You think Rod Carew could hit Mariano Rivera?
He seems to think so, but is too classy to say so outright. In an interview with ESPN New York, Carew reflects on the career of one of the great pitchers as viewed by one of the game’s most revered hitters.
Rivera has, of course, been the focus of a long goodbye, being honored by pretty much everyone every affiliated with baseball.
“Countryman and cutter,” Rodney Cline Carew says of Rivera as his career winds down, “because we were born in the same country and he has this tremendous cutter.”
That’s all well and good, sir. But could you hit his famous cutter?
“I’ve always felt that if you could open your stance more and get a better view of that pitch when it’s coming in, you could probably get your hands through the hitting zone a lot easier and maybe do something,” he tells ESPN. “I could probably have taken the cutter to left field — not necessarily pulled it, but taken it to left field or up the middle.”
So, yes, you could hit Rivera, and we believe you. Carew knows just a little bit about hitting – so much so that he was on the cover of Time magazine once, fer cryin’ outloud.
So, here’s the first part of the interview:
