The stats for Mariano Rivera are awesome. For two decades, this now-retired Yankees closer, and Zionist, was to baseball what Heifetz was to the violin. 

Season after season, he was poetry in motion. In the years of living dangerously from crisis to crisis, no worries. Troubles from far away as Afghanistan? Troubles as near as home plate? Relax. Rivera is coming from the bullpen to calm the situation, and with such poise, such dignity, such ease. Class. 

On the mound, he was tranquility in a world plunged in madness, and there is still madness and darkness if you read the papers other than for Sports.

The “cutter” was his magic pitch. He was a blessed athlete and there was no stain on him as a public figure, and then came a grasshopper.

Radical leftists cannot leave well-enough alone. They must touch everything and everything they touch turns putrid and no man is safe from their clutches.

In his day, and here are the stats, no one did it better than Rivera, and to emphasize the point, the baseball writers, for the first time in the history of the game, hoisted him into the Hall of Fame upon a unanimous vote. No one demurred, objected, or complained, since, except for the laurels, there is nothing left to be said for a career so flawless, and for a man so much a mensch. 

Shouldn’t that be the end of the story?

We should be glad that as Jimmy Cannon and Howard Cosell once put it, “Sports is the toy department of human life.” 

There should be one place on earth where there is no grief – except maybe when the umpire calls a ball a strike. 

Or as we heard Tom Hanks tell it in a movie, “There’s no crying in baseball.” 

(Except the famous earth-shattering scene from the novel “Indecent Proposal,” when Joan Kane picks up a live ball she thinks is foul and is jeered by 30,000 Philly fanatics.)

 

For those nine innings, you expect the world to go away, and stay away to let you celebrate a man and his wonderful life. 

Leave it to the leftist boo-birds to go rummaging to find something, anything, that might bruise a good man. It’s what they did to Kavanaugh. It is what they do. 


Radical leftists cannot leave well-enough alone. They must touch everything and everything they touch turns putrid and no man is safe from their clutches.
Leave it to someone named Robert Silverman writing for something called The Daily Beast to stink up the place we revere as our national pastime.

The complaint? 

Mariano Rivera loves Israel. That, Silverman EXPOSES, is Rivera’s dark side, and in that article for The Daily Beast, Silverman is prepared to reveal – hold on! -- that Rivera met Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu …wait…not just once, but several times. They SHOOK HANDS. Silverman is not just guessing.

He has the evidence and the pictures to prove it, and…and…and to prove that Rivera also met New York rabbis, who honored him for “Man of the Year.”

Rivera is also a supporter of the IDF. Silverman has the EVIDENCE.

For Silverman, for The Daily Beast, for all Progressives, the Israelis have no right to defend themselves but must serve their enemies as sitting ducks. 

Silverman’s Yellow Journalism begins so – “The Yankees Legend Has Managed To Keep His (Far-Right) Political Leanings Hidden For Decades.”

Not at all, you jerk. Rivera was always an open book, if anybody asked. But nobody asked, except how he struck out the side mixing fast ball and cutter.

That Rivera, a practicing Christian, walked through his fame humbly and privately (as decreed through Judaism) is not to be considered in his favor. It must be SINISTER.

According to some umpires, Silverman and The Daily Beast may well be guilty of 1, anti-Semitism, 2, sensationalism,3, racism – Rivera is a Panamanian-American, a Man of Color.

That’s three strikes.

I recommend this top-notch piece from Guy Benson at Townhall in which Silverman and The Daily Beast are taken down properly.

This baseball fan and booster of Israel can’t take much more from these creeps who pick on our heroes, and anything that is good and wholesome, to justify their puny miserable lives.

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His Holocaust to Montreal memoir “Escape from Mount Moriah” has been honored from page to screen at CANNES. His Inside Journalism thriller, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” is being prepared for the movies. Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com