Free The Closer by Mariano Rivera

Jays have the mostdangerous hitter in the league, Carlos Delgado, a twenty-year-old slugger from Puerto Rico. Carlos is on his way to a thirty–home run, one hundred–RBI season, with a .324 average, in the middle of a lineup that also includes Shawn Green, Derek Bell, and Canadian outfielder Rob Butler, who winds up hitting .358, best in the league.
    It’s a Friday night in Fort Lauderdale, and I am ready for the challenge of a seriously stacked lineup. I am pitching well, and I move into the fourth inning when the Blue Jays get a man on first. I see him taking a good-sized lead. I fire over to chase him back, but as I do I feel something funny in my elbow. It’s hard to describe, but it’s not normal.
    Definitely not normal.
    I catch the return throw and take a moment on the mound. My elbow is throbbing. I turn my sights back to the plate and deliver, and now I feel a hard pop in my elbow, as if something just gave out. Or snapped.
    Or ruptured.
    I get the ball back from the catcher and pause again on the mound. I look around the park, and at the pockets of fans here and there, maybe a few hundred people in all. They are waiting for the next pitch, and it occurs to me that not one of them—not anybody in the whole park, even in the dugout and bullpen—knows that I am not the same pitcher I was two pitches ago. How could they know? How could they possibly have any clue about what just happened inside my right elbow?
    I look the same, but I am not.
    I finish the inning and walk to the dugout, my elbow hot and pulsing with pain. I know I am not going to be walking back out there, facing Carlos Delgado or anybody else, any time soon.
    I can’t pitch, I tell Mark Shiflett. The pain is bad.
    The trainer, Darren London, packs my elbow in ice, and I spendthe rest of the game on the bench. It is a strange sensation to be out there competing with everything you’ve got one second, and to be a bystander the next. Something goes pop and, faster than you can say Tommy John, you are damaged goods. You try not to project, but you can’t lie to yourself.
    You know—absolutely know—this is not good.
    Does this mean surgery? How long will I be out? What will I need to do to get better? My head is swirling with questions, but somehow I do not feel any deep anxiety, or anything close to despair. It is the peace and grace of the Lord; it cannot be anything else. Of course I am not happy about the pain and whatever repercussions there will be. Of course I am concerned about my future. But I am not flipping out about it. When the fishing nets were frayed or broken, we fixed them. When the engine on the boat broke, we did all we could to fix it. I come at life from a mechanic’s mind-set. If you’ve got a problem, you find it and you take care of it. That’s exactly what I’m going to do with my elbow.
    The process isn’t always pleasant, but it is simple, and straightforward. You do yourself no good by worrying or projecting, letting thunderheads of gloom set up in your head.
    We’re going to get your elbow looked at and take good care of it, Darren London says.
    Okay, thanks, Darren, I say.
    I go back to my apartment and think about calling Clara but decide against it. It wouldn’t be fair. All it would do is make her feel terrible that she is not with me. After a bad night of sleep—the elbow is really inflamed and tender—I undergo a series of tests with a Yankee doctor in Miami. The MRIs apparently do not show damage to the ulnar collateral ligament. Then there are more tests, and finally they send me to see Dr. Frank Jobe, the same doctor who would operate on Brien Taylor. He is the king of all elbow-fixers, and the inventor of Tommy John surgery—a term that hasbecome as much a part of the baseball vocabulary as grand-slam home run, or performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs).
    If you hang around pitchers for any length of time, I guarantee you will hear a conversation that goes something like this:
    You ever have Tommy