How cool it would have been for all of us to have been there that late spring or early summer day in 1997, wherever it was, when New York Yankee Mariano Rivera was playing catch with his buddy, middle reliever Ramiro Mendoza, and his ball started to move.

Rivera’s cutter, which made him Tuesday the first unanimous pick in the Baseball Hall of Fame, had just been born and no one knew it. Not even Rivera.

All he knew — or came to know — was where it came from.

“The Lord gave it to me,” Rivera told MLB.com’s Scott Miller in a 2013 story. “Oh, the Lord. Def-i-nite-ly. I didn’t change anything. No grip, no motion, anything. Nothing.

“From that moment, I told Mel (Stottlemyre, then-Yankees pitching coach), ‘I have no control over this. The ball is moving, and I have no control.’ ”

The Gospel According To Rivera: The good Lord giveth the cutter to Mariano, and the good Lord taketh away most batters’ chances of hitting him.

Rivera went on to tell the story of Stottlemyre working with him on the pitch a few days later at old Tiger Stadium in Detroit in late June. Here is a quote from that story:

“Didn’t matter how I grabbed the ball,” Rivera recalls. “It was still moving. I told Mel that I won’t be throwing no more balls in the bullpen because I need to be ready for the game. We worked a lot and this thing is still the same and let’s leave it like that.”

A failed starting pitcher sent to the bullpen, Rivera had 22 career saves when the Yankees landed in Detroit. When the team left, he had 25.

“One of the singularly most lethal weapons in baseball history had launched,” Miller wrote.

The lethal weapon was the humble but competitive Rivera’s cut fastball, a pitch that, at the plate, moves to the glove-hand side of the pitcher and keeps the ball off the sweet spot of the hitter’s bat.

It was a beautiful thing to watch. The opposition would joke that Rivera was “tipping his pitches,” knowing the whole time that the cutter was coming and that there was not a whole lot they could do about it — maybe except pray, and hope that God would be as kind to them as he had been to Mariano Rivera.

Joining him in the Hall will be designated hitter Edgar Martinez and starting pitchers Roy Halladay and Mike Mussina. Lee Arthur Smith and Harold Baines were voted in by he 16-person Today’s Game Committee, which is, Lord have mercy, a whole other story.

(If you have not listened to today’s podcast about the Saints/Rams and the Baseball HOF, we invite you to go to DesignatedWriters.com and listen to it now. BREAK!)

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