The save is the pinch of salt in a grand, rich, ingredient-stuffed pot of gumbo. The save is the bass player in a great rock-and-roll band. The save is Coach, from the prime years of “Cheers,” and it’s Radar, from the prime years of “M*A*S*H,” and it’s Nurse Hathaway, from the prime years of “ER.” The save is the lemon in a perfectly brewed pitcher of iced tea.
The save is opting for satellite radio in your brand-new car.
The save is Tom Hagen in “The Godfather,” and it’s Frankie Pentangeli in “The Godfather, Part 2,” and it’s Alec Baldwin in “Glengarry Glen Ross.” Underappreciated. Unnoticed, even.
Until you take them away. Then see what you have.
The save is never the first thing you think about when it comes to watching a baseball game, when it comes to caring about baseball history and when it comes to jealously guarding the sport’s record book. When you think of baseball, you think of sluggers slugging, and hitters hitting and pitchers — starting pitchers — throwing rising fastballs.
You think about closers somewhere after that.
Unless you follow a team with a lousy closer. Or a mediocre closer. Or even a pretty good closer … who happened to blow last night’s game.
KING’S Q&A WITH MARIANO RIVERA
SHERMAN: FROM SHORTSTOP TO SAVIOR
Relief pitchers are almost always best appreciated in the absence of success. Which probably explains why the last few weeks of the baseball season have kind of snuck up on us, why Mariano Rivera’s “pursuit” of 602 saves has been something of a private pursuit, a quiet quest, a lonely expedition toward another rung of immortality.
A few weeks ago, asked about the inevitability of first joining Trevor Hoffman as the only pitcher in history with 600 saves, then passing Hoffman’s record of 601, Rivera shrugged and said, “The record isn’t what’s important to me. It’s what the record has meant to the Yankees that matters.” That is the beauty of the save, of course. Every single time Rivera added to his collection, right up to 602, and however higher he constructs this tower of triumph, represents a Yankees victory.
Every single one.
The Yankees have won about 60 percent of the time Derek Jeter’s been in the lineup since 1996; it’s fair to say that’s about the same winning percentage they’ve amassed in each of the games in which he’s gotten one of his 3,000-plus hits. Alex Rodriguez’s teams in Seattle, Texas and New York have won roughly 56 percent of the time; A-Rod has hit plenty of home runs in losses. There is no guarantee the Yankees will win when he hits his 700th home run, or when he hits No. 715, or if he ever hits No. 763.
The Yankees won the first time Rivera recorded a save 15 years ago, and they won his 150th save, and his 438th, and his 600th in Seattle and No. 602 Monday afternoon vs. Minnesota. Every single time Rivera has picked up a save it’s meant that — to quote Michael Kay’s new catch phrase — they’ve put one on the left side of the hyphen.
So, no, the save record may not capture the imagination the way Pete Rose’s hit record does, or the way Hank Aaron’s home run record used to, or the way Cy Young’s 511 victories boggles the mind or the way Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak stretches the bounds of what we think to be possible.
But you’d better believe it’s valuable. Six-hundred-and-two times since 1996, the Yankees have won a baseball game because Rivera got the 27th out of a game (or sometimes the 30th, or the 33rd, or the 39th). For a team that makes no pretense about being in the business of winning baseball games, what can be more prized than that?
So no: there were no HBO specials for Rivera chronicling the days and weeks leading up to 602. There was no traveling circus following him city-to-city, as there surely will be when the time comes for A-Rod to delete Barry Bonds’ name from the books, even if the asterisk will have to stay in place.
Most closers are remembered for their failures: Armando Benitez and Donnie Moore, even Hoffman and Dennis Eckersley, two of the finest practitioners ever. And yes, even the great Rivera has had his moments of all-too-human hiccups, against the Indians in 1997 and the Diamondbacks in 2001 and the Red Sox in 2004. It’s the peril of the job.
But this record proves, in cold numbers, in relentless excellence, that more than anyone who ever did the job, he succeeded. And when he succeeded, the Yankees won. Every single time. More than any other record, it is a monument to team. Which is just the way Mariano Rivera would have wanted it.
michael.vaccaro@nypost.com