Sports Illustrated's The Core Four

Posada, Jeter, Mo & Pettitte

Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, Andy Pettitte and Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees gathered for lunch last week at the St. Regis Hotel in San Francisco at the invitation of SI, to celebrate one of the most famous and accomplished sets of teammates in sports history. Rivera, Posada and Jeter are the first trio of teammates to play 16 consecutive seasons together in any North American team sport, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. Pettitte missed only three of those seasons with the Yankees while playing for his hometown Houston Astros from 2004 through '06. They have won five world championships together.

It took months for me to get the four of them -- the Core Four, as they've come to be known -- together. One planned date in spring training fell through, for instance, just days before the event because Rivera, a deeply religious man, said he would not give personal time on a Sunday. "It's my church day," he said.

On the night before the lunch last week, with everything in place, Jeter decided to move up the time by one hour. He is, after all, the captain. When Rivera was the only one to show up on time and threatened to leave because of the others' lack of punctuality, I couldn't tell if he was kidding or not. He looked serious enough to worry me that the whole thing was going kaput before it even got started.

The gathering was even more special than I thought, because after they arrived the four of them realized that it was the first time they had been alone together for a meal. They all broke into the big leagues with the Yankees in 1995, but this was their first time together without being part of a larger group.

Listening to them sometimes was like driving a station wagon full of Little Leaguers and hearing the silly, comfortable conversations. They joked almost immediately, for instance, about a situation in the previous game in which Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez was on third base and Posada was at first. "Did you see coach Alex?" Posada said. "Coach Rodriguez was giving me all kinds of hand signals over there. I wasn't going anywhere."

I joined them at the table and helped steer their conversation through what turned out to be a celebration more of their friendship than their years as teammates. The story of the Core Four, in their own words, can be found in this week's edition of Sports Illustrated.

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Sports Illustrated's The Core Four

Posada, Jeter, Mo & Pettitte