No one is calling him a failure. In my case, I’m simply saying he failed.

Mariano Rivera is a legendary, amazing player, but he’s not perfect. In fact as I mentioned before, not calling a spade a spade vis a vis the times he’s fai— errr came up short (?) takes away from his accomplishments, which are pretty darned impressive.

And somehow, looking at Mo’s stats, and knowing how many times he has saved our bacon, I can not be confortable with ever calling him a failure.

If in a year of 600 AB, a player bats .500 and posts an OBP of .600, while it may be technically correct, is it really an accurate and descriptive statement to say ‘he failed’ 40% of the time? To say he failed, is to imply we expected success. Players don’t succeed 100% of the time.

As far as you not thinking anyone wants to gloss over Rivera’s role in the losses, I suggest you read through these comments one more time!

If you do, btw, you will also see that I am record as saying Mussina is being too harsh, too. The bottom line here though is if you count 97 as a failure on Mo’s part – which it was, I think, pretty obviously – then you count ’04 too – not just ’01. So that adds up to two post-season moments – or three if you count 04′s game 5 – after Musssina arrived, vs one before he arrived.

I mean, if throwing the exact losing pitch in a series is the only thing considered Rivera’s fault, then yeah, he’s perfect except in ’01.

Maybe they discussed everyone on the roster for the last 8 seasons, in depth, over the course of 50 hours of conversations. Or maybe these quotes are basically “everything” Mussina had to say. Regardless of how Verducci and Torre couch it in the book, we’ll never really know.

The point is that MUSSINA boils everything down to Mariano’s performances, which is absurd, especially given his own poor outings have been a bigger factor in the Yanks recent post season struggles than Rivera’s.

You also said the Yanks lost 2 world series on his watch, which they didn’t. The 04 series was the ALCS and they still had 4 chances to win after his only poor outing of the series. mariano faltered and then the team as a whole could not summon a victory from tie-game top of the 10th in game 4 thru game 7. mariano should take a lot of blame for that, but not nearly the blame that mussina wants to assign.

Over-pa-id …. over-pa-id …. over-pa-id …

It makes no sense to give credit to Rivera for his part in Yankee success without recognizing he also contributed to Yankee failure. If anything it’s testament to his status that he has been that kind of fulcrum for the team for so long. (Though in the post-season it hasn’t really been the case as much of late!)