Hall of Fame closer Mariano Rivera, in Taichung for the start of the World Baseball Classic (WBC), was diplomatic yesterday when asked who he was rooting for tonight when Taiwan play Panama.
“I’m going to give you the political answer. I came here to support baseball. Obviously, being Panamanian, I want Panama to win, but here in Taiwan I want Taiwan to win as well,” he said.
Rivera, a mainstay of the New York Yankees from 1995 to 2013, is to throw out the ceremonial first pitch of Taiwan’s opening game in Taichung.
Photo: CNA
He did have a pretty good idea what each team’s closer will feel when trying to clinch wins for their WBC teams.
“There’s a lot of pressure when you close games. I used to have an afro, but as the years went by, I started losing my hair because of the pressure,” Rivera said with a laugh.
The legendary reliever holds the MLB record with 652 saves in 19 seasons with the Yankees. He became the first player to be unanimously elected to the US National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2019.
Early in his career, in 1998, he founded the Mariano Rivera Foundation to provide children from impoverished families educational opportunities.
Yesterday, Rivera said education was important, especially for athletes.
“As a professional player, we have an enemy called injuries. Anything can happen in any given moment to whoever. It can be the best player or the worst player, it doesn’t matter,” Rivera said.
“But with education you can get hurt, you can even lose a leg or arm, but you continue to learn and be able to produce or provide for your family that you are going to have,” he said, calling education the “foundation of everything.”
Rivera said his son Mariano Rivera III was drafted by the New York Yankees in 2014, but still had a year left before finishing university.
“He asked me: ‘Dad, what do I do?’ I said: ‘What do you mean what do you do? You know the answer. You have to finish your education. You have to finish college, and then you sign up for professional baseball,’” Rivera said.
He felt his son had to finish college before playing professional baseball, “because there’s no guarantees,” he said of his son, who was drafted the next year by the Washington Nationals, who he joined after finishing college.
Rivera also played with Taiwanese star pitcher Wang Chien-ming, who was one of the Yankees’ top starters from 2005 until 2009. Wang made a memorable start for Taiwan against Japan in the 2013 WBC and is the team’s pitching coach this year.
Rivera praised his former teammate, and talked about what might have been had Wang not been injured in 2008.
“I want to tell you something about Chien-ming Wang. He was hungry. He was determined to make it to the big leagues... Chien-ming Wang was someone who we accepted, and he became one of the best pitchers for us in all those years,” Rivera said.
“Too bad that he was [injured]. That’s why we are not supposed to hit, because he got hurt running the bases. We don’t run bases, we don’t hit, we pitch and that’s what happened with Chien-ming Wang, and after that he wasn’t the same,” he said.
“It was a shame, that something happened like that, because he was our best pitcher and together, we were doing a lot of damage,” Rivera said.
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