The best closer in the history of baseball is now officially a Hall of Famer.
Mariano Rivera was inducted into Cooperstown on Sunday, along with Mike Mussina, Harold Baines, Edgar Martinez, Lee Smith and the late Roy Halladay.
Signed by the Yankees out of Panama, Rivera's family struggled financially to make ends meet, so Mariano had to improvise to make a baseball glove.
What did he do? He grabbed a piece of cardboard and strapped it together using electrical tape and some netting.
"I was the happiest kid in the neighbourhood with this thing," Rivera told Steiner Sports.
Seeing the closer first get into baseball using a cardboard glove to becoming the greatest closer to play the sport is what makes this so special.
When life deals you a bad hand, make the best out of it, have some fun, and push your way to the top, just like Rivera did.
In his Hall of Fame speech, Rivera explained that learning English was a challenge for him, but he had a great supporting cast of teammates who helped him pick up the language.
“On my way to Tampa, 1990, I didn’t know what to expect. I was leaving my hometown, my family, my people. First time on a plane. Arriving to Miami. I don’t know where to go. No English. Thank God for the people that were there that help us.
“We got to Tampa. I don’t know what I was expecting. But God guided me through. At that time everybody, most of the guys I played with, they were Spanish, so they spoke Spanish.
“But my second year in professional baseball, I went to Greensboro, North Carolina, where not too many people spoke Spanish. I used to, at times, go to bed crying because I couldn’t communicate, couldn’t communicate with my teammates. I was frustrated. I was frustrated because no English, no relationship with my teammates, with my manager, my pitching coach. I made one of the biggest decisions and the greatest decision I made. I talked to a few of my teammates, one is here, Bob Dillard and his family. I asked them, ‘Guys, please I need to learn English.’
“‘Whatever I do, whatever things I said that is not right, please you can laugh all you want, but please teach me, teach me the right way.’ And they did. They never laughed. They never laughed.”
This speaks to much bigger issues of poverty and the MLB's lack of communication guidelines for Spanish speaking players when Rivera first came up.
It's still pretty incredible to see Rivera overcome these systematic flaws and persevere through it all.
