The Times Change for Torre, but Rivera Never Seems To

LOS ANGELES — Joe Torre’s first season managing the Yankees came at the right time, coinciding with the emergence of a 26-year-old converted starter named Mariano Rivera. John Wetteland closed out the Yankees’ World Series championship that year, 1996, but he never threw another pitch for the Yankees. Rivera seized the responsibility and, after all these years, remains unmatched at his craft.

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An emotional weekend for Torre and the Yankees ended Sunday night at Dodger Stadium, and an eventful week for Rivera came to a close. Pitching for the third time on the Yankees’ West Coast trip, Rivera silenced Torre’s Dodgers over the final two innings of an 8-6 comeback victory, a fitting coda for a series that brought together the past and the present, Torre’s years in New York and his new life in Los Angeles.
Unless the Yankees and the Dodgers reunite in the World Series, Torre, unsure about managing beyond this season, might have intersected with his former team for the last time.
If so, Torre’s last image will be of Rivera doing what his own closer could not, leaving him feeling like all the managers he beat during his 12 seasons in the Bronx. At age 40, Rivera still fires 92-mile-per-hour cutters on the corners, still breaks bats, still preserves leads. His earned run average is 0.92. Rivera conceals flaws, covers up mistakes and often makes good managers — like Torre — look like geniuses.
Without Rivera, managers sometimes look a little less smart, as Torre did on Sunday night. His closer, Jonathan Broxton, blew a four-run lead in the top of the ninth.
“We had it where we wanted it,” Torre told reporters after Sunday’s game got away from him. “You bring your closer in, your managing is done. That makes it tougher for me. There’s nothing you want to do or can do.”
In his first two seasons in charge of the Dodgers, Torre has twice steered them to the National League Championship Series. They lost both times to the Philadelphia Phillies, undermined, in part, by Broxton’s failures. In Game 4 of each of those series, he allowed the Phillies to stage game-winning rallies.
In itself, that does not make Broxton that unusual. After all, only one closer did not blow a save opportunity during the 2009 postseason. Not surprisingly, it was Rivera, the pitcher so crucial to the four championships that Torre won in his first five years as the Yankees’ manager.
“I thought last year we could have gone a little bit further,” Torre said last week in Anaheim, Calif., as he looked back to the 2009 N.L.C.S. “We had the best record and it came down to Game 4. We were in the ninth inning with a lead. If we were able to close it out that inning, then we’ve got two games at home.”
In the postseason, Rivera rarely failed Torre. Yes, he had his share of imperfections — Game 4 of the 1997 division playoff against Cleveland, when he gave up a game-tying home run; Game 7 of the 2001 World Series, when he lost the lead and the game in the bottom of the ninth; Game 4 of the 2004 A.L.C.S., when he allowed Boston to tie the game and begin its historic comeback — but they pale against his cumulative successes for Torre over 12 postseasons: 73 games, a 7-1 record, a 0.80 earned run average.
Torre has developed a reputation for wearing out reliable relievers, although Rivera was always the exception, handled, for the most part, with considerable care. Broxton may not be getting that same treatment; in a rarity for a closer, he now leads the Dodgers in innings pitched by a reliever.
Somewhat curiously, Broxton’s last three appearances have come in nonsave situations. With a five-run lead Saturday, Torre called on him to throw one and a third innings. With a four-run lead Sunday, Torre summoned Broxton again to pitch the ninth. The Yankees fouled off fastballs and sliders, worked long counts and made him throw 48 pitches in one exhausting inning of work.
And by the time he got the third out, the Yankees had overcome a four-run deficit in the ninth inning for the first time since April 19, 2007, when Torre was still in their dugout.
It is now Joe Girardi’s job to use Rivera as much as possible without overdoing it. Last Wednesday, in Arizona, he let Rivera pitch two innings, and he got the victory, pitching out of a bases-loaded, no-out jam to do so.
Two nights later, he struck out the side in the ninth on 13 pitches. On Sunday, he preserved a tie score in the ninth and closed out the game an inning later. The pitcher who was there with Torre at the start prevailed over him at what might be the end.
As for Girardi, he has far to go to match Torre’s legacy in New York. But as long as Rivera keeps defying logic, he has a shot.