 34+13 consecutive scoreless innings in the postseason; both feats are also Major League records.
Prior to the 2001 season, with one year left on his contract, Rivera signed the first long-term deal of his career, agreeing to a four-year, .99 million contract. That season, Rivera was voted onto the All-Star team for a third consecutive year. He finished the season with a 2.34 ERA, a closer career-high 80+23 innings pitched, and an MLB-leading 50 saves in 57 opportunities, the second time he led the Majors in saves. This earned him his second AL Rolaids Relief Man Award. However, his year ended with one of his most infamous moments; in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks, he blew the save in the bottom of the ninth inning, in part due to his own throwing error. He lost the Series later in the inning by allowing Luis Gonzalez’s bloop single with the bases loaded to score the winning run.
20022005
Injuries limited Rivera’s playing time in 2002. He was placed on the disabled list three times for groin and shoulder strains, and he pitched only 46 innings while accumulating just 28 saves in 32 opportunities. Rivera also missed the first month of the 2003 season with another groin injury. Despite concerns by sports writers about his reliability, Rivera quickly returned to form after re-assuming his closer role on May 1, recording 40 saves in 46 opportunities with a 1.66 ERA in 64 games in the 2003 regular season.
In the 2003 American League Championship Series against the arch-rival Boston Red Sox, Rivera delivered one of the best postseason performances of his career. In Game 7, he entered in the ninth inning with the score tied 55 and pitched three scoreless innings en route to becoming the game’s winning pitcher. Though Aaron Boone’s eleventh-inning walk-off home run clinched the Yankees’ World Series berth, Rivera was named the series’ MVP for recording two saves and a win. He celebrated by running out to the mound and collapsing in joy and exhaustion to thank God, as Boone rounded the bases and was mobbed by his teammates at home plate. The Yankees would eventually lose in the 2003 World Series to the Florida Marlins; Rivera only allowed one earned run in the 16 innings he pitched that postseason.
Prior to the 2004 season, with a year left on his contract, Rivera signed a two-year extension worth million, with an option for a third year in 2007. The 2004 season was another stellar year for him. In addition to becoming the 17th pitcher in MLB history to record 300 saves, he made the All-Star team with 32 saves at the break, then an American League record. Rivera finished the season with a 1.94 ERA and a career-best 53 saves in 57 opportunities, the third time he led the majors in that category. For his performance that year, he won his third AL Rolaids Relief Man Award and finished third in voting for the AL Cy Young Award.
Following the Yankees’ victory in the 2004 American League Division Series against the Twins, Rivera learned that two of his relatives had been killed in a swimming accident at his home in Panama. Despite his status being in doubt for the American League Championship Series against the Red Sox, he returned to New York for Game 1 on the same day the funeral was held in Panama. He recorded a save later that night, as well as in Game 2. Although the Yankees led three-games-to-none in the series, Rivera blew saves in Games 4 and 5, and the Red Sox won both games in extra innings to avoid elimination. In Game 4, pinch runner Dave Roberts stole second base off Rivera and scored on a base hit to tie the game. In Game 5, Rivera entered with a one-run lead with runners on base and allowed a sacrifice fly to tie the score. Although he only allowed one earned run in the 2004 postseason, the Red Sox’ comeback victories helped them become the first team in Major League history to win a best-of-seven series in which they trailed three-games-to-none. They eventually won the 2004 World Series and broke the Curse of the Bambino.
Unlike previous years, Rivera did not throw during the winter in the offseason, leading to speculation that he needed more time to recover from the 2004 season, in which he made the most appearances of his closing career. His 2005 season started out on a low note. After missing time in spring training with elbow bursitis, he blew his first two saves of the season against the Red Sox, marking four consecutive blown opportunities against Boston, dating back to the previous postseason. Fans at Yankee Stadium booed Rivera, upsetting his teammates and making them come to his defense. The stretch prompted baseball journalists to speculate if his days as a dominant pitcher were over. He was subsequently cheered by Red Sox fans during pre-game introductions at Fenway Park the following week, as recognition for his subpar performances against the Red Sox. He took the ovation with a good sense of humor and tipped his cap to the crowd.
Rivera responded in dominating fashion and his 2005 season turned out to be, at that point in his career, statistically his greatest individual year. He made the All-Star team and finished the season with 43 saves in 47 opportunities, along with a career-low 1.38 ERA. He posted then-career bests in many statistical categories, highlighted by his converting 31 consecutive save opportunities and allowing an average of 0.87 walks plus hits per inning pitched (WHIP). Opposing batters only hit for a batting average of .177 against him (see batting average against), then a closer career-best. Along with winning his fourth AL Rolaids Relief Man Award, Rivera finished second in the voting for the AL Cy Young Award to starter Bartolo Coln and ninth for the AL Most Valuable Player Award, his highest finishes in voting for both awards.
20062008
Rivera pitching in 2007
Prior to the 2006 season, a minor controversy occurred in New York City when Yankees fans objected to new Mets closer Billy Wagner using “Enter Sandman” as his entrance music, as they believed he had encroached on Rivera’s territory in New York; many were unaware Wagner had previously used the song before joining the Mets. In the regular season, despite a subpar April, Rivera made his third consecutive All-Star team, with a 1.76 ERA and 19 saves entering the All-Star break. He saved the 2006 MLB All-Star Game, tying a record for three All-Star Game saves. That summer, on July 16, he reached another milestone, becoming the fourth pitcher in Major League history to record 400 saves. He was sidelined for most of September because of an elbow strain in his throwing arm, but he finished the 2006 season with 34 saves in 37 opportunities and an ERA of 1.80, the fourth consecutive season he posted a sub-2.00 ERA. His performance in 2006 earned him the DHL Delivery Man of the Year Award for a second consecutive season, voted on annually by fans.
Before the 2007 season, Rivera attempted to negotiate a new contract to remain with the Yankees beyond the end of the season. Team management refused to negotiate near the start of the season, prompting him to respond that he would consider pursuing free agency after the season. Rivera had an uncharacteristically poor month in April, blowing his first two save opportunities, compiling two losses, and surrendering nine earned runs in 7+23 innings. Concerned baseball journalists attributed his struggles to infrequent use, as the Yankees presented him with few opportunities to enter a game. Rivera recovered, saving 30 of his next 32 opportunities and posting a 2.26 ERA over the final five months of the season. He also passed John Franco for third place on the all-time saves list by recording his 425th career save. Still, 2007 was his weakest statistical regular season as a closer, as he recorded closer career worsts in earned runs (25), hits (68), and ERA (3.15). His 30 saves in 34 opportunities were his second-lowest total as a closer. After the Yankees were eliminated from the playoffs in the opening round, he stated that he intended to test the free agent market, as he was unhappy that long-time Yankees manager Joe Torre was not re-signed and that the Yankees’ ownership was transitioning from George Steinbrenner to his sons. Speculation that Rivera would sign elsewhere ended when he agreed to a three-year, million contract with the Yankees, making him the highest paid reliever in baseball history.
Rivera throws against the Seattle Mariners in 2008
Rivera rebounded in 2008, starting the year by pitching 16 scoreless innings and converting his first 28 saves, both personal bests to start a season, and he earned the Delivery Man of the Month Award for April. His first-half performance, highlighted by a 1.06 ERA and 23 saves in as many opportunities, earned him his ninth All-Star selection. Since the 2008 MLB All-Star Game was being held at Yankee Stadium in the venue’s final year of existence, a few sports writers proposed making Rivera the American League starting pitcher, although he appeared for the AL as a reliever. Despite struggling in non-save situations in the second-half of the season, he finished the season well and recorded two milestones in September: on September 15, he recorded his 479th save to pass Lee Smith for second all-time in regular season saves; on September 21, in the final game in Yankee Stadium, Rivera threw the final pitch in the venue’s history, retiring the Baltimore Orioles’ Brian Roberts on a ground-out. After the Yankees missed the postseason for the first time in his career, Rivera mentioned that he had suffered from shoulder pain throughout the year. Tests revealed calcification of the acromioclavicular joint in his throwing shoulder, for which he underwent minor arthroscopic surgery in the offseason.
Rivera finished 2008 with perhaps the best individual season of his career. Along with a 1.40 ERA and 39 saves in 40 opportunities, he set career bests in multiple statistical categories, including WHIP (0.67), on-base plus slugging (OPS)-against (.422), batting average-against (.165), save conversion percentage (97.5%), walks (6), earned runs (11), and blown saves (1). He averaged 9.81 strikeouts per 9 innings pitched, his best mark as a closer. He had a historical season in terms of his control, as his strikeout-to-walk ratio of 12.83 made him the second pitcher since 1900 to record a figure that high in a season. He placed fifth in the AL Cy Young Award voting.
2009resent
Rivera during the 2009 World Series victory parade
Rivera struggled early in 2009, surrendering five home runs in the season’s first six weeks, including back-to-back home runs for the first time in his career. Despite concerns about his cutter’s effectiveness and his shoulder’s health at age 39, he recovered from his slump. On June 28, he reached a historic milestone by becoming the second pitcher ever to earn 500 regular season saves. In the same game, he recorded his first career run batted in by drawing a walk with the bases loaded against fellow closer Francisco Rodrguez. Rivera earned a tenth All-Star selection with 23 saves in 24 opportunities and a 2.43 ERA in the first half. At the 2009 MLB All-Star Game, he set a record by saving his fourth All-Star Game. He continued to dominate in the season’s second-half by allowing earned runs in only two of his final 39 appearances, winning July’s Delivery Man of the Month Award, and setting a new personal best by converting 36 consecutive save opportunities. Rivera finished the regular season with a 1.76 ERA, 44 saves in 46 opportunities, and a 0.90 WHIP. In the postseason, he pitched 16 innings, allowing one earned run and saving five games, and he was on the mound to clinch the Yankees’ victory in the 2009 World Series against the Philadelphia Phillies, his fifth championship. He was the only closer among postseason teams that did not record a loss or blown save. He earned several awards for his 2009 performance, including his third DHL Delivery Man Award, his fifth AL Rolaids Relief Man Award, and the 2009 Sporting News Pro Athlete of the Year Award. ESPN.com’s Jerry Crasnick called Rivera the most valuable Major League pitcher of the decade.
Pitching style
Rivera’s signature pitch is his cut fastball or “cutter”. The pitch breaks sharply towards left-handed hitters, exhibiting late movement similar to a slider, but with the velocity of a fastball. He mixes the cutter with both a four-seam and two-seam fastball. He throws all three fastballs in the low-to-mid 90s MPH, usually at 9295 MPH. He varies the movement on his cutter by adjusting the pressure he puts on the ball with his middle finger.
Rivera discovered the cutter accidentally while playing catch with Ramiro Mendoza in June 1997, finding that the fastballs he threw in the bullpen were beginning to move sharply and unpredictably. After failing to straighten out the pitch and prevent the movement altogether, he accepted it and began to use the pitch in games, prominently featuring it beginning in 1998. When asked where his ability to throw the pitch came from, he explained, “It was just from God. I didn’t do anything. It was natural.” Rivera has taught the cutter to several other pitchers, including Roy Halladay, who now uses it as part of his repertoire.
“You know what’s coming, but you know what’s coming in horror movies too. It still gets you.”
ike Sweeney, referring to his inability to hit the cutter despite expecting it
Rivera’s cut fastball is a respected pitch among Major League hitters. Chipper Jones once compared it to a “buzzsaw”, (referring to its tendency of breaking left-handed hitters’ bats) after witnessing teammate Ryan Klesko break three bats in a plate appearance against Rivera in the 1999 World Series. Jim Thome called it “the single best pitch ever in the game”. In 2004, ESPN.com ranked his cutter as the best “out pitch” in baseball. Buster Olney described his cut fastball as “the most dominant pitch of a generation”. Although switch-hitters usually bat left-handed against right-handed pitchers to better see the ball’s release point, many switch-hitters bat right-handed when facing the right-handed Rivera to avoid being jammed on their hands by his cutter.
Since Rivera relies on variations of a fastball, all of similar speed, much of his success is attributed to his impeccable control and ability to consistently throw strikes. His 3.93 career strikeout-to-walk ratio in the regular season ranks fourth-best in Major League history. He has achieved his success with a smooth, “fluid” pitching delivery, as an easily repeatable throwing motion allows a pitcher to yield consistent results.
Legacy
“You know when you come to New York, you’re going to get Mariano. It’s not just before the game. I start thinking about him on the plane ride up. I know he’s there waiting, and he’ll be out there, and I will have to see him with the game on the line. So I start getting ready for him. I start thinking, ‘What am I going to do to try to hit Mariano?’”
abe Gross
Rivera is considered by many baseball experts to be the greatest closer in baseball history, despite many of them unfavorably comparing modern closers to those who pitched between the 1960s and 1980s. The role of the modern closer has received criticism for becoming too specialized and easy; closers in past decades often entered games in the middle of innings with runners on base and had to pitch multiple innings, while modern closers are usually called upon to only pitch the ninth inning from the start. Despite being utilized much like a modern closer, Rivera has achieved a reputation as an all-time great reliever. Hall of Fame starter-turned-closer Dennis Eckersley calls him “the best ever, no doubt”, while Trevor Hoffman, the only closer with more saves than Rivera, says he “will go down as the best reliever in the game in history”. Buster Olney says, “No other player can instill calm in his team’s fans as reliably as Mariano Rivera, the game’s dominant closer and arguably the best relief pitcher of all time.” Joe Torre, who managed Rivera for most of his career, says, “He’s the best I’ve ever been around. Not only the ability to pitch and perform under pressure, but the calm he puts over the clubhouse.” Based on his career performance, many baseball journalists consider Rivera to be the most valuable Yankees player from the team’s late 1990s championship years. Although voters have historically been reluctant to allow relievers into the Baseball Hall of Fame, sports writers and baseball experts anticipate he will be voted into the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility, five years after retirement.
“I respect Mo more than anybody in the game. The guy goes out there, gets three outs and shakes (Jorge) Posada’s hand. You appreciate someone who respects the game like he does, respects the people he plays with and against, and obviously his results speak for themselves.”
ichael Young
Rivera is well-known for his composure and calm, placid demeanor, which contrasts with the rough-edged, emotional, and demonstrative nature of many other closers. Derek Jeter called him the “most mentally tough teammate [he's] ever played with”. On his ability to quickly forget bad performances, Rivera explains, “You just keep going. It’s frustrating and it’s tough [to fail], but at the same time, you just have to move on and get the next opportunity.” He is well-respected among his peers for his professionalism. Fellow closer Joe Nathan says, “I look up to how he’s handled himself on and off the field… You never see him show up anyone and he respects the game. I’ve always looked up to him and it’s always a compliment to be just mentioned in the same sentence as him.” Despite the closer role being characterized by volatility and turnover, Rivera is known for his consistency. His tenure as the Yankees’ closer has exceeded the ordinary lifetime of a closer, as he has the longest active tenure for a closer by more than six years. His 15-year tenure with the Yankees is tied for the longest of any active pitcher. He has been one of the most successful pitchers at closing games, as he has converted 89.46% of his save opportunities, the second-best percentage among relievers with at least 200 save opportunities. He ranks highly in many statistical categories amongst both starting and relief pitchers; he has the lowest career WHIP (1.01) and ERA (2.25) of any pitcher in the live-ball era, making him one of the top pitchers since 1920 in preventing runners from reaching base and scoring. Rivera also has MLB history’s best adjusted ERA+ (202), meaning his career ERA is half of the league average, adjusted for the pitcher’s ballpark.
Rivera is also considered one of the best relief pitchers in postseason history. Torre says, “Let’s face it. The regular season for Mo is great, but that’s the cupcakes and the ice cream. What separates him from everybody else is what he’s done in the postseason.” Rivera sports a postseason win-loss record of 81 and WHIP of 0.77, and he holds numerous postseason records, including lowest ERA (0.74), most saves (39), most consecutive scoreless innings pitched (34+13), most consecutive save opportunities converted (23), and most appearances (88). No pitcher has half as many postseason saves as he does. His dominance in postseason games has often led to him being utilized for two-inning appearances, as he has recorded a record-14 saves of this variety. Between 1998 and 2008, he recorded 26 postseason saves of four or more outs; the second-highest total by any other pitcher is four such saves, and the rest of baseball combined had 33. In 19 of his postseason series, he allowed no earned runs. Life recognized his postseason success by naming him one of the 16 most “clutch” professional athletes. In a 2009 ESPN.com poll, Rivera was voted as one of the top five postseason players in MLB history.
Rivera will be the last MLB player to wear the uniform number 42, which was retired throughout baseball in 1997 in honor of Jackie Robinson.
Personal life
Rivera married his wife Clara on November 9, 1991. They have three sons: Mariano Jr., Jafet, and Jaziel. Rivera is a cousin of former Yankee Rubn Rivera.
Over the course of his professional career, Rivera learned English. He is now a proponent of Latino players learning English and of American press members learning Spanish, in order to bridge the cultural gap.
Rivera is a devout Christian. He maintains that God has a reason for everything that happens. For example, he found his failure in Game 7 of the 2001 World Series easier to deal with when he learned of the consequences it had on a teammate. Had the Yankees won Game 7 and the World Series, Enrique Wilson would have flown home to the Dominican Republic and been aboard the deadly American Airlines Flight 587. “I am glad we lost the World Series,” Rivera told Wilson, “because it means that I still have a friend.” Rivera’s pitching glove is inscribed “Phil. 4:13″, in reference to the Bible verse Philippians 4:13 (“I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me”).
Rivera is a partner in a restaurant in New Rochelle, New York called “Mo’s New York Grill”. He is also involved with philanthropic contributions in his native Panama, which include building an elementary school and a church, providing Christmas gifts to children, and developing a program that provides computer access and adult mentors to youths.
Rivera is signed to an endorsement deal with sports apparel company Nike, Inc.
Career highlights
Awards and honors
Award / Honor
Time(s)
Date(s)
American League All-Star
10
1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009
American League Championship Series MVP Award
1a
2003
American League Player of the Week
2
May 26 June 1, 2008; June 2228, 2009
American League Rolaids Relief Man Award
5b
1999, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2009
Babe Ruth Award
1
1999
DHL Delivery Man of the Year Award
3c
2005, 2006, 2009
DHL Delivery Man of the Month Award
2
April 2008, July 2009
Sporting News Pro Athlete of the Year Award
1
2009
Sporting News Reliever of the Year Award
6c
1997, 1999, 2001, 2004, 2005, 2009
This Year in Baseball’s Closer of the Year Award
4c
2004, 2005, 2006, 2009
Thurman Munson Award
1
2003
World Series MVP Award
1a
1999
World Series champion
5
1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2009
aOnly reliever to win both a League Championship Series MVP Award and World Series MVP Award
bTied for most times won
cMost times won
Records
MLB Records
Accomplishment
Record (as of 2009)
Regular season
Highest career adjusted ERA+ (minimum 1,000 innings pitched)
202
Lowest career ERA among relievers (minimum 1,000 innings pitched)
2.25
Most saves in American League history
526
Most appearances in American League history
917
Most consecutive seasons with at least 25 saves
13d (19972009)
Most seasons with 20-plus saves and sub-2.00 ERA
9 (199799, 200306, 200809)
Most seasons with 20-plus saves, sub-2.00 ERA, and sub-1.00 WHIP
5 (1999, 200506, 200809)
Most games saved for a single winning pitcher
63 (Andy Pettitte)
Most interleague saves
59
Most saves in a single ballpark
230 (original Yankee Stadium)
Postseason
Lowest career ERA (minimum 30 innings pitched)
0.74
Most saves
39
Most consecutive scoreless innings pitched
34+13
Most consecutive save opportunities converted
23
Most two-inning saves
14
Most appearances
88
Most games finished
70
Most saves in each round of postseason
16 (LDS), 12 (LCS), 11 (WS)
Most appearances in each round of postseason
34 (LDS), 30 (LCS), 24 (WS)
Most games finished in each round of postseason
27 (LDS), 24 (LCS), 19 (WS)
Lowest career ERA in Division Series history
0.35
Most saves to clinch series
9
Most times recording the final out of a series
14
Most times recording the final out of a World Series
4
Most consecutive postseasons with an appearance
13 (19952007)
All-Star Game
Most All-Star selections as reliever
10
Most All-Star Game saves
4
Yankees Records
Accomplishment
Record (as of 2009)
Regular season
Most saves
526
Most saves in single season
53 (2004)
Lowest career WHIP
1.01
Most appearances
917
Most games finished
773
Most strikeouts by a reliever in single season
130 (1996)
Highest strikeouts per 9 innings in single season
10.87 (1996)
Most consecutive saves converted
36
dTied for most times
Other accomplishments
Rivera has accomplished other feats in his career (as of 2009):
One of two pitchers to record at least 30 saves in twelve separate seasons
One of two pitchers to record at least 40 saves in seven separate seasons
One of two pitchers to record at least 50 saves in two separate seasons
Fourth pitcher to record 300 regular season saves with one team, and second pitcher to record 400 and 500 regular season saves with one team
One of nine pitchers to record at least 50 saves in a season
Named the relief pitcher on Major League Baseball’s Latino Legends Team
See also
List of Major League Baseball players from Panama
List of Major League Baseball saves champions
List of Major League Baseball all-time saves leaders
List of Major League Baseball leaders in games finished
References
^ a b Ziegel, Vic (2006-07-14). “Mo Gets More on his Plate”. Daily News. http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/sports/2006/07/14/2006-07-14_mo_gets_more_on_his_plate.html. Retrieved 2006-08-10.
^ a b c d e f O’Dwyer, Kieran (2006-07-27). “A cutter above”. Sporting News. http://www.sportingnews.com/yourturn/viewtopic.php?t=111983. Retrieved 2006-08-09.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Antonen, Mel (2006-10-09). “Yanks’ Rivera continues to learn”. USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/sports/soac/2006-10-09-rivera_x.htm. Retrieved 2006-08-20.
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^ a b Hermoso, Rafael (1998-08-31). “Where Rivera goes for relief takes hat off to Panama”. Daily News. http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/sports/1998/08/31/1998-08-31_where_rivera_goes_for_relief.html. Retrieved 2009-04-28.
^ a b c d Bamberger, Michael (1997-03-24). “Strikeouts By The Boatload”. Sports Illustrated. http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1009676/1/index.htm. Retrieved 2009-02-11.
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^ Carig, Marc (2009-08-15). “Mariano Rivera, Tommy John and an old question answered”. Star-Ledger. http://www.nj.com/yankees/index.ssf/2009/08/mariano_rivera_tommy_john_and.html. Retrieved 2009-08-15.
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^ a b c Associated Press (2006-07-17). “A decade later, Rivera still dominates”. NBC Sports. http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/13907073/site/21683474/. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
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^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p “Mariano Rivera Stats”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/stats?playerId=3240. Retrieved 2008-05-19.
^ “1995 AL Division Series – SEA vs. NYY”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/1995_ALDS2.shtml. Retrieved 2008-05-31.
^ “Mariano Rivera”. Yankeeography. 2002. No. 9, season 1.
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^ Associated Press (2009-06-30). “Rivera adds to legacy as elite closer”. USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/al/yankees/2009-06-30-rivera-milestone_N.htm. Retrieved 2009-11-02.
^ Verducci, Tom (1998-09-25). “In ’96, everyone was Mr. October”. Sports Illustrated. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseball/mlb/features/1998/yankees/comparisons/1996vs1998.html. Retrieved 2007-07-28.
^ a b c “1996 Career Highlights”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/team/player_career.jsp?player_id=121250&y=1996. Retrieved 2009-04-06.
^ “Holds leaders in 1996″. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/shareit/e9br6. Retrieved 2009-10-09.
^ a b c d e f g “Mariano Rivera Individual Player Postseason Stats”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/stats/individual_player_postseason.jsp?c_id=mlb&playerID=121250&statType=2. Retrieved 2006-08-10.
^ “1996 Awards Voting”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/awards/awards_1996.shtml#ALcya. Retrieved 2006-08-10.
^ Hoch, Bryan. “Rivera ‘blessed’ to wear No. 42″. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070415&content_id=1900688. Retrieved 2007-07-27.
^ Michaux, Scott (2008-10-10). “Waynesboro native steps into spotlight”. Augusta Chronicle. http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/2008/10/10/mic_478975.shtml. Retrieved 2008-10-14.
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^ a b Shpigel, Ben (2006-04-05). “For Wagner and Rivera, Play It Again, Metallica”. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/sports/baseball/05mets.html. Retrieved 2009-04-27.
^ McAdam, Sean (2000-10-26). “Rivera and mates to the rescue”. ESPN.com. http://espn-i.starwave.com/mlb/playoffs2000/2000/1025/838729.html. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
^ a b c “Yearly League Leaders & Records for Saves”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/SV_leagues.shtml. Retrieved 2009-06-19.
^ “1999 Career Highlights”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/team/player_career.jsp?player_id=121250&y=1999. Retrieved 2009-04-06.
^ “1999 Awards Voting”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/awards/awards_1999.shtml#ALcya. Retrieved 2006-08-10.
^ Olney, Buster (2000-02-20). “Rivera Loses Ruling on Salary, but Takes It in Stride”. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/20/sports/baseball-rivera-loses-ruling-on-salary-but-takes-it-in-stride.html. Retrieved 2009-05-12.
^ a b c d e f Schoenfield, David (2001-11-05). “Frozen Moment: Rivera finally fails”. ESPN.com. http://espn-i.starwave.com/mlb/playoffs2001/s/frozen/game7.html. Retrieved 2009-11-09.
^ a b c “New York Yankees 9, Seattle Mariners 7″. Retrosheet. 2000-10-17. http://retrosheet.org/boxesetc/2000/B10170NYA2000.htm. Retrieved 2007-07-28. The boxscore states Rivera’s streak was broken at 34 innings, but this is incorrect, as it neglects the out Rivera recorded in Game 4 of the 1997 ALCS after he gave up a run. The streak should be 34+13 innings. Checking individual Retrosheet box scores confirms this.
^ Edes, Gordon (2010-02-17). “Jonathan Papelbon Learns from the Best”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/boston/mlb/columns/story?columnist=edes_gordon&id=4919488. Retrieved 2010-02-19.
^ Kepner, Tyler (2002-08-20). “Rivera Is Out With Injury For 3rd Time”. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/20/sports/baseball-rivera-is-out-with-injury-for-3rd-time.html. Retrieved 2008-05-25.
^ a b Kepner, Tyler (2003-05-01). “Mondesi’s Slam and Rivera’s Debut Frame Victory”. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/01/sports/baseball-mondesi-s-slam-and-rivera-s-debut-frame-victory.html. Retrieved 2008-05-31.
^ Habib, Daniel J. (2003-03-31). “New York Yankees: 2003 Preview”. Sports Illustrated. http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1028354/index.htm. Retrieved 2009-06-03.
^ a b Associated Press (2003-10-17). “Yankees reliever named MVP after 3 innings”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs2003/news/story?id=1639855. Retrieved 2009-10-09.
^ a b “Yankees’ Rivera inks extension”. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. 2004-03-23. http://www.cbc.ca/sports/story/2004/03/23/riverayankees040323.html. Retrieved 2008-05-22.
^ Gagliano, Anthony (2004-05-29). “Rivera earns 300th career save”. MLB.com. http://www.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20040529&content_id=755613&vkey=news_mlb&fext;=.jsp. Retrieved 2007-07-29.
^ Newman, Mark (2004-07-23). “It’s always a classic, so own it now”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20040723&content_id=807352&vkey=news_mlb&fext;=.jsp. Retrieved 2008-07-10.
^ “2004 Awards Voting”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/awards/awards_2004.shtml#ALcya. Retrieved 2006-08-10.
^ a b c “Believe it: Red Sox realize the unbelievable”. ESPN.com. 2004-10-20. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=241020110. Retrieved 2009-05-11.
^ a b Kepner, Tyler (2005-04-08). “Fellow Pitchers Feel Rivera’s Red Sox Pain”. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/08/sports/baseball/08yanks.html. Retrieved 2008-01-03.
^ a b Shaughnessy, Dan (2005-04-07). “Opening series almost too much for us to take”. Boston Globe. http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/articles/2005/04/07/opening_series_almost_too_much_for_us_to_take/. Retrieved 2006-08-18.
^ Cristodero, Damian (2005-04-10). “Boo birds lose perspective with closer Rivera”. St. Petersburg Times. http://www.sptimes.com/2005/04/10/Sports/Boo_birds_lose_perspe.shtml. Retrieved 2008-07-10.
^ a b Klapisch, Bob (2005-04-07). “Red Sox show Rivera who’s boss”. ESPN.com. http://proxy.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=klapisch_bob&id=2031728. Retrieved 2006-12-11.
^ Feinsand, Mark (2005-04-11). “Rivera has some fun with Sox fans”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20050411&content_id=1012575. Retrieved 2006-08-18.
^ a b c O’Connor, Ian (2005-11-08). “Rivera’s season stellar despite Cy Young results”. USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/sports/columnist/oconnor/2005-11-08-oconnor-cyyoung_x.htm. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
^ “2005 Awards Voting”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/awards/awards_2005.shtml. Retrieved 2006-08-10.
^ Feinsand, Mark (2006-07-10). “Guillen tabs Rivera as AL stopper”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20060710&content_id=1551268. Retrieved 2006-08-18.
^ Associated Press (2006-07-11). “Young’s two-run triple in ninth lifts AL All-Stars”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=260711132. Retrieved 2006-08-10.
^ a b Mink, Ryan (2006-07-16). “Rivera notches save No. 400″. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20060716&content_id=1559770. Retrieved 2007-07-29.
^ Associated Press (2006-08-31). “Rivera’s MRI shows mild muscle strain”. Sporting News. http://www.sportingnews.com/yourturn/viewtopic.php?p=1093373. Retrieved 2007-07-28.
^ Feisand, Mark (2006-10-24). “Rivera is DHL Delivery Man of the Year”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20061024&content_id=1722137. Retrieved 2009-04-27.
^ Associated Press (2007-02-14). “Rivera says he’ll consider offers from other teams”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2766006. Retrieved 2009-05-11.
^ a b “Mariano Rivera Stats – 2007 Pitching Splits”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/splits?playerId=3240&type=pitching&year=2007. Retrieved 2008-05-23.
^ a b c White, Paul (2007-05-30). “Confidence game as closer has few winners”. USA Today. http://www.usatoday.com/sports/baseball/2007-05-30-sw-closers_N.htm. Retrieved 2008-05-20.
^ Associated Press (2007-07-14). “Abreu’s HR, 5 RBIs steer Wang, Yankees by Rays”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=270714130. Retrieved 2009-06-18.
^ ESPN.com News Services (2007-10-09). “Exit Sandman?”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3055382. Retrieved 2007-10-09.
^ Klapisch, Bob (2007-10-19). “Fat contracts likely will keep key free agents in Bronx”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=klapisch_bob&id=3070368. Retrieved 2009-05-12.
^ ESPN.com News Services (2007-11-20). “Rivera becomes highest paid closer with Yankees’ deal”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3118286. Retrieved 2009-04-10.
^ a b Hoch, Bryan (2008-05-07). “Mariano is DHL’s Delivery Man for April”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20080507&content_id=2655826. Retrieved 2008-07-16.
^ “Mariano Rivera Stats – 2008 Pitching Splits”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/splits?playerId=3240&type=pitching&year=2008. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
^ Klapisch, Bob (2008-07-08). “Starting Rivera in Midsummer Classic would be ultimate tribute”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/allstar08/columns/story?columnist=klapisch_bob&id=3471345. Retrieved 2008-07-10.
^ Benjamin, Amalie (2008-07-11). “For starters, Rivera?”. Boston.com. http://www.boston.com/sports/baseball/redsox/articles/2008/07/11/for_starters_rivera/. Retrieved 2009-11-02.
^ Associated Press (2008-09-15). “New York begins probable final week at Yankee Stadium with win over ChiSox”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=280915110. Retrieved 2008-09-29.
^ Associated Press (2008-09-21). “For final game at Yankee Stadium, Yanks win to prevent playoff elimination”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=280921110. Retrieved 2008-09-22.
^ Associated Press (2008-09-29). “Yanks’ Rivera to undergo offseason surgery, should be ready for spring”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=3616587. Retrieved 2008-09-29.
^ a b c d e f g h “Mariano Rivera Statistics”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/r/riverma01.shtml. Retrieved 2009-03-18.
^ “2008 Awards Voting”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/awards/awards_2008.shtml#alcya. Retrieved 2009-05-11.
^ a b DiComo, Anthony (2009-05-08). “Limited Rivera allows historic homers”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090508&content_id=4619746. Retrieved 2009-05-08.
^ a b Associated Press (2009-06-28). “Rivera’s 500th save punctuates Yankees’ Subway Series sweep of Mets”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=290628121. Retrieved 2009-06-29.
^ “Mariano Rivera Stats – 2009 Pitching Splits”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/splits?playerId=3240&type=pitching&year=2009. Retrieved 2009-07-13.
^ a b Associated Press (2009-07-14). “Crawford’s glove runs AL’s unbeaten streak to 13 All-Star Games”. ESPN.com. http://espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=290714132. Retrieved 2009-07-14.
^ “Mariano Rivera Stats – 2009 Game Log”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/players/gamelog?playerId=3240&year=2009. Retrieved 2009-09-28.
^ a b Singer, Tom (2009-08-06). “Rivera named Delivery Man for July”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090806&content_id=6283118&. Retrieved 2009-08-07.
^ Hoch, Bryan (2009-09-19). “Mariano records 1,000th strikeout”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090919&content_id=7044328. Retrieved 2009-09-28.
^ a b Associated Press (2009-11-05). “New York Yankees’ core four win elusive fifth title”. Sports Illustrated. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/baseball/mlb/11/05/yankees.core.four.ap/index.html. Retrieved 2009-11-05.
^ Curry, Jack (2009-11-05). “Rivera, Nearing 40, Wants to Play Five More Seasons”. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/sports/baseball/06yankees.html. Retrieved 2009-11-05.
^ a b DiComo, Anthony (2009-10-14). “Mariano wins Delivery Man of Year Award”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20091014&content_id=7455952. Retrieved 2009-10-15.
^ a b Bradley, Ken (2009-12-17). “2009 Sporting News Pro Athlete of the Year: Mariano Rivera, Yankees closer”. Sporting News. http://www.sportingnews.com/mlb/article/2009-12-17/2009-sporting-news-pro-athlete-year-mariano-rivera-yankees-closer. Retrieved 2009-12-17.
^ Crasnick, Jerry (2009-12-16). “Most valuable pitcher of the 2000s”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=crasnick_jerry&id=4747688. Retrieved 2009-12-16.
^ a b c d McCarron, Anthony (2001-10-27). “Poetry in Motion”. Daily News. http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/2001/10/27/2001-10-27_poetry_in_motion.html. Retrieved 2009-04-27.
^ a b Stark, Jayson. “The pitches that scare major leaguers”. ESPN.com. http://static.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/stark_jayson/1382666.html. Retrieved 2009-03-05.
^ “PitchFX – Overview”. Fangraphs. http://www.fangraphs.com/pitchfx.aspx?playerid=844&position=P. Retrieved 2009-05-14.
^ Verducci, Tom (1999-10-25). “Out at Home”. Sports Illustrated. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/features/cover/news/2000/03/22/out_at_home/. Retrieved 2007-05-27.
^ Curry, Jack (2006-07-17). “Guilln’s Rare Retreat Is a Show of Respect for Rivera”. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/17/sports/baseball/17curry.html. Retrieved 2006-08-10.
^ McAdam, Sean (2004-04-20). “Knockout pitches”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?id=1786041. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
^ Olney, Buster (2006-09-29). “20 best postseason weapons”. ESPN.com. http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?entryID=2606205&name=olney_buster. Retrieved 2006-09-29. (preview only)
^ Kepner, Tyler (2004-03-23). “For Yankees and Rivera, It’s Case Closed”. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/23/sports/baseball/23YANK.html. Retrieved 2007-07-25.
^ “AL East”. Sporting News. 2005-07-08. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1208/is_27_229/ai_n14713597. Retrieved 2007-08-23.
^ Viera, Mark (2009-07-21). “With signature pitch, Rivera stays a cut above”. Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/20/AR2009072002902.html. Retrieved 2009-07-21.
^ “Career Leaders & Records for Strikeouts / Base on Balls”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/strikeouts_per_base_on_balls_career.shtml. Retrieved 2009-04-01.
^ DiComo, Anthony (2009-06-29). “Friends, foes respect Rivera’s dominance”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090628&content_id=5587344. Retrieved 2009-06-29.
^ a b c d Caple, Jim (2008-08-05). “The most overrated position in sports”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=caple/080805. Retrieved 2009-05-12.
^ a b c Graham, Bryan Armen (2009-05-05). “On-field achievement gives Rivera edge over instinctive pick Robinson”. Sports Illustrated. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/more/05/02/robinson.rivera/. Retrieved 2009-05-14.
^ Feisand, Mark (2009-07-14). “Yankees Derek Jeter and Mariano Rivera praised at 10th All-Star trip”. Daily News. http://www.nydailynews.com/sports/baseball/yankees/2009/07/14/2009-07-14_derek_jeter_and_mariano_rivera.html. Retrieved 2009-07-14.
^ Hoch, Bryan (2007-04-21). “Rivera’s blown save dooms Yanks”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070420&content_id=1921024. Retrieved 2009-07-08.
^ Rodriguez, Justin (2009-07-14). “All-Starry-eyed Nathan”. Times Herald-Record. http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090714/SPORTS/907140330/. Retrieved 2009-07-14.
^ Trevor Hoffman, the only other pitcher with a longer closer tenure, became a Brewer in 2009, ending his long tenure as closer with the Padres.
^ Stark, Jayson (2009-01-09). “Three Strikes: End of Two Eras Edition”. ESPN.com. http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?entryID=3821949&searchName=stark_jayson. Retrieved 2009-05-19.
^ “Career Leaders & Records for Walks & Hits per IP”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/whip_career.shtml. Retrieved 2009-05-12.
^ “Career Leaders & Records for Earned Run Average”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/earned_run_avg_career.shtml. Retrieved 2009-05-12.
^ a b “Career Leaders & Records for Adjusted ERA+”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/earned_run_avg_plus_career.shtml. Retrieved 2008-10-24.
^ a b c Browne, Ian (2009-10-26). “Entering in eighth, Mariano rewards faith”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20091026&content_id=7549838. Retrieved 2009-10-26. Reference does not include save from Game 2 of 2009 World Series, or clinching 2009 World Series.
^ “16 Great Clutch Athletes”. Life. http://www.life.com/image/493815/in-gallery/23143/16-great-clutch-athletes. Retrieved 2009-06-16.
^ “MLB Hall of Fall (2009)”. ESPN.com. http://espn.go.com/mlb/playoffs/2009/halloffall. Retrieved 2009-10-30.
^ Bryant, Howard (2009-06-12). “At 39, the great Rivera fighting mortality”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=bryant_howard&id=4251481. Retrieved 2009-07-12.
^ Olney, Buster (2005-05-02). “Excerpt from the “Epilogue” for The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty: The Game, the Team, and the Cost of Greatness”. ESPN.com. http://proxy.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/story?columnist=olney_buster&id=2051491. Retrieved 2009-05-12.
^ Hollander, Dave (2005-05-27). “Keeping the faith”. Sports Illustrated. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2005/writers/dave_hollander/05/27/mariano.rivera/index.html. Retrieved 2009-07-09.
^ Fish, Mike (2007-07-06). “Advertisers are riding the Hispanic wave”. ESPN.com. http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/latinosrise/columns/story?id=2341270. Retrieved 2009-07-08.
^ “Mariano Rivera of the New York Yankees named Bank of America presents the American League Player of the Week”. MLB.com. 2008-06-02. http://mlb.com/news/press_releases/press_release.jsp?ymd=20080602&content_id=2821878&vkey=pr_mlb&fext;=.jsp. Retrieved 2009-08-12.
^ Dittmeier, Bobbie (2009-06-29). “Rivera, Dye take home AL weekly award”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090629&content_id=5599550. Retrieved 2009-07-02.
^ “Fireman of the Year / Reliever of the Year Award by The Sporting News”. Baseball Almanac. http://www.baseball-almanac.com/awards/aw_snfi.shtml. Retrieved 2009-06-19.
^ “2009 This Year in Baseball Awards”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/mlb/awards/y2009/tyib/index.jsp. Retrieved 2009-12-17.
^ Dennis Eckersley, Rob Dibble, and Randy Myers are the only other relievers to win a LCS MVP Award and none won the World Series MVP.
^ “Major League Baseball Pitching Stats, Career All Time”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/stats/historical/player_stats.jsp?statType=2&timeFrame=3&timeSubFrame2=0&sortByStat=SV&baseballScope=mlb. Retrieved 2006-08-10.
^ “Historical Player Stats”. MLB.com. http://mlb.mlb.com/stats/historical/player_stats.jsp?teamPosCode=all&statType=2&timeFrame=3&baseballScope=AL&timeSubFrame=0&&sortByStat;=G. Retrieved 2009-12-26.
^ Puma, Mike (2009-07-19). “Yankees’ closer secures one Mo 25-save season”. New York Post. http://www.nypost.com/p/sports/yankees/item_N1JVQvPUvpIbreXG7oO4cI. Retrieved 2009-07-19.
^ “Most seasons with 20+ saves and sub-2.00 ERA (min. 60 IP, 80% games in relief)”. Baseball-Reference. http://bbref.com/pi/shareit/SwzwW. Retrieved 2009-10-05.
^ “Most seasons with 20+ saves, sub-2.00 ERA, sub-1.00 WHIP (min. 60 IP, 80% games in relief)”. Baseball-Reference. http://bbref.com/pi/shareit/CBV3P. Retrieved 2009-10-05.
^ “Most interleague saves”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/shareit/DxBSt. Retrieved 2009-10-15.
^ a b c d “All-time and Single-Season LDS Pitching Leaders”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/LDS_pitching.shtml. Retrieved 2009-10-11.
^ a b c “All-time and Single-Season LCS Pitching Leaders”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/LCS_pitching.shtml. Retrieved 2009-10-26.
^ a b c “All-time and Single-Season World Series Pitching Leaders”. Baseball-Reference. http://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/WS_pitching.shtml. Retrieved 2009-10-11.
^ Associated Press (2009-10-11). “A-Rod, Posada HRs help Yanks complete sweep of Twins”. ESPN.com. http://espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=291011109. Retrieved 2009-10-11. Reference doesn’t include save to clinch 2009 ALCS.
^ Reuters (2008-04-08). “Purple Beverage Company Names New York Yankee Legend Mariano Rivera a Celebrity Spokesman”. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUS126597+08-Apr-2008+BW20080408. Retrieved 2008-10-24. Reference does not include 2009 World Series.
^ Singer, Tom (2009-07-05). “Red Sox six-pack leads AL squad”. MLB.com. http://mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20090705&content_id=5705972. Retrieved 2009-07-05.
^ a b c d e “New…
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