Mason Miller’s latest playoff wobble did more than cost the Padres a game. It also dragged Mariano Rivera back into the center of the conversation, right where the Yankees legend belongs.
Miller has spent the last two years turning hitters into spectators, and it’s easy to see why the baseball world has been captivated. This season, he struck out 47.4% of the batters he faced, finished with a 1.67 ERA and 1.17 FIP over 70 games, and piled up 38 saves while pumping 101 miles per hour heat and pairing it with a wipeout slider. That kind of dominance naturally invites the comparison game.
But Game 2 of the NLDS was a reminder that there’s still a giant gap between frightening and untouchable.
With the Padres already trailing 1-0 in the series, they asked Miller to handle a two-inning save. He breezed through the bottom of the eighth with a three-up, three-down inning, then lost the strike zone in the ninth.
After getting two outs, he walked old friend Gary Sánchez to load the bases and bring Jackson Chourio up with San Diego clinging to a 3-2 lead. Chourio then turned a 101 MPH four-seamer into a single to center, driving in both the tying and winning runs in a walk-off Brewers comeback.
That finish put the Rivera comparison in sharp relief. As electric as Miller is, he is nowhere near Mariano Rivera when the stakes get tight in October.
“Mason Miller ain’t Mariano Rivera”
- Evan Roberts (@EvanRobertsWFAN) October 4, 2026
Rivera’s greatness was never just about the regular season, though he was obviously elite there too. He remains baseball’s all-time saves leader with 652, well ahead of Trevor Hoffman’s 601.
No one else has even reached 500, though Kenley Jansen sits at 498 and is the active leader. Miller, at 28 and with 88 career saves, is not realistically in that neighborhood.
The bigger story is what Rivera did once the playoffs started. Over a regular-season career, he posted a 2.21 ERA across 1,283 2/3 innings with 1,173 strikeouts.
In October, he went to another level entirely. Rivera threw 141 postseason innings, allowed just 11 earned runs, and finished with a 0.70 ERA.
To put that another way, more men have walked on the moon than scored on Rivera in the playoffs.
The Rivera praise surged again on social media as people revisited just how absurd that October line really is. NBA personality and Game Theory Podcast host Sam Vecenie wrote, "Watching the best closers in baseball semi-regularly get hammered in the playoffs -- even as closer stuff continues to get even more unhittable -- puts Mariano Rivera posting a 0.70 ERA in 141 postseason innings in an even more impossibly impressive light to me."
And for anyone trying to poke holes in Rivera’s postseason workload, the numbers push back hard. He was called on for 31 saves of at least four outs, including 14 saves of at least six outs. In all, Rivera had 45 save chances in the playoffs and converted 42 of them, meaning those 14 two-inning outings accounted for 33% of his postseason saves.
He wasn’t limited to save situations, either. Rivera made 96 total postseason appearances, and one of his most famous came in a game he won rather than saved. In Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS, he threw three scoreless innings before Aaron Boone’s series-clinching homer off Tim Wakefield sent the Red Sox home.
The context matters, too. Rivera did all of this during the height of the Steroids Era, which only makes the October résumé look more staggering.
When the debate turned to postseason relievers, another post put it simply: "Rivera is on his own planet."
- Jim Miloch (@podoffame) October 5, 2026
And if anyone wants to drag up the 2001 World Series, the argument doesn’t really stick. The line there is that if the infield had been playing at normal depth, the looper off Luis Gonzalez’s bat likely would have landed in Derek Jeter’s glove. In other words, luck wasn’t on Mo’s side.
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The issue only got louder after Game 2 of the Division Series, when the Yankees committed multiple errors and did something the franchise had never done before in a postseason inning. Boone also addressed Trent Grishams defense ahead of the matchup, a reminder that every detail is being scrutinized now, and that the margin for patience gets thinner once October starts exposing the same flaws over and over. [Read more 🡒]