XM MLB Chat: Mariano Rivera close to 2 year deal with Yankees, Red Sox and Angels said to have made offers

12/2/10, "The New York Yankees are close to re-signing iconic closer Mariano Rivera to a two-year deal worth close to $30 million, sources confirm. Rivera has decided to remain with the Yankees, rejecting three other offers of three years, one which is said to have been made by the rival Red Sox."...

(NY Times says this may have been a tactic by the Red Sox to get the Yankees to give Rivera a second year, betting it would be a laugher and cost the Yanks).

(continuing, SI): "Two of Rivera offers are believed to have come from the Red Sox and Angels. It isn't surprising, considering he had one of his best seasons in a storied career. The Red Sox's reputed try is interesting in that they already have Jonathan Papelbon and Daniel Bard for the bullpen."...

12/2/10, Sports Illustrated, "Yanks close to signing Mariano Rivera, make progress on Derek Jeter," Jon Heyman

12/3/10, "Rivera and Yanks near 2 year deal," NY Times, Michael S. Schmidt "Nevertheless, the person said the tentative deal with Rivera was reached even as several other teams, including the rival Boston Red Sox, had made offers to Rivera in a long-shot attempt to lure him out of the Bronx. The person said the Red Sox offered Rivera a two-year deal and that at least one other team offered three years.

It is possible that the Red Sox knew they had no real chance of signing Rivera but offered him two years simply as a tactic to force Cashman to do the same and thus spend more money on Rivera than the Yankees really wanted to.

Cashman might have been hoping to sign Rivera to one year plus an option, or even just a flat one-year deal, but the Boston offer of two years probably made that harder to do.

In many ways, offering a 41-year-old reliever anything more than a one-year deal seems reckless.

But Rivera, widely considered the best reliever in the history of baseball, has broken all the rules, remaining impossibly hard to hit season after season

even as the years and the innings pitched continued to mount.

In 2010, his workload did decrease slightly but he still had a sterling 1.80 earned run average along with 33 saves. For his career, he has 559 saves and a 2.23 earned run average.

But most remarkable

are the numbers he has compiled in his long run of postseason games. In that category, Rivera has pitched 139 2/3 innings with a 0.71 E.R.A., allowing just 11 earned runs and