Presumably you’ve heard that Mariano Rivera saved his 600th game last night. Sometime this week he’ll save his 601st game, and before the season is done he’ll save his 602nd game and break the all-time saves record, just in case anyone is silly enough to need that figure for evidence that Rivera is the greatest closer of all-time.

By allowing a single hit last night, Rivera maintained his career 1.000 WHIP. To date he has thrown 1206 innings, yielded 932 hits and walked 274 batters. That is, if you’re scoring at home, awesome.

Adjusted ERA+ factors park- and league-effects into earned-run average and scales it so that 100 is average — sort of like IQ tests and the old SATs. Among pitchers with over 1000 innings pitched, Pedro Martinez has the second best ERA+ of all time with 154. Third is someone named Jim Devlin, who dominated hitters for three seasons in the 1870s and managed a career 151 mark. Fourth and fifth are Hall of Famers Lefty Grove and Walter Johnson, with 148 and 147, respectively. Those men were pitching geniuses.

Rivera’s career adjusted ERA+ is 205, more than 50 points higher than the next best ever. Isaac Newton stuff, in this imperfect metaphor.

Of course, any discussion placing Rivera among the best pitchers ever must be qualified with the fact that his dominance almost always came in one-inning stints. Who knows what Johnson or Grove or Pedro would have done if afforded that luxury? Who knows if Rivera would have been anywhere near as effective if asked to throw 120 relief innings every year the way Rollie Fingers once did, or — heaven forbid — to start games.

It never happened, so it doesn’t matter much now. Rivera happened to emerge and succeed in the era of the one-inning closer, a role he has come to define better than Tony La Russa ever could.

And though there’s evidence to show that teams leading after the 8th inning have won the same rate of games since the dawn of the closer as they did in all the years before that, perhaps increased specialization in bullpens was an adjustment necessary to maintain that percentage in the contemporary game rather than a needless rejiggering of an already effective system.

Either way, Rivera is awesome. That’s the main thing.