Some Westchester sentences write themselves. This is one of them. On Tuesday, September 8, Mariano Rivera is showing up at Walter's Hot Dog Stand on Palmer Avenue in Mamaroneck with his hot sauce line. Four thirty to six thirty. A Mo's Heat hot dog goes on the menu that afternoon, and a three pack of the sauce gets you a photo with him.
That is a fun little local event on its own. What makes it better is what the two halves of it actually are.
All 425 Voters Put Him in Cooperstown
Rivera pitched nineteen seasons and retired with 652 saves, which is still the most anyone has ever recorded. Five World Series rings. Thirteen All Star selections. All of that is the resume you would expect.
The number that separates him is 425. In January 2019 the Baseball Writers' Association of America released its Hall of Fame vote and Rivera's name was on every single ballot. All 425 of them. No player had ever done that before. Not Willie Mays. Not Hank Aaron. Not Ken Griffey Jr., who came the closest in 2016 and still missed three votes. Rivera was the first, and he did it with essentially one pitch.
He Named the Sauces After His Pitches
The line is called Mo's Heat. Three sauces, all habanero, produced in partnership with the Panamanian hot sauce maker D'Elidas. The names are The Cutter, The Curve and The Sinker, which is the kind of branding decision that only works if you actually threw them.
The Cutter is the flagship, and it should be. That is the pitch that broke bats for two decades. The company says the recipe behind the sauces came to Panama from the Caribbean in 1904, which would make it older than the hot dog stand it is about to land on. Rivera grew up in Puerto Caimito, a fishing village on the Pacific side of Panama, in a family of fishermen. If you look closely at the bottles, they are photographed sitting on fishing nets. That is not a random prop.
Walter's Has Been There Since 1919
Walter and Rose Warrington started selling hot dogs in Mamaroneck in 1919. They did not start with hot dogs, actually. They started with cider and apples, then worked with a local meat maker on a frankfurter recipe of beef, pork and veal, split down the middle and cooked on a griddle. That is still how it is done. If you have ever wondered why a Walter's dog looks flat and crispy at the edges, that is why, and that recipe goes back about as far as the stand does.
The stand moved twice in its first decade. First a spot on the Boston Post Road, then Shepard's Field, and finally 937 Palmer Avenue, which the Warringtons bought in 1928. Their son Eugene ran the place for more than sixty years before he died in 2017. It is still in the family, and it has since added a White Plains location and a fleet of food trucks.
And It Is on the National Register
Here is the part that surprises people who have been going there their whole lives. Walter's is on the National Register of Historic Places. It was added on June 11, 2010, reference number 10000338, after New York State listed it that April.
It is there for the building. The 1928 stand is a pagoda with a copper tile roof that has oxidized to that pale green, plus ornamental dragons along the ridge and hanging dragon lanterns at the corners. The National Park Service files it under roadside architecture, the same category as the old motels and giant novelty signs that used to line American highways before the interstates took the traffic away. Almost none of them survived. This one is still selling lunch.
So They Meet on September 8
A hundred and seven years of split grilled hot dogs, and a Panamanian family recipe, in the same paper tray. Tuesday, September 8, 937 Palmer Ave, 4:30 to 6:30.
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