A couple of years ago, half paying attention to the ESPN Sunday Night Game of the Week, I noticed that the announcer John Miller kept referring to Mariano Rivera, the peerless closer of the New York Yankees, as “the great Rivera.” I don’t think he meant the words to be capitalized, as though we were speaking of some circus performer. I think Miller meant it as a scientific description, a simple use of a common word that in this case conjured profundity. In recording his 602nd save yesterday, Rivera became the all-time leader in saves, and in doing so, established statistically what has been known for at least a decade: he is the best closer in the history of baseball.

I could go on, but I’ll leave it to Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated, who captured the essence of the Rivera experience two years ago, as the Yankees were winning their most recent World Championship:

“There’s no stadium in baseball quite as relaxed and certain as Yankee Stadium in the ninth inning with a lead. Rivera has not been perfect in his remarkable 15-year career … but close enough. He has been so good that New York fans have grown almost unaffected by the tension and fear that is supposed to afflict the body in the ninth inning of a close game. With other closers — even the best closers — there’s a jolt of adrenaline that runs through the stadium. It’s like the beginning of a Springsteen concert. Here we go! This is going to be great! You rock!

“But with Rivera — even if he does enter to the strains of Metallica’s Enter Sandman — the feeling is different. It’s more like the feeling of a superhero arriving on the scene. `Thank God you’re here, Superman!’ In New York, the game is won when Rivera steps on the mound. The rest is performance.”

It’s always a privilege to see greatness, and it’s been a privilege to have been able to watch the great Rivera.

The Yankees became the first team in major league history to hit three grand slam home runs in one game. Robinson Cano, Russell Martin and Curtis Granderson each went yard with the bags packed in a 22-9 Yankee victory over the Oakland Athletics, a game which saw the Yankees trailing by a score of 7-1 after three innings.

On Wednesday, Ginny and I and Cara headed out for the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where Cara will soon begin her freshman year. Thinking to combine some tourism with one of the last acts of basic parenthood (everything after this gets placed in the supplemental category), we headed first for Cleveland, where we saw the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (left), which sits inside a dazzling I.M. Pei pyramid on the shores of Lake Erie, which, as just as the advance word promised, is indeed a Great Lake. We stayed in a Crowne Plaza Hotel with bad room service, and then hit the Hall on Thursday. It was pretty cool, although it wa bit disconcerting to see one’s youth in a musem. The effect that is produced is not the warmth of nostalgia, nor the intellectual stimulation that is produced by going to, say, the Met. It’s kind of cool, but kind of dull. The best moment was seeing a montage of British Invasion groups, and being reminded how very cool the Kinks and the Zombies and the Animals really were. It was amazing how well Eric Burden could shake his hair and his ass simultaneously, but of course one now sees that lhe indeed loked like the spastic madman his critics said he did.

After lunch it was south on a very straight and boring I-75 (highlight: a huge billboard in a cornfield says Hell Is Real), through Cincinnati, and then onto Lexington. On Friday we moved Cara moved into her room, a process hectic enough to inspire a couple of stories that will be top of the line private stock family stories. After she settled in, we went back and spent the night in a very nice Hyatt. The next day, we visited Ashland, the home of the Great Compromiser Henry Clay, and then attended a couple of information sessions with Cara before sharing a pretty bland meal at an Italian restaurant (this is why Tony Soprano was neve drawn to the witness protection program), before taking our leave, and driving back up to Columbus, where we spent the night in an excellent Westin, of whose quality we were not worthy. (Top right, a new Wildcat in her lair; bottom right, Clay’s pile; Top left, Cincinnati, Thursday, 4:55 PM; bottom left, Columbus, Sunday, 8:30 AM.)

On Sunday, we drove from Columbus to Canton, which turns out to be far from everything, to visit the Pro Football Hall of Fame. (If you wonder why the Hall of Fame is in Canton, it’s because football had it’s roots in Canton specifically and Ohio generally. But football soon left Canton for the bright lights of the big cities, and it’s no mystery why.) I liked the museum–it had some pretty cool Baltimore Colts stuff, including the Marching Band’s drum and Tom Matte‘s famous play-inscribed arm bands–but a lot of it was kind of static. They really could do a lot more. The best part was the collection of amazing films. And then it was eight hours back through Pennsylvania, and home. Happy to be back, but already missing Cara.

In an astonishing, Jack Armstrongish day, the peerless Derek Jeter reached the milestone of 3000 career hits by slugging a third-inning home run off hard-throwing right hander David Price of the Tampa Bay Rays. Jeter marked the day by going 5 for 5, with the hits including the homer, a double, and three singles, the last of which was the game-winning hit in a 5-4 Yankee victory. It was the third time in his career that Jeter went 5 for 5, and he finished the day with 3003 hits, good for 27th place all time. He was the 28th man to reach 3000 hots, the only man to achieve the feat in a Yankee uniform (others who had been Yankees: Dave Winfield, Rickey Henderson, Wade Boggs, and Paul Waner), only the eleventh player on the list to have played his entire career for one team, and only the second hitter besides Boggs to reach 300 hits with a home run.

Joe Posnanski has a beautiful appreciation of Jeter that was published in si.com last week when Jeter was on the verge of his accomplishment. It is an excellent piece of writing–I encourage you to read the entire thing if you have an interest in this sort of thing. It is a piece worthy of its subject. Meanwhile, here are two selections:

“Jeter, more than anyone else, is the personification of 3,000 hits. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. How do you get to 3,000 hits? Line drive after bloop after scorcher down the line. Seven times Derek Jeter got 200 hits in a season. No other shortstop has done that more than four. Eleven times he hit .300 or better … that’s as often as Clemente. Jeter hit double-digit homers 15 times, most ever for a shortstop. Jeter stole double-digit bases 15 times, most ever for a shortstop (tied with Ozzie Smith and Luis Aparicio). Jeter scored 100 runs 13 times, most ever for a shortstop. He has been unrelenting and undeniable. We can’t remember all the hits. But we can remember that there have been almost 3,000 of them by now.” . . .

“Jeter burst into the league on the first Yankees team in almost 20 years to win a championship. He hit .314 and carried himself like a man who had done it all before, perhaps in another life. At 24, he led the league in runs and led the Yankees to 125 victories, the most any team has had from April through October. He should have been MVP. At 25, he was even better; he hit .349, scored and drove in 100. He should have been MVP again.

“From that point on, his career has been a cavalcade of numbers: .343 average, 124 runs, 34 steals, 44 doubles, 97 RBIs, 212 hits, 23 homers, all achieved in different seasons. He is unquestionably one of the greatest-hitting shortstops in baseball history. Jeter’s defense has been more scrutinized than the defense of any player ever, I imagine. There seems to be no consensus even now. Managers and coaches began voting him Gold Gloves after he turned 30, which was just about the time that people who try to quantify defense began to suggest that he was much less effective than he looked. But in the end, he was out there at shortstop every day, and the Yankees won every year, and for most people this tends to be where the argument stops. . . .He has done another remarkable thing, perhaps the most remarkable thing: He has carried himself with grace and humility in a time and place that pushes hard against grace and humility. Reporters and cameras have surrounded him for more than 15 years, yet he has rarely misstepped. Steroid suspicions have circled the locker of every star player, but even the most cynical tend to believe that Jeter has been clean. He has been the subject of the most extravagant praise imaginable (I invented the word “Jeterate” to describe the overzealous praise of his intangibles) and some withering criticisms, too, but he seems relatively untouched by both. I know a father who both (A) gravely dislikes Jeter as a player and (B) is thrilled that his son emulates Jeter. With Derek Jeter, that is no contradiction.”

David Brooks of The New York Times and Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated are both good writers and astute commentators who almost never work the same topic. And they might not think that they were doing so earlier this week. But I do, and it’s my blog.

First, let’s hear from Brooks. “You could easily get the impression that American politics are trundling along as usual. But this stability is misleading. The current arrangements are stagnant but also fragile. American politics is like a boxing match atop a platform. Once you’re on the platform, everything looks normal. But when you step back, you see that the beams and pillars supporting the platform are cracking and rotting. This cracking and rotting is originally caused by a series of structural problems that transcend any economic cycle: There are structural problems in the economy as growth slows and middle-class incomes stagnate. There are structural problems in the welfare state as baby boomers spend lavishly on themselves and impose horrendous costs on future generations. There are structural problems in energy markets as the rise of China and chronic instability in the Middle East leads to volatile gas prices. There are structural problems with immigration policy and tax policy and on and on. As these problems have gone unaddressed, Americans have lost faith in the credibility of their political system, which is the one resource the entire regime is predicated upon. This loss of faith has contributed to a complex but dark national mood. The country is anxious, pessimistic, ashamed, helpless and defensive.”

Clear enough, right? Now here comes Joe Posnanski, writing a piece that is complimentary to baseball commissioner Bud Selig. Posnanski says that recently he “wrote a little something about Bud Selig and how people cannot help but underestimate him. This has to do with Bud’s almost mythical ability to look baffled. Who can forget the Bud after the All-Star Game tie? Who can forget his rambling press conference when he held up the rule book after the rain-delayed World Series game? . . . .But Bud Selig has utterly transformed baseball. I’m not saying that he has always transformed it for the better. That’s a discussion for another time. But at the end of the day, baseball has been transformed — expansion, wild cards, interleague play, increased revenue sharing, drug testing, relative labor peace, new stadiums, All-Star games that determine homefield advantage, the World Baseball Classic, on and on. Maybe baseball stumbled into some of these things. Maybe it was pulled kicking and screaming. But this stuff happened. And Bud, unquestionably, was a force behind this stuff happening. He works the back rooms. He coaxes and ponders and considers. And sometimes he boldly acts. . . . Bud Selig might be the most influential baseball commissioner ever.”

Why are these stories connected? Because Posnanski is, in a way, illustrating the point Brooks is making. Selig, who is in charge of a pretty important American institution, is giving the American people what they want: leadership. “Not always for the better,” as Posnanski acknowldeges, but that’s not the point. People are smart enough to know that things don’t always work out as planned. But they do expect problems to be addressed. They do not want endless squabbling. They absolutely do not want endless partisanship. They want, as Franklin Roosevelt recognized, action: try something, and if it doesn’t work, try something else. All across America, people make decisions. They figure stuff out and move forward. Our debt issue is a bad thing. If we face it, it’s a problem. If we don’t, it’s a crisis. We need to have the common sense of Bud Selig.

Words of wisdom show up in the oddest places. Watching the Yankee game Friday, announcer Michael Kay was talking about a conversation he had with the manager of the Red Sox, Terry Francona, whose tram has started the season a lamentable 0 and 6. According to Kay, Francona was saying that no, the team wan’t down and certainly didn’t think it’s season had been ruined, but, “you know, you have to respect the loss.”

Respect the loss. Now, there is an honorable attitude. Humble, realistic, professional, serious, modest. It’s an attitude that bespeaks a willingness to examine why a game was lost, to apportion responsibility, and to make improvements. If only business and political leaders could be as honest with themselves–and us.

In Sunday’s game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Miami Dolphins, Raven fullback Le’Ron McClain pretty clearly spit in the face of Miami linebacker Channing Crowder–an infraction of the rules, and probably a serious health code violation as well. After the game, a furious Crowder expressed his anger that none of the officials saw the infraction and called a penalty. “A guy just spit in my face! I don’t give a damn about [teammate] Karlos [Dansby] pulling somebody’s facemask. Like they didn’t see [quarterback] Chad Henne get hit twice when he slid. Yeah, a little Stevie Wonder and Anne Frank … Is that the blind girl? Helen Keller … I don’t know who the fuck Anne Frank is. I’m mad right now. I’m not as swift as I usually am.” For future reference: Anne Frank, the diarist and victim of Nazi persecution, is pictured at left; Helen Keller, the person who overcame multiple disabilities to become a great humanitarian, is at right.

The NFL Network, which Cablevision does not allow me to see, recently rated the top 100 players in NFL history. I’m not going to repeat the entire list–you can click here if you wish to see it–but here are my observations on the selections:

I would not have listed Jerry Rice as Number One. He’s a great player, very easily a top 10 player, but I don’t think I would put any receiver in the top spot. Jim Brown (Number 2), who was one of the architects of the league during its turning point era, or Lawrence Taylor (Number 3), a sport-changing player, or the great Johnny Unitas (No. 6), the Father of Modern Quarterbacking, would have been my choice.

Walter Payton (Number 5) was a great player, but he played on a lot of bad teams.

Jack Lambert at 29? Okay, but why so far behind Dick Butkus (Number 10, and no championships or Super Bowls) and Ray Lewis (Number 18, and one)?

Delighted to see Jim Parker (32), Raymond Berry (36), Gino Marchetti (39), John Mackey (42) and Lenny Moore (94) on the list, although it seems a disservice to rank the elegant Moore that low. I like him better than Tony Dorsett, but then Dorsett isn’t ranked much higher. And where the heck is Art Donovan?

I’m happy to see Brett Favre at 20. I still find him enormously entertaining.

Dan Marino (25) can play quarterback on my team anytime, but with only one Super Bowl appearance (a convincing loss), does he deserve to stand so far ahead of Roger Staubach (46), Terry Bradshaw (50), and Bart Starr (51).

Down 5-1, the Rangers looking capable and confident, C.J. Wilson pitching the game of his life, the Yankees strike. Gardner beats out a slow roller with a head-first slide. Jeter doubles, scoring Gardner. Score is 5-2. Rangers change pitchers. Swisher walks. Teixiera walks. Rangers change pitchers. On the first pitch, Rodriguez smashes a grounder to left. Two runs score. Yanks trail, 5-4. Rangers change pitchers. On the first, Cano lines a single to center. Teixiera scores, tying the game. Rangers change pitchers. Thames hits broken bat single (above), and the Yanks take the lead. Seven up, seven reach base. Rangers get the leadoff hitter on in the eighth, but Wood picks him off, and in the ninth, but the great Rivera takes care of business