Not Fair

This isn't the way Mariano Rivera deserves to go out.

For an athlete with this kind of dignity, this amount of class, someone who has never pounded his chest and tried to humiliate the opposition; for a guy who has spent the last 15+ years being the best there ever was at what he does without ever acting like he thought that was a given, this is unacceptable.

But then, when has the world of sports--or any other world, outside of a Hollywood movie--been fair?

Rivera, shagging flies in the outfield as he has done pretty much every other day of his ridiculously long and accomplished career, stepped wrong, hit the wall, and fell to the ground in clear agony, something the rest of the Yankees would surely understand once his diagnosis of an ACL tear and damage to his meniscus was revealed.

"Oh my god," Alex Rodriguez was saying, and you didn't have to be Curtis Pride to read his lips. "Oh my god." Would he have been that devastated if, say, Andruw Jones had hit the turf? Nothing against Jones, who seems like a very nice guy, but no. There are two people on the Yankees whose sudden absence would be this devastating, and the other is Derek Jeter, who at age almost-38 is now hitting .404 for the season.

Maybe CC Sabathia, too.

But it wasn't Jeter, it wasn't Sabathia, it wasn't Rodriguez and it wasn't Jones on that warning track. It was the 42-year-old closer, by his own broad hints playing in his last major league season. It was the player who is considered to be the key to those five World Series championships over the past 16 years. It was a man who believes his ability to throw the cut fastball better than anyone else in history is literally a gift from the heavens.

By all accounts, Mariano Rivera is the greatest gentleman in baseball. His talent, which is impossible to quantify, even in a sport that revels in arcane statistics, comes second to his grace and dignity. Nobody in baseball, no matter how much they loathe the Yankees, dislikes Mariano Rivera. He shows up at All-Star games and shows the competing pitchers how he throws his signature pitch. He mentors young relief pitchers, good and bad, in the Yankee bullpen, not just in mechanics or technique, but in how to carry oneself in the spotlight of New York sports, something Rivera has done just about as well as anyone in history.

Yankee fans have always been aware that there would come a day when that bullpen door would open, but there would be no "Enter Sandman" and there would be no Number 42 trotting out to the pitching mound, a picture of calm in the eye of the hurricane, assuring us all that everything was under control. Mariano Rivera was here.

We just didn't know it would come this abruptly. We thought there would be that victory lap around the league, opposing fans showering their admiration, deservedly, down on Rivera as they did for departing stars like Cal Ripken Jr. That won't happen now, unless Rivera decides against all odds that he'll rehab the knee (which will undoubtedly need surgery) and come back for that victory lap in 2013, at the age of 43, uncertain about his health.

If he does, will be be the "real" Mariano Rivera, or one simply going through the motions? Nah. Rivera has never been about Rivera. If he can't compete at the same level he has--an astounding one--throughout his career, he won't embarrass himself and diminish his team just for accolades. At a thickly emotional press conference after last night's game, the closer, who might otherwise have been on a plane to New York to see to his painful injury, said he would stay with the team in Kansas City "to make sure the guys are all right."

This just isn't fair.