A couple days ago, Bexy over at Mystique and Aura, wrote a post about how utterly awesome Mariano Rivera’s 1996 season was, and why it meant so much to the team, given that the rotation was, shall we say, not the best one the Yankees have ever had.

If you haven’t read it (okay, if you’re reading this, you probably have), I highly recommend doing so before continuing on with the rest of this post.

I would, courtesy of a recent discussion with loyal blog reader JGS, like to expand on this.

I’ll start by throwing this out there:

In Rivera’s games 6-17, he pitched a total of 25 innings–more in a month than some starters do, nowadays, and he held the team to a line of: .086 /.129/.099/.228.

Yes, you read that right. In successive outings that would likely have destroyed the arms of lesser men, Rivera held opponents to a .099 slugging–just one double in seven hits.

The thing that may be most astounding about Mariano’s 1996 season, however, is not that he gave up just one home run all year, it’s that he pitched a total of 107 reliever innings, which means that there were multiple appearances of multiple innings on consecutive days, and he has, since then, never sustained a (go ahead and knock on wood here) serious arm or shoulder injury.

Sure, he’s had some shoulder problems–like in 2008, where he had the other season of his life, and pitched on an injured shoulder–but Rivera has never missed significant time with an arm injury.

With all the fuss today about pitch counts and innings limits, it seems almost remarkable that Rivera would have been allowed to undertake that workload, something about which Ramon Troncoso or Fernando Nieve would have nightmares wherein Scott Proctor haunts them, but then we remember that the 1996 Yankees were managed by Joe Torre, and suddenly it doesn’t seem quite so surprising.

There were only eleven years between 1996 and 2007, and yet the way the Yankees handled Joba Chamberlain when he first came up, as an elite set-up man, seems so far, far different from the way Mariano Rivera pitched. There are caveats–such as Joba had an injury history and Torre a bullpen abuse history that Rivera did not and Torre had not yet amassed in 1996.

Still, it seems today amazing that Rivera accomplished in 1996 what he did, and that he never had to pay the baseball-karma-injury price.

Maybe, in 1996, Mo was a bit divine….