Thank you Mariano Rivera

The greatest reliever in baseball history played his final game at Yankee Stadium last night. I typically don't enjoy the tributes and pageantry around professional sporting events but I loved watching Andy Pettitte and Derek Jeter go out to the mound to remove Mariano Rivera with one out remaining in the ninth inning.

The New York Times has a good story on the boy who used to play baseball on Puerto Caimito beach in Panama during low tide and is now retiring after nineteen seasons closing for the most storied franchise in sports - the New York Yankees.

But when Rivera was growing up, groomed grass fields were hard to come by in the little Pacific fishing village in Panama. The best playing surface in the area was a vast expanse of hard, white sand that revealed itself at low tide, a field strewn with rocks, shells and remnants of abandoned fishing vessels.

“That beach at low tide, that was our Yankee Stadium, that was our Maracanã,” Rivera said, referring to his place of work in the Bronx and to the soccer palace in Rio de Janeiro. “The tide went way, way out and gave us a huge field right there. But when the tide came in, there was no more field.”

At that point, as the waterline crept back to shore, the children said goodbye to one another and, depending on the time of day, went home, to school or to work on the fishing boats.

 Thank you Mo from Yankee fans everywhere.