When Earl Weaver announced in September 1986 that he wasn’t returning to the club next season, the players got into the act of choosing a successor; some campaigned openly for my father. Rick Dempsey said it wouldn’t be fair to give the job to anyone else. Eddie Murray said that if Senior got the job he’d withdraw his request for a trade. (Eddie was under contract with the Orioles through 1991.) Jim Palmer, no longer even a player, said that Senior was the one candidate with “no negatives.” He and some others also suggested that my eligibility for free agency the following year would be taken into account by Hank Peters and Edward Bennett Williams. That was pure speculation. And one player was quoted anonymously as saying there’d be a “mutiny” if someone other than my father were chosen.
Dad was gratified by the support, I’m sure, but still embarrassed. If you’re looking for Earl Weaver’s air of self-importance from Senior, you’re wasting your time. I thought the choice of Dad was a foregone conclusion—but you never know. Frank Robinson was still with the team. Ray Miller was available. People were always looking for angles why Dad might get the job: the Orioles wanted to make sure I stayed, he had put in his time with the organization, the Orioles owed him, et cetera, et cetera. They seemed to consider everything except what was to me the most obvious reason: given his experience and the respect in which he was held by all the players, my father had certainly earned his shot as the big league manager.
And he got it that year, at the age of fifty. I don’t remember how I found out—a phone call, probably. There might have been some tears shed by the notoriously unsentimental Ripken family that day. No one in the world ever deserved this opportunity more than my father deserved his. He had been loyal for years, and he was totally qualified, but when a reporter asked if he’d been “waiting” for the manager’s job, Senior replied, “I haven’t been waiting thirty years for this job. I enjoyed every day as a minor league manager and major league coach.”
As we know, Dad doesn’t dream, and he doesn’t wait, either. The funny thing was that his job didn’t really change that much. He had always had a lot of responsibility under Earl Weaver, then Joe Altobelli, then Weaver again. He was ready. Asked if the family relationship would have any bearing on decisions, Dad snapped, “No bearing whatsoever.” That was true. Dad had always said they’re my sons off the field, and he meant it. His attitude with us had been totally professional, even when we were little kids hanging around the fields in Elmira and Dallas and Rochester and Asheville. And I say “us” because Billy, in his sixth year as a professional, was on the Orioles’ major league roster in spring training in 1987. The year before, Billy had traveled over from his minor league camp to fill out the roster one day when we had split squads, but 1987 was for real, although he wasn’t expected to be with the club when we broke camp in April. Later, maybe. The tipoff of his chances of making the team—if Billy needed a tipoff, which he didn’t—was the number he was issued: 56. A high number usually means high odds of making the team. Senior saw that number the first day and hollered, “Hey, Lawrence Taylor!” Another tipoff might have been Billy’s first order of bats: the name was spelled “Ripkin.” Of course, that kind of thing could happen to him after fifteen years in the majors. I know.
When someone asked if my brother and I had ever played baseball on the same field in any kind of organized league game, I was surprised to realize that the answer was no. We’d been in one organized soccer game—as described, when Billy, Fred, and I got into the big fight—and in a lot of pickup games, but never in the same league. In Florida, it was now fun seeing Billy the baseball player, the obviously improving second baseman. Maybe I was even a little surprised to realize that he could have played defense in the big leagues right then; hitting was going to be the issue for him.
My mother came down to camp that year in Miami, and, of course, there was a big media and marketing blitz for the three Ripkens. Sports Illustrated had us on the cover, and Edward Bennett Williams waved this issue at the state capitol when he was campaigning to get approval of the financing package for the proposed new stadium at Camden Yards. Dad, of course, wanted nothing to do with the Ripken angle. He wanted his sons looked at as professional ballplayers and himself as their manager. End of discussion. Generally Billy and I went along with the party line, although sometimes we called him “Bub” as a joke, because that’s what he’d called us as kids.
Dad ran that camp at Bobby Maduro Stadium in Miami the way he had run all the previous ones—strictly—and he got the ball rolling with a forty-five-minute speech on the first day. That’s a lot of talking, but with a ton of new players and a lot of bad memories left over from 1986, the Orioles needed it in ’87. I think he wanted to set the stage for a fresh start for the team after a losing season. He summed up his baseball philosophy, in effect, while referring to his notes on a yellow legal pad. He repeated what I’d heard many times already: that baseball is fun when you’re doing things correctly and winning ball games. He said that some of the Orioles seemed to have forgotten this in the last month of 1986. Overall that year we had committed 135 errors, a club record—but that number would come down, Senior said. (And it did, to 111.) If an infielder wasn’t taking a drill seriously and laughed after bobbling a ball during a drill, this would not be appreciated or tolerated. Senior said he didn’t want a lot of idle Final Four talk around the batting cage. He wasn’t even in the Final Four pool. “No time,” he said, correctly. On the field, he wanted you to think baseball and work on baseball. That’s just the way he was.
I had heard the basics of his speech many times, but looking around the locker room, I could see that the players were paying attention. The older hands had respect for Senior; the new guys were trying to get a handle on him. This 1987 team that Dad inherited bore no resemblance to the team that had won the World Series four years earlier. Eddie Murray and I were the two main holdovers among the position players; Mike Boddicker, Mike Flanagan, and Scott McGregor among the pitchers. After campaigning for Senior to get the manager’s job, Rick Dempsey hadn’t been re-signed to play under him. Storm Davis had been traded for catcher Terry Kennedy. Rick Burleson had been signed to play second base, Ray Knight to play third. These three guys would add scrappy veteran leadership, but you had to wonder whether the overall flow of the Orioles’ famous “complementary” talent coming up through the system was finally drying up.
At the start of the season nobody wanted to admit, at least not publicly, where the Orioles stood. Especially my dad. It was his job to be enthusiastic and optimistic, and he was great at that. But if you were listening and reading carefully, you noticed that he never said we had the talent to go all the way. What he said was we were going to work hard and play the game properly. As he had said at the press conference the previous fall when he was introduced as the new manager, “If there was one disappointment for me this year, it was that I could no longer say we had twenty-four guys coming through the door ready to put on the uniform and go to work.” That would change. As Tom Boswell, one of the best baseball writers in the country, wrote in The Washington Post during spring training, “If the floundering S.S. Baltimore is to be saved, no man is more likely to do it. And if the ship is destined to go down, no one else would stand taller as the last man on the bridge.”
After a miserable spring, I was on fire with the bat in April, but after a month Eddie Murray and Fred Lynn were hitting near or even below .200, and my friends John Shelby and Floyd Rayford had already been sent to Rochester for retooling. Then everyone came around, helped a great deal by a major league record for home runs in a month, 58 in May, but then we slumped again, losing 10 in a row. Just before and after the All-Star break, it was division-leading Boston’s turn to lose a bunch of games while we won 11, and we closed the gap against them again. And it’s my pleasure to give much of the credit for that 11-game winning streak to Billy Ripken. My brother was a big spark for us when he came up at the All-Star break. There’s no doubt about that. As a brother and as a teammate, I was happy to have him on the Orioles. He had earned the opportunity.
While I made it to the majors in three and a half years, Billy’s breakthrough hadn’t come until his fifth year, in Double-A Charlotte in 1986. He had always been a terrific, smart infielder, but Charlotte was where Billy found himself as a hitter. Then in 1987 he was playing great in Rochester while Rick Burleson and Alan Wiggins were sharing second base duties in Baltimore. These two had taken over the position from Juan Bonilla, who had taken over from Lenn Sakata and Rich Dauer. Second base had been something of a revolving door for the Orioles (third base, too, for that matter), so I couldn’t have been more excited to see Billy take up his position in the infield. He has great hands and knows how to play. He executes at a high, high level. Looking just at defense and baseball smarts and things that don’t necessarily show up in the stats, he and Robbie Alomar are in the same league. Take a certain double play that must be turned in the big leagues. It must be—but failure to do so doesn’t show up in the stats. Billy will turn that double play. As a steady performer on the other side of second base from me, he would bring stability. I believe stability is important. I like knowing who’ll be playing alongside me tomorrow.
It was fun seeing Billy with the Orioles, period, because when he walks in the room, I smile. When he starts talking, I usually start laughing. One thing that ties us together is that we’re much more alike than people realize. We’re both very competitive; this quality, on his side especially, was the fuel for our feuds growing up, because he refused to accept the huge disadvantage he faced in size and age. While my brother Fred and I sometimes fought as kids, I just teased Billy unmercifully, and he always, invariably, finally blew his top. Someplace out on the road in the early years, I drove him berserk squirting him with a water pistol through the screened top half of a locked door, and he cut his arm pretty badly punching the glass panel underneath. I invented a neat game called “Sack the Quarterback” in which I was the defensive line, there was no offensive line, and Billy was the quarterback. When the two of us got together, things could “get simple,” as Dad put it. Billy seems to have something of an inferiority complex, because he tells everyone that he’s the Ripken without the piercing, sky-blue eyes. For this genetic deficiency, he blames the three-year gap between himself and Fred, the next youngest.
We’re both cutups in private, although I’m reserved in public, while Billy is more of the class-clown type. He’s the in-your-face, spontaneous one. He doesn’t care about flaming out. I do. In spring training, with the three Ripkens posing for our hundredth photograph, I reached behind Dad’s back to twist his cap sideways. Understandably, he looked accusingly at Billy before pulling the cap straight.
When someone asked our manager if he called his youngest son Bill or Billy, Senior replied deadpan, “I call him motormouth.” Our mother liked to quip, “If he had been the first one, he’d have been the last one.” Our father replied, “Don’t you think he might be like this because he is the last one?” As our sister Elly revealed in one of her many interviews in 1995, Billy was one of those marital mistakes that sometimes happen. I don’t remember this, but Elly said that Mom cried when she found out she was pregnant for the fourth time, while Dad said, “Don’t worry. He’ll be the joy.” Our parents never denied the story. When Billy was at the center of some public episode in a restaurant many years ago, Dad scribbled on a napkin that he passed over to Mom, “Told you he’d be the joy.” (Have I mentioned? My father has a very dry sense of humor.)
In neighborhood games, my little brother and I could be a potent combination. If I was picking one of the squads, and I usually was, I’d choose him first. I guess I was looking out for him, but I was also taking into account that the other team would often disregard him, because he was so much younger. We scored a lot of points with me at quarterback and him at wide receiver. In basketball, when I picked off an offensive rebound, I’d probably flip it back out to him for the open shot.
Billy was drafted by the Orioles in the eleventh round in 1982, and two weeks later he was on the road to Bluefield, West Virginia, the same Rookie League franchise I’d played for four years earlier. And he was on the road in my old LTD. By that time—1982—I’d bought a little BMW and had the idea of passing the Ford sedan along to Billy. I thought it would be worth more to him than it was to me as a trade-in, and Dad agreed it was a great idea. A couple of days before he left Baltimore I tossed him the keys and said, “It’s your turn.” Dad loaned him the same battered equipment bag he had loaned me, and he told Billy he wanted it back again when he made the big show. Fred helped with the drive to Bluefield, where Billy tried to get a bedroom in Mrs. Short’s house on College Avenue, but she was already full. And soon enough, he, too, called home in frustration. Mom told him I’d made just about the same phone call shortly after I’d arrived on the same team.
If I caught some flack in Bluefield for being a coach’s son, Billy caught even more heat. I had been tall and gangly and didn’t look very good on the field; Billy weighed all of 160 pounds, and he struggled, too. The injuries came early and often in his career—broken middle finger of his glove hand, broken index finger on his right hand, assorted knee problems and shoulder problems—and they slowed his progress through the minors.
As I’d done, Billy made some off-season money as a substitute teacher in Aberdeen. In the off-season after 1983, his second year in the minors, he sponged off me at my condo. The idea was that in lieu of paying room and board he’d be in charge of fun and entertainment. This would be a piece of cake for him—he’s the life of the party in his sleep—but mainly he just looked up the movie times. We had a ball that winter, and I even cooked fairly often, using the same recipes Mom had sent off to Bluefield with me more than five years earlier. I cooked cafeteria portions: meat loaf the size of a small wedding cake. Plenty for everyone. But the highlight of that wild winter was up in the Catskills in New York, where I’d been named king of Winter Carnival. The queen turned out to be Miss Universe, from Down Under. Our parents joined Billy and me for the festivities, and we all had a great time. Billy, particularly, was in his element. When we left, the sponsors probably decided they’d picked the wrong Ripken to wear the crown.
Three and a half years later, he was in his baseball element with the Orioles, finally getting the chance to write that book he was always bragging he’d write, One Day in the Big Leagues. Historians reached for their record books and learned that we were not the first, not even the second, merely the third sibling keystone combination to play in the majors, following Granny and Garvin Hamner in Philadelphia in 1945 and Eddie and Johnny O’Brien in Pittsburgh in the early fifties. Dad greeted Billy with the same handshake and “Welcome aboard” that he greeted everyone with, and warned him that he might not play every day and that he might be pinch-hit for. But he wasn’t pinch-hit for, because he hit .308. When he showed speed by beating out an infield hit or stealing a base, opposing players teased me. After recording no homers in Rochester in 238 at-bats (although he made sure everyone understood he’d been rooked out of one, when a drive that hit the foul pole was ruled a double), he nailed his first homer in just his first week with us. He was batting second, I was third, and he claimed he could hear me screaming from the on-deck circle in Kansas City as the ball left the field. Maybe he did hear me. I was excited, and so was Dad, but everyone else gave the newcomer the silent treatment.
Billy was the post–All-Star game spark in ’87, but the team couldn’t keep the blaze going. The year before, fans had thought Earl Weaver’s magic and leadership were the key to our good position in early August. In 1987, Senior must have been doing something right, but in both those years we just didn’t have the ability to follow up over the closing months. Occasionally the best team will blitz the field early, like the Tigers had done in the AL East in 1984, but more often the good teams get better as the season rolls along. That had always been the Orioles’ tradition. In fact, Earl Weaver used to get upset when his team was chastised for being around .500 at the All-Star break. Earl knew how it works: somewhere in late July or August, maybe early September, the best team wins nine, loses three, wins nine more, loses three, wins six more and the race is over. The Orioles didn’t have that extra gear in either ’86 or ’87. We had burned our fuel getting to the point of even being in contention. In 1987, the pitching wasn’t there, overall, with lots of injuries to just about all of them. Our closer Don Aase missed almost the entire season. We hit 211 homers but gave up 226, a large number that accounted for a team ERA of 5.01, the first team to post an ERA over 5 since the 1962 Mets. Billy’s spark and a career performance from a rejuvenated Larry Sheets weren’t nearly enough.
On the official highlight tape of the 1983 World Series you can hear our first base coach Jimmy Williams telling one of the National League umpires that I’d played every inning of every game that year. The umpire’s reaction was “No Way!” as though playing every inning must have been a big ordeal. After our victory celebration that year, manager Joe Altobelli and I had a few minutes alone in his office and Joe said about the innings, “That was great, but I’m not going to let it happen again.” I didn’t know what to say, I was so surprised. Any number of times Joe had come up to me in a blowout and asked “Want to take these last innings off?” and I’d said something like, “Not really, Joe. I’m swinging well. I want to keep it going.” To me, the issue couldn’t have been simpler. I was learning the game, getting hits, exploring baseball. In my mind, when the game was out of hand one way or the other I had a good opportunity to use at-bats to experiment, if I wasn’t hitting well, or to keep a good thing going, if I was. That was my approach. Playing the nine innings was no big deal. So Joe let me play, even though he said several times that he would “inevitably” have to sit me down sometime.
He’s now the general manager in Rochester, and during the hoopla about the Gehrig record in 1995, we sat in his office when the Orioles were in town for the annual exhibition game and talked about old times. Joe asked if I remembered our earlier conversation. “Yeah,” I said, and he laughed and said, “But I did let it happen again.” And not just the next year. I played every inning under Joe again in 1984, then in ’85 under him and Earl Weaver, then in ’86 under Earl alone. When the same question came up Earl would say, “When we’re winning, I want our best defensive player in there”—in ’86 he cited an 11-run inning by Kansas City against Boston—“and when we’re losing I want my best offensive player, who can get us back in the game with one swing of the bat.”
There was some joking about the innings streak in the clubhouse a couple of times, maybe standing around the batting cage, maybe in a restaurant late at night, but, basically, playing every inning and every game was accepted, certainly in my mind. As I said in my remarks on September 6, 1995, I grew up with that old-school attitude that I learned from Senior growing up and then saw played out in front of my eyes by Eddie Murray, the definition of the everyday player for a decade until he got hurt in 1986. Eddie played every inning in 1984.
I had to be told that the streak extended back to June 5, 1982, the game after Jim Dwyer had pinch-hit for me in the ninth inning in Minnesota, and five games after the streak of consecutive games started. Still, in 1987, it seemed like these consecutive innings became a topic of interest. There wasn’t a record as such, but researchers decided that I held it nevertheless. They found two players for the early Red Sox teams who’d played every inning for a streak of 424 game (Candy LaChance) and 534 games (Buck Freeman). As the subject gathered momentum, it seemed like reporters mainly wanted to ask me about my run of 7,000-, then 8,000-plus innings. I also think the fact that I was in a slump was a contributing factor to the attention, and also the fact that the Orioles had been touted as a contending team but weren’t contending very well.
On May 16, I was hitting .326. A couple of months later, the average was down 40 or 50 points. I’d heard and read the normal rumbles during previous slumps, but this was the first time it had ever become fairly intense: Ripken is 1-for-this, 3-for-that over his last so-many games. The reporters had all the numbers, and therefore so did I. And they had all the questions as well, and my answers were sometimes short. I tried to be polite, but I was irritated and it probably showed. I didn’t want an excuse for my slump, especially one as weak and wrong as needing an inning off. When you feel sluggish, you don’t feel better sitting on the bench. At least I don’t. I perk up when I trot onto the field. Sometimes my concentration flags and I find myself standing at the plate with two strikes and no idea what the pitches have been, but that happens to every player at times, maybe in September, maybe in April. The only streak that counts physically is one season. Then we rest all winter. And we have off days throughout the season. I didn’t play all those innings without any breaks.
Anyway, in 1987, my manager—my father—thought he could do one thing to alleviate some of the pressure. On September 14 we were at the old Exhibition Stadium in Toronto, enduring a game which would have been remembered by O’s fans anyway. That was the night we set the record by giving up ten home runs. Not surprisingly, Toronto won that laugher, 18–3. I was due up fourth in our half of the eighth inning, and while I was getting ready to step out to the on-deck circle, Dad called me over and said very quietly, “What do you think about coming out?”
“What do you think?”
“I think it’s a good idea.”
We never mentioned the streak. It was understood.
“Okay.”
If I had said “I don’t want to,” if I had insisted, he would have left me in. But I wouldn’t have insisted, because I had faith in his judgment. This one time, Senior was dealing with me as my manager and as my father. Old Stone Face would deny if, of course, but that’s what I believe.
Batting in front of me in the eighth, Larry Sheets and Eddie Murray got hits, and then it looked like I had one, too, on a shot up the middle, but Manny Lee stabbed it and got the force out on Eddie, who was hobbling into second on the ankle that had been bothering him for a month. That left me on first base, and then Ray Knight made the third out on a comebacker. As I walked off the field, Jimmy Williams jogged over from his coaching box and said “I’ve got you,” meaning that he’d take my batting helmet so I could head straight for shortstop. Standard procedure. When I said “I’m out of the game,” he was caught totally off guard. My string of 8,243 consecutive innings was over.
Dad hadn’t told Billy, so after the third out Billy reached for my glove before Senior whistled to him and shook his head. Billy was still in the dugout when I arrived, and he looked bewildered. He looked like he wanted an explanation from me personally. I thought he was going to cry, and seeing him made me feel like crying. It was so unbelievably strange to hear myself say, “No, I’m not in there.”
I felt lost. I stood in the runway by myself for a minute, guys crowding around to shake my hand, my father among them. Rene Gonzales used the word “awesome.” Jimmy Williams told me quietly how proud he was. I was surprised by the emotion, because I’d never much put stock in the streak as a streak to begin with. I just wanted to play. But now that it was over with, all of a sudden I could hardly breathe, and I had to get to the clubhouse to gather myself. I didn’t want my emotions to get the best of me out there. Settled down and back on the bench for the final half innings, I sat next to Mike Boddicker, who asked if I was okay. My answer was, apparently, “Yeah.” Mike said he’d had the feeling for a few days that “Bub” was going to make the move. At some point Larry Sheets tried to lighten the situation by quipping, “If you ever want to know what to do on the bench, let me know. I can help you.” If I smiled, which I doubt, it was a weak one, although I usually appreciated Larry’s wit and irony. He was having a great year; for the first time in his career, he’d been playing most of the games that season.
In the clubhouse after the game the press descended on me and Dad, wanting to know, “Why now?” Dad said it was his decision, I wasn’t involved, he thought it was time, he didn’t want me to have to deal with the hassles as I approached 10,000 innings the following year. That was old-school baseball in which the manager tries to protect his players and deflect criticism, no matter what. In the modern game, this doesn’t always happen. Sometimes managers distance themselves from blame or responsibility. They might say, “It’s not my fault. All I can do is put my best players out there. They have to perform. I’m not swinging the bats. I’m not throwing the balls.” My father would never have said something like that. He never did that year, even when we were plummeting in September to a record of 67-95, 31 games behind Detroit.
Later, it was reported that management had pressured my father into breaking my innings streak. Not true, Dad said. In the clubhouse, I answered what seemed to me every imaginable post-game question, and then I answered them again, as wave after wave of reporters came up to my locker. Where were they coming from? Someone even wanted to know what my mother thought of all this.
Finally, hours after the game, I was able to talk alone with Dad. He told me that he knew how much I worried about the team and my hitting and that it wouldn’t hurt me to take a seat in blowouts. He thought I should do it more often. I know the details of that conversation because I wrote them down later in my hotel room. For therapeutic reasons, I guess, I wrote nine pages of my thoughts and feelings on a legal pad. I’ve never kept a diary, but the fact that I wrote at such length that night indicates that sitting out just one inning had had a major impact on me. Years later, I had forgotten about those notes and their content until I found them when my wife and I were moving some stuff around in the closets. I don’t think I mentioned them during the coverage of the Gehrig streak.
Those pages begin with a quick résumé of the preceding five years and with my idea that “I just wanted to play, period.” That’s the phrase I use. I note somewhat sarcastically that the only time the streak ever came up was when I was struggling, and that the attention had become even greater that September. I suggest that the reason Dad took me out was that he understood I would never—underlined—have taken myself out of a game. He understood better than anyone—because he had taught me—my belief that if I could play, I should play, and any criticism in this regard would only bring out the Ripken competitiveness and stubbornness. I note the time at the bottom of the ninth page: 3:36 a.m.
The very next day, my brother, still in a state of shock of his own, ripped ligaments in his ankle, and that was it for him for the year. That afternoon, at 4:10 p.m., I wrote two more pages in that legal pad, and at this point the consecutive games streak is also on my mind. Almost exactly eight years before I broke Lou Gehrig’s record, this is what I wrote:
I have no feeling of anger or regret or disappointment. I also have no feeling of relief. I guess my feeling all along about the innings streak being “no big deal” was right. Although I take tremendous pride in my ability to play every day (& every inning), I don’t perceive it to be a great accomplishment. The innings thing to me seemed to go hand in hand with the games streak. I always thought both would end at the same time. Now the question that lurks in my mind is will I feel the same way when the [games] streak has ended as I do about the ending of the innings streak. I do, however, have strong feelings about continuing the games streak & I probably would have objected to ending that if that were the case a couple of days ago.
Thinking back to the night when the innings streak was snapped, I do remember one feeling that I haven’t recorded on paper. That feeling was one of giving up, giving in, or beaten down.
One paragraph later:
In a sense, because I don’t believe all that bull about being tired from playing (mentally or physically), [I] was fighting back, refusing to give in to something I didn’t believe in. So when the time came to come out of the lineup I felt I had lost the fight & at that moment I didn’t feel good about myself. I almost felt I let myself down. Dad assured me that in no way did I give up or give in, and that that was not the right way to look at it. I believed him then and I believe him now. It’s just that I played one way and thought one way for so long that I felt I was abandoning my ideals. . . . My approach is still going to be the same but I see my approach now in a different light. I feel better about it all.
If it had been just that streak, Dad knew I could have dealt with it. Physically, of course, the streak meant nothing. We both understood that. Sitting out one or two or ten innings was going to restore depleted energy? I don’t think so. After stopping that streak, I would just punch the clock the next day and begin another streak, but at least the attention would be somewhere else.
Two weeks after sitting down in Toronto, I was ejected from a game for the first time in my six-plus-year career, for arguing a called strike with Tim Welke. Coincidental? Totally. After Tim punched me out, I walked away saying, “You missed two of the three pitches. The one you didn’t miss I swung at.” I wasn’t particularly mad, just frustrated, but I guess my tone was pretty harsh and Welke took offense. He came out from behind the plate and when I stopped short while starting for the dugout, his mask bumped the bill of my batting helmet. With that, he tossed me. “Why did you throw me out?” I asked. His face went blank, and I took that to mean he didn’t know. We exchanged some words I’m not proud of before I finally departed the scene. However, this argument had nothing to do with my missing an inning two weeks earlier.
Years later, during the Gehrig extravaganza, my brother Billy said that when he saw the look on my face in the dugout on September 14, 1987, he knew it would be a long time before I missed an entire game, if I had anything to do with the decision. I’m sure my father knew that, too, as well as anyone else who understood my competitiveness and desire to play. But breaking Gehrig’s record for consecutive games was so far in the future it was unthinkable. The newspapers usually mentioned when I passed someone on the list—in September 1987, I was number six, behind Joe Sewell—but not a lot was made out of it. The most attention had come when I passed Brooks Robinson’s Oriole record, 463 consecutive games, two years earlier.
“Is this a high point of your career?” a reporter asked at the time.
“I hope not,” I answered.