Free The Closer by Mariano Rivera Page A

John?
    Yeah, two years ago.
    How did it go?
    Pretty good. Took a while, but eventually I threw even better.
    How about you?
    Yeah, mine was three years ago.
    How did it go?
    Same thing. It was a rough road, but I’m all the way back.
    Tommy John surgery is a reconstruction of the ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow. Elbows don’t like throwing baseballs ninety-plus miles per hour, thousands upon thousands of times, and when the ligament goes, it has to be rebuilt with a ligament from your forearm.
    In Los Angeles, Dr. Jobe provides the diagnosis: I have a lot of wear, and I have stuff floating around in my elbow. I am going to require surgery, but I do not need a total reconstruction, just a thorough cleanup. It includes the removal of my funny bone, but at least it doesn’t put me in the Tommy John Club. I take in Dr. Jobe’s words as I sit in his office and don’t say anything at first. I am too busy talking to myself:
    This injury is not going to define me. It is not going to stop me. I will have the surgery I need and do whatever I have to do to get back.
    Dr. Jobe performs my surgery on August 27, 1992. It’s not a day that you’ll find commemorated anywhere in the annals of baseball history (though it is the ten-year anniversary of Rickey Henderson breaking the single-season stolen-base record). It’s just the day I get my elbow cleaned up—and (I hope) a fresh, pain-free start to my pitching career.
    Dr. Jobe does a great job on my elbow, and he also does a great job predicting the future.
    This is going to be an up-and-down process, he says. One day you may feel very good, and the next day you won’t. That is normal. It’s part of the process. Don’t get discouraged if you don’t progress every day. It takes time for the elbow to fully heal. Just be patient and keep doing your work, and it will be fine.
    I am out until the spring of 1993, have a short stay back in the Gulf Coast League, and then join the rotation in Greensboro. I have rust to scrape off and don’t have the command I had before, and they naturally have me on a low pitch count, but in ten starts I have an ERA of just over two, and that’s nothing to be discouraged about. It is all coming together, in the halting way Dr. Jobe told me it would.
    It’s all good for me in Greensboro, and there’s an added bonus, too—because I make a new friend. He’s our shortstop, maybe the only guy on the club who is skinnier than me. He was the Yankees’ top draft pick the year after they chose Brien Taylor. His name is Derek Jeter, of Kalamazoo, Michigan. I had met him before, in minor league camp, but this is the first time I get to play with him, and it is some show, because the kid is a year out of high school and all limbs, and you are never sure what he will do. I see him inside-out a ball to right-center field and wind up with a triple. I see him rip doubles down the line and hit in the clutch, and play shortstop like a colt in cleats, chasing down grounders and pop flies and making jump throws from the hole.
    Of course, I also see him throw the ball halfway to Winston-Salem, over and over, as if he’s still trying to get used to being in a six-foot-three body. But I don’t worry about the errors at all. Derek makes fifty-six of them that year in Greensboro, and years later, there are stories about how the Yankees were concerned enough that they considered moving him to center field. If anybody hadasked me what I thought that year, I would’ve been happy to offer my opinion:
    Don’t even think about moving Derek Jeter. He is going to be fine. He’s getting better every day. He wants to be great. You can see it in how hard he works, how passionately he plays. He’s quick and has pop in his bat and wants to learn and will do anything he has to do to win.
    The only thing you need to do with Derek Jeter is leave him alone.
    A month into the off-season, Clara and I are preparing to rejoice in the birth of our first child. It has not been an