Craig Kimbrel Is Proof of Mariano Rivera

In his first five seasons in baseball, Craig Kimbrel was turning the best hitters in the world into pretzels -- the greatest reliever baseball had ever seen.

The undersized Brave mowed down 476 batters in his first 289 innings and allowed just a 1.43 ERA. He relinquished a total of 12 home runs -- in five years! -- and finished off 186 saves, the most in the NL in four of those five seasons. Despite the size of his workload, he earned top 10 Cy Young votes for all but his rookie season.

Then Kimbrel became arbitration-eligible, and the Braves inked him to a deal that hiked his salary 11-fold to $7 million in just its first year. In deep rebuilding mode and at the urging of this blog, the Braves suckered A.J. Preller into taking Kimbrel and B.J. Upton's death-contract to San Diego for players, prospects and massive salary relief.

But I haven't heard much about him lately...
Imagine the setup: the Incredible Hulk of closers moving to the most demoralizing park for hitters the game has conjured. Petco Park saps 14% from hitters' production, a gilding of the lily that Kimbrel hardly needed.

But a funny thing happened on the way to immortality: Kimbrel lost some of his mojo. Batters began timing his fastball -- just a bit -- and squared him up for homers twice as often. His ERA ballooned from otherworldly to excellent (2.68) and his save numbers dropped by 20%.

Quickly pivoting, Preller sent Kimbrel to Boston for pennies on the dollar, but Kimbrel again took a step back in 2016. Battling injuries for the first time, his walk rate spiked, sending his ERA to 3.40. His saves plummeted again and his value, once reliably more than three wins a year, stood at 0.9 wins last season. The projections suggest that this is the new Craig Kimbrel -- a flame-throwing reliever whose high heat is losing its novelty.

All of this is commentary on Mariano Rivera. Wha?

In his best year, Rivera was a pale shadow of Craig Kimbrel 1.0. He never fanned batters at such a rate. He never dominated hitters so thoroughly. He merely converted his split-finger into relentless awesomeness -- year after year after year.

In Rivera's worst year, his ERA jumped to 3.15. But advanced metrics suggested he was mostly unlucky and the following season -- at age 38 -- he allowed 49 baserunners in 71 innings and dropped his ERA to 1.40.

Mariano in his 40s
In his 40s, Rivera saved 126 games, sported a 1.95 ERA and allowed a WHIP under one. Included in that period was a year missed due to knee surgery and his comeback (and final) season.

In other words, any notion we might have had that Rivera was turning into the game's second best reliever of all time have evaporated, just like that. While Kimbrel's inaugural five campaigns rank up there with the best ever, his two seasons since would rank as Rivera's worst. Kimbrel would have had to maintain his pace for 15 years to match Mariano -- and he has begun to wear down after five.

The name of the greatest reliever of all time will not be changing anytime soon, and by soon we mean at least two decades. Craig Kimbrel's "struggles" remind us how unbelievably great Mariano Rivera was.