Yankees: Insane writer tries to change his Mariano Rivera Hall of Fame vote

One ex-Hall of Fame voter now wishes Yankees closer Mariano Rivera hadn’t gone in unanimously. OK?

Yankees fans were one vote short in 2020 of celebrating unanimous Baseball Hall of Fame elections in consecutive years, with Derek Jeter losing the support of a singular writer after Mariano Rivera broke the mold and entered unabated in ’19.

But if one former Hall voter who cast a ballot in that election had his way, Rivera would be trudging into the doors of Cooperstown just shy of unanimity, too.

Luckily, it doesn’t work that way. And this man is no longer a member of the Hall of Fame’s voting class! Funny how having unreasonable standards sometimes disqualifies you from sharing them in any meaningful way.

Jerry Green of the Detroit News announced in a column this week that he’d lost his privilege to vote in the upcoming Hall election, and took that opportunity to also announce that he’d rescind the 2019 vote he’d cast for Rivera if he could. Why? Politics? Self-loathing? No, no. It was motivated by learning Rivera had been elected unanimously, something that should not happen, per Green, if you’ve failed twice in your life.

Perfect. Got it. So the agreed-upon greatest closer in the history of the game, who secured every win asked of him during World Series runs in 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2009, should be penalized because the Yankees were in the postseason every year of his career (but one), leading to exactly two high-profile blown saves.

Nobody tell Jerry Green about Game 4 of the 1997 ALDS in Cleveland. He might want to kick Rivera out altogether.

Were those two blown saves devastating? Of course! One was Game 7 of the World Series! And one, at the time, had very little significance, but allowed the Red Sox to run train on the Yanks’ depleted pitching staff three more times. We wish they’d never happened! They haunt us! Mariano Rivera is still a deserving unanimous Hall of Famer, as are many other players who were slighted for similarly nonsensical reasons over the years.

But hey, it can happen to anyone. Ever read Hall of Famer Max Carey’s take on Babe Ruth, of all people? Yikes.

It can happen to even the game’s greatest of the great.

But let this be a lesson to all the kids out there: If you screw up even once, Jerry Green is coming for you.

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