Please see Part I for acknowledgments.

Hey, so now that I’ve missed the last 100 years or so, what’d I miss?

Anyway, here’s what we’ve got in terms of a final tally:

Year PREWAR Converted PREWAR
1995 0.200 2.64
1996 0.145 0.712
1997 -0.18 -3.8
1998 0.389 2.04
1999 0.476 2.71
2000 0.213 0.957
2001 0.535 2.34
2002 0.0221 1.55
2003 0.882 3.86
2004 0.686 3.81
2005 0.077 1.80
2006 0.0045 0.317
2007 0.178 2.71
2009 0.542 2.37

This will give us our totals:

PREWAR:                                 4.17
CONVERTED PREWAR:   24.016
Now, before we can go into what this data actually means, we need a couple of notes:

1)  The data is slightly skewed because of the years in which the Yankees lost in the first round of the postseason.  Just look at how much lower the numbers are for 2002, 2005, 2006 and 2007 to get an idea.

2) The Sandy Alomar Jr home run in 1997 kills Mariano’s PREWAR.  For comparison’s sake:  in 1997, Mariano’s postseason FIP was over 8.6(!)  In 2003, his best postseason (and it’s not even close), the number is 1.28.

Okay, so now that we’ve cleared that up, go pour yourself a nice glass of wine as we discuss what the numbers mean.

The raw, unconverted PREWAR figure is 4.17, so let’s do that one first.

The unconverted number says that Mariano is worth over four wins in the postseason–the equivalent of one round, all by his lonesome self–but there’s a caveat here.

The raw numbers here measure a win as having the same value as a win during the regular season–ie, one win in 162 games.  In the postseason, one win is worth a lot more.  Since Mariano pitches relief innings only, his innings totals in the postseason are thus supressed–he’s never thrown more than 16 innings in a postseason–which in turns suppresses the value for WAR.

Now, the raw PREWAR numbers are useful, but they will be most useful when we can compare them to other postseason relievers–this is the epilogue post that you will see following this one, which, if I can figure out how to make one, will have a nice shiny graph.

Anyway, enough with the digressing.

So what we want to do here, then, is to convert Mariano’s PREWAR numbers to a number that would be representative to what Mariano would be worth if he pitched at the same scale in the regular season.

The conversion has been done in the table above, but just a refresher:  to convert the numbers using the Magical Calculator Thingy, you change the input for Innings Pitched to 70, which is roughly what a closer would pitch over a full season (since becoming a full-time closer, Mariano has pitched between 60 and 80 innings per year, so this number actually works very well).

When we total up the CONVERTED PREWAR numbers, we get 24.016.

That would be, then, 24 wins.

Now, let’s go back and remember our very basic assumption, that it takes eleven wins to win a Championship.

Twenty four divided by 11 is, of course, just over two.

This means, adjusted to a regular-season scale, the Yankees have won two of their last five World Series, potentially for no other reason than that Mariano Rivera, and not another closer, was on the mound in the ninth inning.

Every time we go and we think that Rivera is the Hammer of God,  something else comes around to show us that he’s even greater…