Dan-nie Baseball!

A Yankee Stadium Bleacher Creature whom I know only as Larry often wears a t-shirt that reads, "Yankee Baseball is life. The rest is just details." Apparently Mariano Rivera disagrees.

The Yankee closer told beat writer Jack Curry of the New York Times last week that he would quit baseball in four years to pursue a higher calling--becoming an evangelical minister.

Rivera said that during a July 16 game against Atlanta, he heard what he believes was the voice of God telling him "I am the one who has you here."

Over the course of the past five months, Rivera has decided that the importance of his faith surpasses the importance of his baseball potential, and has chosen to leave the game in four years to spread the message he feels has changed his life.

Make no mistake, Rivera's baseball potential is immense. He finished the 1999 championship season as the World Series MVP, and posted a 4-3 record with a 1.83 ERA and converted 45 of 49 save chances.

Since 1996, he's been the most dominant relief pitcher in the game, and if he were to continue at his current level, would be considered the greatest relief pitcher in history, and probably one of the most dominant pitchers that the game has seen.

Maybe Rivera is onto something. The July 16 game against Atlanta was the last one he lost all season, and he allowed just one earned run in the remaining 49 innings he pitched, including a scoreless post-season. Coincidence, or divine intervention?

Yankee general manager Brian Cashman was philosophical. Curry quotes him as saying "It sounds like he's got peace of mind, which is something many of us on this earth look for. For that, I'm happy for him."

And why not? Cashman's reaction was typical of the way sports people treat incursions by the real world into the sports community--an inevitable tendency to say that athletes' personal lives, or higher ideals, or commitments to virtues that aren't sports-related are forever more significant.

On Monday, Danny Ainge made a decision similar to Rivera's. In his fourth season as coach of the Phoenix Suns, Ainge quit because he felt that his coaching duties were detracting from his relationship with his wife and children.

"I love coaching, but anyone can coach," Ainge told the AP. "My wife has just one husband and my children have just one father. Some of you may think I'm jumping ship. I don't believe I'm jumping ship. I'm diving overboard to save my family."

Commentators have been unanimous in their praise for Ainge's decision. That's not surprising, since sports media always react in like fashion when the relative significance of the sports world is called into question.

When middleweight Stephan Johnson died Dec. 5 from injuries suffered in a Nov. 20 bout in Atlantic City, the outpouring of grief that greeted his death was appropriate, but was consistently couched in terms of the minor magnitude of boxing to life.

Here's an excerpt from the AP's account:

"Johnson's mother said she had asked her son to leave boxing, but he loved the sport too much for that.

'Stephan had a passion for boxing,' she said. 'He really loved boxing from the time he was a little kid, 5 years old--loved it with all his heart. Whenever I talked to him about stopping, he said, 'Stop asking me to quit. I've never been in jail. I've never done drugs. Let me pursue my passion.''"

Johnson death is painted as a tragic act in the morality play whereby an unreasoned devotion to sport ends up costing an athlete the ultimate price.

Ainge and Rivera, by contrast, are credited for their restraint, for sacrificing lucrative and successful careers in sports for the considerations of faith or family. But the irony in this distinction is that only athletes who have already achieved greatness can opt out with the laurels of commentators.

Stephan Johnson fought Paul Vaden even after he had been placed on indefinite medical suspension and had been blocked by the Association of Boxing Commissions from stepping in the ring until he passed neurological tests. Turns out, Johnson shouldn't have been fighting at all, but he needed the $10,000 purse and boxing was his only livelihood--his passion by default.

Ainge and Rivera can afford to quit because their beliefs lead them elsewhere, and the sports world fabricates a disingenuous belief in its own insignificance by praising them.

Johnson fought because he didn't have a financial choice, and the media transformed him into a martyr, a victim of boxing's brutality and all-encompassing greed.

But sports needs people like Stephan Johnson. It depends for its persistence and appeal on athletes who are willing to sacrifice the real world--whether in the form of high school or college grades, family responsibilities or personal safety--for the sports world.

It's hypocritical and distasteful when pundits find themselves compelled to valorize an athlete's preferring his personal beliefs or needs to his team's. There's more to life than knockouts or home runs, they remind us. Yet the impulse to conflate sports with life--in the quest for role models in athletics, in the prurience with which the media exposes the private lives of sports figures--is the lifeblood construct of sports journalism.

Stephan Johnson's death was senseless and preventable and tragic. But it was also symptomatic of a trope in the sports community: the only ones who can go out gracefully are the ones who don't need to stay.