Vows: They Saw a Sign and Didn’t Shake It Off

For much of the last three years, Mariano Rivera III and Alyssa Picinich were kept apart by Mr. Rivera’s first love.

“I was very sad every time he left me,” said Ms. Picinich, 24, who met Mr. Rivera in November 2014, when they were students — she a junior and he a senior — at Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y.

“As time went on, he started saying how much he really loved me and missed being with me,” she said. “Although I felt the same way, I told him that before he decided to come home for good, he needed to consider the consequences.”

Mr. Rivera, now 25, had not been chasing another woman. He had been chasing a Major League Baseball dream across minor league ball fields in the long shadow of his father, Mariano Rivera, the retired Yankees closer who was a key contributor to five World Series titles during his 19-year tenure in the Bronx.

That success came at a steep price, as Mr. Rivera and his two younger brothers, Jafet, and Jaziel, often spent days, and sometimes weeks without seeing their father as he went about the business of being a baseball star.

For Mr. Rivera, the thoughts of such loneliness involving a child of his own got him wondering, if what he had been pursuing was his dream.

“I’ve been blessed to have a father who has provided so much for our family, but I don’t want my own son to grow up the way I did, and not have a father around because of baseball,” he said. “There were days when my father took us to school and spent time with us doing other things, and those are memories I cherish. But I rarely saw him after he left for spring training, and when he played night games at Yankee Stadium, I’d be asleep before he came home.”

“I actually saw him more on television than in person,” Mr. Rivera said.

In April, Mr. Rivera, a relief pitcher like his father whose fastball had topped out at 97 miles per hour, decided to slow things down, permanently. “I don’t want to live the life my parents have lived,” he told Ms. Picinich.

He promptly retired from professional baseball, giving up one true love for another.

“It wasn’t an easy decision,” he said. “But it was my decision, not Alyssa’s.”

When asked about his son’s desire to follow the pitter-patter of little feet rather than the giant footsteps of his own father, elder Mariano Rivera smiled and said simply, “if he’s happy, I’m happy — that’s all that matters.”

At Iona, Mr. Rivera was a starting pitcher. He set a school record as a senior with 113 strikeouts while limiting opposing hitters to a .211 batting average en route to being named the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference’s pitcher of the year.

By then, Mr. Rivera, who resembles his father, had already become a de facto celebrity on campus, constantly heeding a general warning given by his parents, who raised their children in a protective, religious environment.

“They wanted to make sure I stayed away from people who hung around me for all the wrong reasons,” he said. “There were girls who were all over me simply because I was the son of Mariano Rivera. It would get overwhelming at times.”

Then one night at a campus party, Mr. Rivera locked eyes with Ms. Picinich. He walked over to introduce himself and they spoke briefly.

“She was beautiful, and just the way she carried herself, I knew that she was different than any other girl I had ever met,” he said. “I definitely wanted to see her again.”

Ms. Picinich said that she and Mr. Rivera had, on occasion, crossed paths on the leafy Westchester campus, and were aware of each other on social media.

“I knew who he was,” she said. “At the party, we both did a double-take before he came over to introduce himself.”

When Ms. Picinich awoke the next morning, she found an Instagram message from Mr. Rivera, who wrote, in part, “I’d like to get to know you better.”

“I really didn’t know anything about him on a personal level,“ she said. “But he was handsome and sweet and I was attracted to him, so I told him I would love to hang out and get to know him better.”

They got together several times, as friends, and in a few short weeks, Ms. Picinich said she found Mr. Rivera to be “a very thoughtful, caring and generous guy.”

Mr. Rivera was equally excited about Ms. Picinich, the only daughter of Maryann and Anthony Picinich Sr., who grew up in Rochelle Park, N.J.

“She was a very caring, very loving, family-oriented person,” he said. “She knew who I was, but that wasn’t what attracted her to me, and I picked up on that right away.”

He took her to a Giants football game “as an icebreaker.”

“I brought a friend along because I was really nervous,” he said. “But we had a great time.”

The following month, they went on their first official date, to the Christmas tree lighting at Rockefeller Center.

On Dec. 27, 2014 — before a planned ice-skating trip in Manhattan — Mr. Rivera, who had been seeing Ms. Picinich for a little more than a month, handed her a card and a large bouquet of flowers. Inside the card he wrote: “Will you be my girlfriend?”

“Then he approached my dad and asked him for permission, that’s the kind of gentleman he is,” said Ms. Picinich, her voice beginning to crack. “That’s how well he was raised.”

Her father was beyond impressed. “I thought he was a class act,” said Mr. Picinich, who works as a steamfitter in Manhattan. “We were always big Yankees fans, so he fit right in.”

When Mr. Rivera returned the news to his parents that he and Ms. Picinich had become an exclusive item, “they were a bit concerned at first,” Ms. Picinich said.

“They wanted to make sure I wasn’t one of those girls getting involved with their son for all of the wrong reasons,” she said. “I wasn’t mad or angry because I understood that if I were in their position, I might act the same way.”

“But I wasn’t about to give up on our relationship just because of what his parents thought,” she added. “I was determined to show them that I was here for all the right reasons, to support Mariano and to care for him and love him for who he is, and not for who his dad is, or anyone else for that matter.”

Earlier that year, the Yankees had selected Mr. Rivera in the 29th round of the Major League Baseball draft, largely as a symbolic gesture, but Mr. Rivera chose instead to return to school to continue working on his pitching mechanics and achieve his goal of becoming the first member of his family to earn a college degree.

That decision paid handsome dividends, as Mr. Rivera not only earned a degree in public relations, but was selected by the Washington Nationals in the fourth round of the 2015 draft, and received a signing bonus of $410,700.

He soon began a steady climb up the Nationals minor league system, playing for the Class A Auburn Doubledays in Auburn, N.Y, the Hagerstown Suns in Maryland and the Potomac Nationals in Woodbridge, Va.

Though he posted a combined record of 7 victories and 6 losses with those teams from 2015-18, with 14 saves and a 4.62 earned run average, Mr. Rivera, who was now living with Ms. Picinich in New Jersey, was also becoming concerned with the kind of statistics that did not appear in any box score.

“He missed all three of my birthdays while he was playing in the minors,” Ms. Picinich, now a second-grade teacher in Fort Lee, N.J., said with a sigh.

Baseball also prevented Mr. Rivera from escorting Ms. Picinich to Iona’s college formal. “I filled in as Alyssa’s date that night,” said Meghan O’Donnell, a close friend of Ms. Picinich since the seventh grade. “She was kind of sad but she understood, and she never stopped supporting Mariano’s dream.”

For the up-and-coming reliever, there was also a different sort of blown opportunity in May 2016, that became a game-changer. That month, he failed to attend Ms. Picinich’s college graduation — she received a degree in psychology — a decision that ultimately led him to step out of his father’s shadow.

“I was playing in Hagerstown that day,” he recalled. “I felt it wouldn’t be right for me to ask my coaches for special treatment and try to get that day off. I thought it would send a bad message to my teammates.”

But, he said, “It was one of my biggest regrets. That’s when I knew things had to change.”

Mr. Rivera, who now works at his father’s auto dealership in Mount Kisco, N.Y., said, “I just didn’t have that love and desire to play baseball anymore, I didn’t want to live my life out of a suitcase.”

So he huddled with his parents and talked it over. “They were very supportive, especially my father, who never pressured me to play the game in the first place,” he said. “That was always something I wanted to do.”

Ms. Picinich had been to many of Mr. Rivera’s games throughout his minor league career, including multiple trips to spring training in Florida. She was there for his very last game, against the Wilmingtom Blue Rocks in Delaware.

“It was a very sad, emotional day for me,” she said. “But Mariano was actually happy, which told me that he had considered the consequences, and that he was truly comfortable with his final decision.”

After the final out, they drove home together.

The couple were married Oct. 13 at the Refuge of Hope Church in New Rochelle, with a reception that followed at the Rockleigh Country Club in Rockleigh, N.J.

“Today the bride and groom come here from two different families, two different heritages,” said the Rev. Mark Vega, an Evangelical minister, surrounded by the wedding party and rows of large glass vases teaming with white roses.

“A husband and wife should not measure love according to worldly success or even worldly achievements,” he said to the couple. “Only love can maintain a marriage.”

The bride, turning heads in a mermaid-style Dennis Basso wedding gown, soon exchanged wedding rings with the groom, razor sharp in a black Canali tuxedo that was handmade in Italy.

When the groom presented a red rose to his mother, Clara Rivera, after a brief candle-lighting ceremony honoring both families, she bowed her head slowly and began to cry, as did many members of the Rivera family seated around her.

Mariano Rivera, also dressed in a black tuxedo but, reverting to his days in pinstripes, saved the day by offering his wife a gentle hug and a box of tissues that made its way around the three pews reserved for the groom’s relatives.

Later at the reception, Mariano Rivera basked in the glow of a new role, father-in-law, going table to table to meet and greet many of the 321 guests in attendance (though no Yankees, past or present). Some of the guests were thrilled to pose for photographs with him.

“She’s a great girl, really amazing,” he said of Ms. Picinich. “As a young couple, she and my son have their whole lives in front of them, and as parents, we ask the Lord to bless them with many, many years of health and happiness, and we pray that their family will grow.”

And then the groom’s father closed with this: “There is life after baseball.”