TAMPA — Like the signature pitch Mariano Rivera throws, everyone knew what was coming yesterday and still it cut the baseball soul to hear these words:
“After this year, I am retiring.”
In the end, major league hitters didn’t get to Rivera. Hotel rooms did. He simply has grown tired of being away from home. So at a morning press conference, Rivera began a long goodbye in which he asked for “joy” not sadness.
Nevertheless, there was a funereal quality to the proceedings. All of his teammates lined a side wall silently and reverently. Tributes flowed from power brokers and friends. Finality was the subject, even if Rivera — the definition of on-mound brevity — is now in the midst of the most extended close of his career.
Yet, the most pertinent living eulogies yesterday did not come from the orchestrated press conference. In a fitting coincidence, the Braves were the opponent and it has become accepted wisdom the difference between the Yankees, not the Braves, being a dynasty at the end of the last century was one man — the son of a poor Panamanian fisherman.
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“I would have two more rings if it wasn’t for Mariano Rivera,” said Atlanta bullpen coach Eddie Perez, the Braves’ backup catcher when they lost the World Series to the Yanks in 1996 and ’99.
Take yourself back to the eighth inning of Game 4 of the 1996 World Series. Atlanta was representing the NL for the fourth time in the last five Fall Classics and was the defending champs. The Braves had beaten St. Louis by a combined 32-1 to win the final three games of the NLCS, won the first two World Series games by a cumulative 16-1 score and were leading the Yanks two games to one and Game 4 6-3 when Mark Wohlers was asked to make a two-inning save.
Wohlers was 26, Andruw Jones 19, Chipper Jones 24, and Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and John Smoltz were all 30 or younger. At that moment it was inconceivable to believe the dominant team of the era was in the other dugout to some large extent because of the guy who would pitch the bottom of the eighth, who ironically would become the master of the two-inning postseason save.
“Teams keep looking for closers,” said Fred McGriff, a special coach for Atlanta this spring and a member of the ’96 Braves. “The Yankees have had a rock. He has taken care of Joe Torre and Joe Girardi and a whole organization. If they don’t have him, they don’t have as many titles.”
It is forgotten to time now. But the 1996 Yankees — the cornerstone for the dynasty — were hardly a juggernaut. They finished ninth in the AL in runs and fifth in ERA. No champion had ever finished that low in both categories and won it all. But the Yanks had Rivera, a multi-inning set-up force who assured that just about any time they had a chance to win a tight game, they did.
He became the closer the following season and in 1999, the midyear of the Yankee three-peat, Rivera earned a win and two saves in three games as the Yankees swept Atlanta in the World Series.
Brian Jordan, another special Braves coach this spring and a member of the ’99 Braves, said, “You are professionals and you are doing what you have to do, but everyone knew when he came into the game, the game was over. Give us Rivera and we win some more World Series.”
Those who do advanced metrics will explain the fickle nature of both one-run and postseason games. Yet, during the 1998-2000 run, the Yankees were 7-0 in one-run postseason games. The common denominator: Rivera pitched in every one of them, worked more than an inning in five and gave up zero runs in four two-inning outings.
Rivera was treated like a piece of history yesterday because he changed it. The Yankees brand soared again on his right arm while the Braves became baseball’s Buffalo Bills. Rivera was the constant for the Yankees, a force at a time when offense became overly muscular, a differentiating piece other clubs — the Braves and the rest of the sport — could not conquer or match.
Can he still be that? At 43? More than a decade removed from the dynasty and 10 months after tearing up his knee? With arguably his most flawed Yankees team? He was throwing 91-mph cutters yesterday in a 1-2-3 fifth, getting two punchouts looking in his spring debut.
This is how the long goodbye began, familiarly with dominance against the Braves. Does the great closer get a fairy-tale ending?
joelsherman@nypost.com