Taking Batting Practice With Mariano Rivera, Baseball’s Best Closer Ever

It’s a boiling hot day in the Bronx, but deep beneath the oppressive summer sun, in the indoor batting cages at Yankee Stadium, I have a task. It’s a proposition that made Major League Baseball’s best hitters quiver in their cleats, accept that the game was over, and maybe use their second or third-best bat, out of fear that the hellacious cutter heading their way would shatter it to pieces: I get to stand in the batter’s box and face down Mariano Rivera, baseball’s most authoritative closer and inarguably the best relief pitcher to ever put fingers to seams.

With the Yankees in the midst of a road trip, the baseball palace is eerily quiet. Poland Spring, New York City’s most ubiquitous bottled water, has taken over for the day, and allowed me to see if my years of youth baseball will provide adequate training for a showdown with Mariano Rivera. And while he’s not giving 100% effort, or even 50%, the ball still dances when he wants it to. After taking my swings against Mo—and whacking a few crisp line drives, flex—he praises the elixir that led to 652 saves. “Hydration is no joke, you gotta take it seriously before the game, during the game, [and in] batting practice,” he says. The ace reliever is a pretty good pitchman, too: “When we play games and it’s 90 degrees, you gotta pump a lot of Poland Spring.”

As we start talking baseball, there’s one thing on my mind. Though I didn’t get to see it at its peak form, I need to know about the pitch that earned him a plaque in Cooperstown.

“The difference with my cutter was, it wasn’t about being hard, it was about movement,” he tells me. “I learned how to control the movement of the cutter—make it smaller, make it bigger—that was the difference. If you add a little bit more speed to that pitch, it can be devastating.” When asked who throws the best cutter in the league today, Rivera admits he’s unequipped to answer that question because he only watches the Yankees. He has watched enough to form one strongly-held opinion, though: “Most of the guys who think they’re throwing a cutter, it’s a slider.”

At 54 years old, Rivera says that a day of tossing batting practice to the media makes him no worse for wear (“No cold tub,” he assures) and that his body still generally feels great. As the conversation shifts to this year’s Yankees—a mercurial bunch who sprinted out of the gates, then lost 21 of 30 in an embarrassing summer swoon, only to recover and rattle off five straight W’s—the game’s all-time saves leader offers some perspective. “They’ve been up and down,” he concedes. “But I played for 19 years—that’s baseball! My hope is that they’ll all come together again like at the beginning of the season and take it all the way to the World Series.”