It’s painful to see the Red Sox playing so well, but in a way, it is a tribute to the Yankees’ success in the late ’90s, a run that forced the Red Sox to build a bigger, smarter team.  It’s as if they are the villans in the superhero movie who create a supermonster to defeat the superhero (Though you’d be hard-pressed to find a Sox fan who considers the Yankees the heroes).

As much as I hate to see Boston winning, I do appreciate that they are defending their title so well–at least thus far.

So while we wait for the hot stove to warm up, we are left with our memories–and what a stockpile we’ve got to choose from! I’ve been digging around in the Esquire archives lately, and now offer up Charles Pierce’s 2001 profile on our man, Mariano Rivera:

He is modest and mild. He is neat and quiet. Closers are not. They snarl and spit. They rage and howl. They are wild and unkempt, hooligan cowboys, living and dying with every pitch. One of them still hangs around the Yankees, helping the relief pitchers. The hair’s thin now, and gray. The mustache still droops, and it’s gray, too. He’s the old rancher with a rifle above the door that nobody asks about. Be they as precise as Mariano Rivera or as fierce as this old gentleman, closers make their own special marks, always, as long as they sign in blood.

…His power seems like some sort of physical trompe l’oeil, its source a mystery locked inside the elegant movement of his pitching motion. The power is in there somewhere, coiled and mysterious and remorselessly reliable. Otherwise, he looks as if he’s tossing a tennis ball against the side of his garage. If he has an identity as a closer, it is that he throws the same pitch at the same speed with the same fluid motion every time, impeccable and contained and neat, like his handwriting, like his career.

Nothing like Mo to make a Yankee fan feel all warm n fuzzy inside.