Inside Baseball Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera’s Secret Far-Right Politics
Mariano Rivera, the greatest relief pitcher in baseball history, will be formally enshrined in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday. A throng of New York Yankee diehards will surely make the trek to Cooperstown, NY, to take in the proceedings and relive treasured memories. For countless fans, Rivera is baseball royalty—an idol, worshipped for his on-field dominance, deadly mastery of a cut fastball, and pinpoint control.
To this day, he is held up as the ideal athlete, bestowed with endless grace and an unflappable demeanor on the mound that belied a burning competitive desire. Rivera represents a nearly unbroken succession of Yankee greatness that stretches all the way back to the 1920s, from Ruth and Gehrig to DiMaggio and Mantle, and then Reggie Jackson and Derek Jeter.
And over the past three years, he’s also served at the pleasure of a racist president, taken part in thinly veiled propaganda on behalf of an apartheid government in Israel, and gotten chummy with outright bigots and apocalyptic loons. None of this will be inscribed on his Hall of Fame plaque. It should, even if much of the sports world would very much like to pretend none of it exists.