On November 13, 1987, Kelly Geer and I finally got married. I say “finally” because there’d been a delay of a couple of years since we’d settled down as a serious couple while we tried to get a diagnosis for an illness that had first arisen two years earlier. I’ll get to that.
Kelly and I met through the good offices of her parents. One night during the off-season following the ’83 season, Joan and Robert Geer happened to see me in a restaurant in Cockeysville. I was there with Al Bumbry. From what I understand, it took a while for my future mother-in-law to get up the nerve to ask me for an autograph, but when she did she said something like, “Have I got a daughter for you!”
I wrote on the napkin, “To Kelly, if you look anything like your mother, I’m sorry I missed you. Cal Ripken.”
That kind of forward statement is out of character for me. I don’t know what came over me, but I’m glad it did. Kelly now has that napkin stored in a safe-deposit box, but at the time she was in fact underwhelmed by the gift from her mother. “Who’s Cal Ripken?” she asked. Her parents were modest baseball fans—they’d never been to an Orioles game, but they followed the results on the sports pages—while Kelly was no fan at all. Still, a couple of weeks later she tapped me on the shoulder after I’d finished a promotional appearance in a different Cockeysville restaurant and thanked me for being nice to her mother. Before she had a chance to introduce herself, I said, “You must be Kelly.”
The first thing I noticed was that she was so tall—six feet, or very close. Kelly jokes that I was attracted by her height because I wanted sons who’ll be basketball players. That’s not entirely true; she’s also as pretty as her mother. But I do have to admit I was impressed when I was over at her place and saw her trophy for second place in the statewide “Dribble and Shoot” contest one year. I couldn’t figure out why the trophy was so small, because that was a great achievement. I entered the competition one year, and didn’t get past the second or third round. Kelly made it all the way to the finals, which were held at halftime at a Baltimore Bullets game. Kelly swears that her stock went way up that evening when I saw her trophy. Well, it didn’t go down.
As it turned out, our first official date was more or less snowed out because it was hard to get around town, and since I had to leave the following day and needed to do some laundry and pack a bag, we ended up at my townhouse for dinner—salsa and chips, all I had on hand. That was the year my brother was around to handle the entertainment, so the three of us played cards and darts. Kelly wasn’t much of a card player, and had never thrown darts in her life, so there was a lot of instruction. We didn’t talk baseball, that I know. Kelly had played softball, but she didn’t know major league baseball.
Nor did she know that it takes me at least an hour to get out of the clubhouse after the game, but she found out on our first baseball date at Memorial Stadium early in the 1984 season, when she waited alongside the fans who were hoping for autographs. Nor, unfortunately, did she know I was in the habit of then sitting in my car for another hour or so signing these autographs. All in all, I got the distinct impression she didn’t find this part of dating a professional baseball player very appealing. In fact, it didn’t take long before she quit waiting altogether. We started meeting at a certain time and place away from the park. Eventually she became accustomed to a ballplayer’s unusual schedule, and at the end of the ’84 season she came with me on my first post-season barnstorming tour of Japan.
In the Tokyo airport, waiting to fly home, Kelly and I talked for the first time about getting engaged. Not a week later, back home in Baltimore, she began having headaches, then fainting spells and nausea. She worked in Piedmont Airlines’ VIP lounge at BWI airport, and pretty soon her work and her whole life was in a shambles. And no doctor could figure out what was wrong. Or put it this way: each doctor she visited had a different explanation. In the beginning, I went with Kelly to the various specialists, but I quit. We couldn’t get a definitive answer and I began wondering whether my presence as a ballplayer was getting in the way of the diagnosis, or creating extra pressure to find it. Maybe this would have been a good time not to be locally famous. Or maybe I was just paranoid.
Even when I wasn’t with her, Kelly got the sense that the doctors weren’t concentrating on the question at hand. Maybe the word had spread along with the referrals that Kelly Geer was Cal Ripken’s girlfriend. She was tested for brain tumors, heart problems, cancer, Lyme disease, Hodgkin’s disease, lupus. She was declared to have chronic fatigue syndrome and, at one point, a cervical vertebra injury. This injury probably stemmed from her fitness workout, she was told, and her therapy included one hour of neck traction once a week plus cortisone shots with huge needles.
Nothing worked, and eventually Kelly had to quit her job with Piedmont, which she’d taken because she loves to travel. She lost twenty-five pounds. She got light-headed and almost blacked out once or twice while driving. Her health insurance was almost maxed-out. At some point, the word in the medical profession must have been that Kelly Geer is not only Cal Ripken’s girlfriend, but she’s got some kind of emotional problem as well. One doctor said, “Kelly, you’re too stressed out from dating such a high-profile celebrity,” and referred her to a psychiatrist.
She stared at him and her frustration boiled over when she said, “So you’re saying Cal is making me sick? Going out with him is my whole problem? Is that what we’re saying here? You know what stress is? Stress is not knowing what’s wrong. Something is wrong with my body. Losing twenty-five pounds is significant.”
She wasn’t happy, but she went to see the psychiatrist because it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that by this time she was desperate. This psychiatrist took one look at her and asked, “Have you ever been tested for Graves’ disease?” Graves’ is a thyroid disease. At the same time, she saw a headache specialist who began to suspect some form of migraine, and he also tested her for Graves’. Twelve other doctors had seen her over a two-year period, but none had ordered the complete thyroid profile, which is strange, in retrospect, because Kelly’s mother has Graves’ disease. It was right there in Kelly’s history.
Within a couple of days we had the results. You can imagine the jumble of emotions for Kelly and her family, and for me: relief and frustration. Something must have gone wrong in this case. I’m a “Why?” person, and that’s one “Why?” I’ve never figured out. Graves’ disease is not an automatic diagnosis—it can even be hard to diagnose in some instances, and Kelly had “passed” the normal thyroid tests—but nobody had even ordered the complete set. Instead, Kelly had taken over twenty-five different prescription medications, all of which had given her allergic reactions.
With radiation treatments and daily medication, Graves’ disease is controllable. There’s no cure as such, but good control. Kelly is now a spokeswoman for the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association, based in Detroit.
Not long after she got the proper diagnosis, I made the engagement official. All by myself, with no help from my much more mechanically inclined father and two brothers, I rigged up a sign made with old-fashioned Christmas tree lights borrowed from Dad and set it up in the backyard of my new house in Worthington Valley, in horse country (although I don’t ride horses) north of Baltimore. During the 1986 season, Kelly had been practically a supervisor on that construction job. She hadn’t had anything to do with the design—which she didn’t really like, calling it a “bachelor pad”—but she was handling the punch lists—things to correct—while I was playing baseball. On New Year’s Eve 1986, after a home-cooked dinner of filet mignon, lobster tails, and champagne, I took Kelly up to the balcony on the second floor and asked her what she saw in the yard. Nothing, she said. Look again, I suggested, and threw the switch. The bright lights spelled out WILL YOU MARRY ME?, and while she was looking at the lights I slipped a small box out of my pocket. When she turned around I was holding the diamond engagement ring.
I came up with that idea because I knew it would be hard for me to actually say the words in person, and I wanted to do something special. I thought these bright lights were pretty creative, and I guess Kelly did, too, because her answer was yes. She still wears that ring. Not quite a year later we were married in the Towson United Methodist Church on Friday the thirteenth. Kelly wore a Spanish lace dress by Oscar de la Renta, who, it turns out, is a big baseball fan. Maybe Rachel will wear that dress one day. My father was my best man, dressed in black tails, and he said later in his toast at the wedding party, “May the most that you desire be the least that you accomplish.”
For our honeymoon we flew to London, where the weather lived up to expectations—a cold drizzle—and we saw the sights, drove out to Stonehenge, took in a couple of plays, and I was asked for an autograph in Westminster Abbey, of all places, by a tourist in town from Boston. Then we flew to Milan and took a trip by car south to Rome. We were concerned about driving ourselves, so we hired a car and driver, and as it turned out that was the smartest thing we did. The travel agency had prepared a list of restaurants, but our guy would always say “No, no,” then lead us down some side street to a little place with six tables which had even better food than the previous little unknown place with six tables he’d taken us to the day before. I even found myself getting into the cuisine as it gradually changed—or so it seemed from our limited sampling—from the simpler sauces in the north to the heavier, tomato-based sauces farther south. It’s true, I’ll try to analyze almost anything. Anyway, it was all delicious and I felt like I gained twenty pounds.
Maybe I overanalyzed our experiences with the doctors, but I know that Kelly took them as a pretty clear sign that life as my wife would be a change for her. Now it was official, and it was a change. Out on the town in Baltimore, she was considered Mrs. Cal Ripken, first and foremost, as opposed to Kelly Ripken, and ten years later she still finds this situation . . . challenging. We both do. Who wouldn’t? Everywhere she goes in Baltimore, someone will notice her because now she’s just about as visible as I am. Her own life in the public eye in Baltimore has built steadily since the day we were married. When she meets people, they may want to talk about me or the Orioles or baseball. Or maybe they say, “I know a friend who knows Cal.” It goes with the territory. At one of the first games she went to after we were married, a guy asked if he could kiss her on the cheek because his friends were watching. At that stage Kelly was sort of a soft touch and agreed. Then a couple of other guys had the same request. By the fifth inning, she had a new rule.
When I went into professional baseball, I pretty much knew what to expect. Kelly didn’t bargain for this, and raising kids with a husband who’s more or less gone for over seven months every year isn’t easy. We try to talk about situations and be sure that we’re at least working toward solutions, or as much of a solution as there can be. All in all, she’s handled the situation amazingly well. She’s strong; she deals with it. And really, I hesitate to even bring up this subject because it sounds like I’m complaining or looking for sympathy, and I’m not. We have a great, enjoyable, wonderful life. We’re very fortunate. But there are these challenges, and this is a book about my life in baseball—and away from it.
My situation is what makes our life different. Other families have their different challenges. I figure there’s enough baseball in our lives as it is, so I try to leave the game at the park. I stay in the clubhouse a long time after the game, reflecting on it and on myself professionally, maybe getting rid of bad feelings. If Kelly and the kids have come to the park, they’ve gone home long before I’m ready to leave. I could do my post-game evaluation sitting in the den while everyone is asleep, but I try to do it solely at the ballpark. Nevertheless, Kelly doesn’t have to hear from me or read the newspaper or watch TV to know how the Orioles are doing, how I’m doing, if I went out to a basketball game in spring training.
In our daily lives away from the park, where are our quiet places? Anyone who has small children knows it’s not at home. Most couples can get out of the house to a movie or a dinner, but around town in Baltimore, it’s a little harder for us. I feel that privacy is very important, and we have to work for it. In the off-season we have one “date night” every week—a dinner and a movie, usually—after almost none at all for eight months, thanks to my job. Or sometimes it’s “date afternoon” at the 2 o’clock movie. She gets the tickets and the popcorn, gives me the sign, and I hurry in. It’s a great escape, and then we—or at least I—can spend hours trying to figure out a doubtful plot line. (For instance, the coincidence in Silence of the Lambs that has Clarice—Jodie Foster—turn up at the killer’s house at the same time the other FBI agents are busting down the door of the wrong house. When these agents realize their mistake, how does the Scott Glenn character instantly know that Clarice is in trouble? I’ve probably watched that movie half a dozen times trying to figure it out. Brady Anderson wants to know, too.)
On date night, I’m just the husband, and on the whole nearly everyone understands this. When I take my daughter Rachel to an activity, I want to be there just as her father, not as Cal Ripken, Jr. But the other kids may crowd around giggling because I’m horsing around with them, and their parents may crowd around, too, and maybe a few want autographs. I say, “I’m just Rachel’s dad right now. I hope you understand.” I don’t take that attitude to protect myself from signing, but because this needs to be her activity, not an extension of my life as a ballplayer. Most of the time people understand; occasionally they don’t.
If our first child had been a boy, we would have named him Calvin Ripken III. By the time we did have a boy, Kelly and I had changed our minds about that. We want our children to have every opportunity to establish their own identities, and the name is the first aspect of the identity. By 1993, when Ryan was born, we realized that his having my name would have made this more difficult. And what about teaching our children about strangers? We want them to feel that the world is a good, safe place, but that we also have to be careful regarding strangers. Yet a lot of “strangers” in Baltimore say hi to me. Rachel invariably asks, “Is he a stranger?” and we have to answer, “Well, yes.” It’s confusing for her, and it will be for Ryan. They see everyone as a friend, which would be a wonderful way to look at the world if this were a perfect world.
Forget 1988. I know I have, large chunks of it. Literally blocked them out. It was great to be married and settled into our new house, and it was a lot of fun to be in the starting lineup on Opening Day with my brother on the other side of second base and with our father as the manager—a baseball first—but just a week later, on the afternoon of Tuesday, April 12, I was driving to Memorial Stadium, and heard on the radio that Senior had been fired just six games into the regular season. All losses, but . . . six games. I was in my car, about a mile from the park, and my first thought was that this was some radio guy fooling around. But this was a music station, not talk radio, and listening to his tone I realized he wasn’t fooling around. Reporters had already determined that this was the earliest firing in a season of a manager in the history of the major leagues. My father.
I don’t remember what happened when I came into the clubhouse. Dad had already left, I know that. When Billy arrived a little later, our trainer, Ralph Salvon, a wonderful guy both of us had grown up with, took him into the little hideout off the clubhouse that we called the “embassy”—the ceiling was so low I had to duck down when I slipped in there—and said that Dad had asked Ralph to tell Billy not to worry about this, to do his job to the best of his ability, the way he always had. Typical Ripken behavior. Ralph may have passed on the same message to me, but I just don’t remember, and I can’t ask Ralph, because he died later that year. I don’t remember what I said to Billy. Something. I don’t remember my first conversation with Dad, or whether I called him right away or waited. Ask Freud why, but I remember very little from that day.
I do remember that our new manager, Frank Robinson, called Billy and me into the embassy and said he wanted us to know that he hadn’t lobbied for the job. Frank said he had the greatest respect for Dad, but that Senior was going to be fired no matter what. He said he hadn’t even wanted the job, that he had been happy where he was, that he had made the decision very reluctantly. I don’t think Frank got into the details at the time, but he told me later that he had gotten a phone call from Edward Bennett Williams on Monday in Cleveland, before the last game of the road trip. Over the phone Williams asked him to take over the club. Frank told me that he was stunned by the question, that he had told the Orioles’ owner that Senior was a good manager who deserved a real opportunity, not just one season and six games in the next one. Williams replied that if Frank didn’t take the job, he’d get someone else, but he wanted Frank to do him this favor. Frank asked for a little time to think about it and to talk with his family, which he did before calling Williams back less than an hour later and repeating what he’d said earlier, that Senior deserved more time. But Williams wasn’t going to change his mind: Frank or someone else would be the new manager of the Orioles. Frank then said, “Well, I don’t want someone else to come in to manage the team, so I’ll take the job.”
Therefore, Dad was already a lame-duck manager during the game Monday night, which the Orioles lost 7–2, our sixth loss in a row, with about five thousand fans in the stands in Cleveland. It wasn’t until he came to the park on Tuesday and was called upstairs by Roland Hemond that he finally knew. Roland had taken over for Hank Peters as general manager the previous fall in a front office shake-up. Tom Giordano, the scouting director when I’d been drafted in 1978, then the director of minor league operations, was also shown the door.
Dad thought he’d been called to meet with Roland to talk about player moves. He was fired instead. Roland has said he didn’t know about Edward Bennett Williams’s phone call to Frank Robinson in Cleveland, setting up the change. He learned of that decision after the fact on Monday when he was summoned to Williams’s office in Washington, D.C.
Maybe I should have realized the previous fall that Dad’s days as manager were numbered. He hadn’t been rehired until after the shake-up, and at the press conference introducing the new front office people Williams said, “This is neither the beginning nor the end of our reorganization. It’s the end of the beginning.” In retrospect, it’s not hard to figure out what he had in the back of his mind. Frank Robinson said that Williams had wanted to let Senior go in the fall but was talked out of it by his front office team, including Frank. Then Williams had wanted to make the move in spring training but was talked out of it again. That’s what I’ve been told, and maybe so. There was plenty of speculation around.
One widespread explanation was that our owner was a “big splash” kind of baseball man who’d hired Joe Altobelli though his heart wasn’t in it. Joe would take the team to the World Series and win it, and he would have a winning record after that, but this wasn’t enough. Williams wanted flamboyance, so he brought back Earl Weaver. Then, the theory goes, when Earl left and EBW hired Senior out of some sense of obligation, his heart wasn’t in that move, either, because Senior was, if anything, an anti-splash kind of guy, despite his confrontations with umpires à la Earl. At the first opportunity EBW wanted to bring in another strong personality from the Orioles’ glory days—Frank Robinson.
This was the analysis of some people in spring training camp. I guess Dad was supposed to feel lucky he had the six-game trial in ’88. One intrepid reporter even asked him in camp if he had thought about the possibility of getting fired. I’d liked to have seen the look he gave that guy, but all Senior said was, “Not for one second.”
The “flamboyance” explanation seems like bull to me. I don’t work in the front office, and I don’t know all the politics of the organization, I just think it’s more likely that EBW was frustrated with the direction of the team after years of excellence, and he wanted someone to blame. Maybe he also felt an urgency because of his poor health. All I know is that I felt deeply for my father. I couldn’t imagine how painful this must have been for him, who had been so loyal to the franchise for thirty-one years. He must have been angry and hurt beyond words, but, so far as I know, the harshest thing he said publicly following the firing was, “I wasn’t happy about the thing.” He said he was going to take a couple of weeks to decide whether to accept the club’s offer of another job. Boston was reportedly interested in his services as manager, but nothing came of that.
For myself, I knew the organization had been changing subtly, but now all of a sudden I didn’t recognize it at all. That firing—not the firing itself, but the way it happened—made it clear to me that this organization wasn’t the Orioles anymore, not as I’d known them. Rather than doing the hard work of rebuilding an organization over the long haul, the decision was made to try to get there with a quick fix. I was especially angry because anyone who had been watching the six games we lost would have known that we might just as easily have won two or three of them. We weren’t going to the World Series that year, but those first six games weren’t indicative. I was off to a slow start. So were Eddie Murray and Fred Lynn. We scored seven runs in the six games, were shut out twice, and all of us had had opportunities to drive in key runs. The only guys who could hit the ball were my brother and Joe Orsulak. As a team we had one home run, by Rick Schu in Cleveland.
But even with a record of 0–6, the firing was absurd. At some point in this long story Roland Hemond acknowledged that my father had been “dealing from a short deck.” That remark didn’t lift my spirits, because everyone should have known and acknowledged in the beginning that we were a little short on talent. We had good players, but we had some holes, too. In fact, we were in a rebuilding mode. Everybody is optimistic in the spring, but it was very unlikely that Senior or any other manager was taking this Orioles team to a championship. In spring training, you could tell that the high level of execution just wasn’t there. With the influx of different players and young players I was thinking, This is a problem. Patience and more teaching were going to be required; more talent, too.
Then, after Senior was fired, we kept losing ball games. Players were confused and disappointed. I was confused and disappointed and angry. Senior was more than just my manager. He was my father. At some point, Frank Robinson asked Billy if he wanted to take the lineup card to home plate. A couple of other guys had already done so, but maybe Billy could be the lucky messenger. Billy said okay and then mentioned the plan in passing to me. I asked him if this was Frank’s request, and he said yes. I didn’t like it and convinced Billy to change his mind, for several reasons. First, Dad hadn’t liked for others to take the card out, with the rarest of exceptions. He thought it was the responsibility of the manager. Second, why Billy? Whatever the answer, I thought it was in bad taste. If not manager Ripken, why player Ripken?
One thing I want to make clear: over the next three years, whenever the consecutive games streak came up in relationship to any slump I might be having, Frank Robinson was totally supportive. He handled the streak business better than any manager I had. His response was consistently, “The easiest part of my job is knowing who I’m going to pencil in for shortstop every day. I wish I had eight other players like him.” He kept it simple, he didn’t give the media anything to run with, and given his baseball experience and Hall of Fame record, the media couldn’t debate the point; given his stature in the game, they couldn’t debate him on a lot of things. So Frank and I got along fine, and I have no reason not to accept his assurance that he hadn’t in any way maneuvered my father out of his job. I think Frank really wanted to be a general manager as his next challenge in the game. He’d already done everything on the field.
I could also readily understand Frank’s point about Williams’s persuasiveness, because I’d encountered it myself over four years earlier, after the 1983 World Series. I was overwhelmed at the time with post-season invitations, and when I turned down one of the Orioles’ caravans to Washington, D.C., EBW called me directly and introduced himself as “Ed,” which surprised me right off. He went on to say that he understood I was out of gas, and maybe the club had asked me to do too much, but he’d consider it a personal favor if I’d attend this reception in Washington. What could I say? In addition to being the owner, he was a dynamic, persuasive man. It wasn’t hard to see why he was a winner in the courtroom. And when I arrived at the affair in Washington, “Ed” was there to greet me, introduce me around the room, and make me totally comfortable. I really appreciated that.
Immediately after the firing, however, because I was so disappointed with the Orioles and probably overanalyzing the evidence, I wanted to blame someone, anyone. But at least I kept the emotions inside while trying to sort everything out. The media were keeping close tabs on us that April—meeting us at the airport, at the hotel, at the ballpark—but I wasn’t going to gratify everyone by lashing out at our owner or general manager or field manager or anyone else. What would that have accomplished? So for the most part I shut up. Billy didn’t say much, either, even after he made that cover of Sports Illustrated for all the wrong reasons, slumped on his bat, a national symbol of the Orioles’ decline. For both of us, there was lots of resentment, and it wasn’t our responsibility to go public with our feelings. I did say, “As a player, I have no opinion. As a son, I’ll keep my opinions to myself.” That was fair enough, I thought. Later I went as far as to say that Dad had been “wronged.” “Raw deal” was the phrase more than one player around the league used to describe what had happened to Senior. Dozens of guys told me this while standing at second base.
One or two days after my father’s firing, EBW walked through the clubhouse, and we shook hands and he said something like, “These are tough times.” I didn’t say much, obviously, and I’m sorry we never had the opportunity to sit down and really talk things over. The following spring, after Dad had been rehired as third base coach and Roland Hemond said the firing had been his decision, I said I still didn’t think I had the whole story. I’ll say the same thing today.
As it turned out, of course, we lost 15 more in a row under new manager Frank Robinson, for a grand total of 21 losses to start the season. We finally won 9–0 in Chicago and I broke out of my own slump with four hits, including a homer. Then we lost two more and returned home with a 1–23 record. So how many fans came out to that next game against Texas? 50,402. Talk about the glory days in Baltimore: our fans were the last vestige of the Oriole Way. Still, that was a bittersweet game. The support was great, but it was too bad we needed that kind of support. That game was also when the official announcement was made regarding the new park to be erected at Camden Yards.
I finally got red-hot with the bat, maybe inspired by Morganna the Kissing Bandit, who nailed me that night as I was stepping into the batter’s box. Then I settled into an average season for me, not my greatest but productive enough. A tough year for all of us. But I have to say, losing can be a learning experience. Maybe we come out the other side better people, better able to handle all of life’s experiences, winning and losing. I know that close friendships are made when baseball times are tough, almost like in the minors. You rely on teammates more. We had a good bunch of guys in Baltimore in what I think of as the dark years. On the other hand, bad times also usually mean turmoil in the organization, and careers can be affected, because new managers and front office people have different estimations and different plans for the players. My friend Larry Sheets could have been a guy whose career was hampered by what was going on with the Orioles.
For Larry, 1988 was pivotal. As I’ve described, he had quit the game in the minors, then come back, then left again, then returned again in 1982 with a more dedicated outlook and with a wife who supported him. Three years later he found himself in the starting lineup on Opening Day after Lee Lacy tore his thumb diving for a ball in the outfield right at the end of spring training. Larry hit well in 1985 in a platoon situation, and he was even starting to get some respect from Joe Altobelli against left-handers. But then Joe was fired, and Earl Weaver immediately returned to a platoon. When Earl retired and my dad took over the club, he played Larry almost every day and Larry responded with his best season, hitting .316 with 31 homers. When Larry was pushing for 100 RBIs, I told him, “I’ll be out there for you. I wouldn’t mind scoring a hundred runs.” We both came up just a little shy, Larry with 94 RBIs, myself with 97 runs. But then Senior was fired in ’88 and Larry came up with the theory that he couldn’t get a manager to stay around long enough to support him. This is not a novel theory; lots of players share it regarding their own careers.
In any event, Larry slumped in 1988 under Frank Robinson, the next year he’d see diminished playing time, in 1990 he’d be traded to Detroit, in ’91 he’d play in Japan, and then he was out of the game. Today Larry runs baseball camps around the Baltimore area, and he’s developed a mean golf game. In fact, he’s thinking of getting into some golf course development work.
Was the turmoil in the Baltimore organization going to affect my own career? Certainly the future with the Orioles and the stability of the organization had been called into question. Did I want to play here any longer? This question also crossed my mind. I had only a one-year contract for that season, because the Orioles and my agent Ron Shapiro hadn’t been able to come to a long-term contract after the ’87 season.
For the previous four years—’84 through ’87—I had played under a four-year contract for a lot of money—the first third-year player to sign a multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract. The money in that contract had been great (although I never saw it because Ron put me on a $1,000 allowance every two-week pay period), but the key for me had been the long-term commitment from the Orioles. A long-term contract is a commitment from the club to you as a player, and nothing, nothing, is more important. Any young player wants to make some money, of course, but his first priority is job security and knowing that he fits into the club’s plans for years to come. I would have been eligible for arbitration after the ’84 season, but I chose security and the club’s commitment. I thought the four-year contract for ’84–’87 was a classic win-win deal. And the four years in the contract were the perfect number, too. I probably could have gotten a fifth year, but I didn’t want it, because four took me right up to that first year of eligibility for free agency.
But at the end of that contract, in 1987, I wasn’t interested in free agency, and I guess the club knew this. On the day before I had to file for free agency, I instead signed for just that one year, 1988. It was immediately suggested that I had signed for the one year in order to see how things went with Dad’s new job as manager. Well, there is some element of truth to that, but I also had a lot of other questions at the time, including the direction of the Baltimore organization. And those were the collusion years, which weren’t a good time to be negotiating, to say the least. Taking everything into account, the one-year deal seemed the way to go.
So now in 1988 I was playing out my contract, my father had been fired, and, to top it all off, rumors of a trade were everywhere. I asked our media relations people to advise all the reporters that I wouldn’t discuss the subject, but I couldn’t get away from it. It was just in the air. The most prevalent theory called for some kind of blockbuster deal with Boston, four or five of the Red Sox prospects for me. Other teams came up in the news reports, too. I was astonished. Trade? Somebody else telling me where I would play, like it or not? I couldn’t have imagined a more unsettling situation. That was the first time in my baseball career that I might have turned up at the ball park to play shortstop for the Orioles and been given an airplane ticket instead. I determined right then that a no-trade clause would be in my next contract, if at all possible.
The front office understood that I was naturally angry about my father, they knew I had strong doubts about where the organization as a whole was headed, and they assumed I wanted out. Therefore, they wanted to get something for me in a trade. In fact, if I had had to make the decision in April or May, right after Senior had been fired, I might have left Baltimore. I probably would have. But then I settled down, on the field and otherwise, and a cooler head prevailed. I had just gotten married, too, and I was thinking not only about control of my career but also about stability for my family. I wanted to be in Baltimore, the town. My only doubts were about Baltimore, the baseball organization. What was happening with it?
On the negative side, Edward Bennett Williams was now dying of cancer. We all knew this. Who would the new owner or owners be, and what would they have in mind for the future? I had no idea, but in all honesty, I didn’t think the situation looked too promising. Like my father, I took pride in the Baltimore organization, and in the late eighties a lot of the little things and some big things that had been part of the organization for decades were increasingly missing. That’s the way I saw the situation, and it gnawed at me.
Since it played an important part in my own internal deliberations in 1988, I’d like to explain briefly what I mean when I refer to the Oriole Way. Understand that these are my perceptions; other “old-timers” in the organization might well put a different slant on things, although I’d think they’d all agree that, simply put, the Oriole Way is the knowledge learned over a long period of time of the best way to teach and play baseball—or, if not the best way, as good as any. With a lot of hard work, sweat, and trial-and-error experimentation, these baseball men separated the methods that worked for us from those that didn’t. The Oriole Way is the carefully thought out teaching of cutoffs, relays, positioning of players—every one of the dozens of stratagems on the baseball field. The game hasn’t changed in its essentials in a hundred years, and the strategies haven’t changed, either. The Oriole Way tried every possible variation on these strategies, picked certain ones, and rejected the rest.
It’s not guesswork. Veterans of the organization could tell you exactly why the Orioles played a certain situation a certain way. It didn’t mean they were smarter than everyone else in the game. They had a system that worked, that’s all. The organization then built on the proven methods. It was simple and logical. Teaching baseball got to be more of a science. The coaches didn’t have to reinvent the wheel every season, with every group of new players. Everyone had a proven system that was taught consistently at all levels. Managers in Double-A knew that players coming to them from A-ball knew the system. Earl Weaver in Baltimore didn’t have to worry whether players coming to him from Triple-A Rochester knew the system.
Of course, a lot of organizations teach similar fundamentals on the hit-and-run, pickoffs, and so on. I think a key with the Orioles was the consistency of their instruction and pride in execution. “Do two million little things right and the big things take care of themselves”: that was one of Dad’s favorite sayings. The Oriole Way is fundamentals; pride in the fundamentals was almost a code of conduct.
Let’s look quickly at one situation—the rundown—in which Oriole teaching differs from that of some, maybe many, organizations. The idea in the Oriole Way is to get the runner running too fast to change direction quickly, and then to get the out with one throw and one only. Say the pitcher and the shortstop have the runner at second base picked off, so he has to take off for third. In order for the shortstop to get the runner running hard, he wants the maximum distance in which to do it, so the third baseman goes straight to third base. Some organizations teach that the third baseman jumps into the base line, cutting down the distance between himself and the shortstop. The logic behind that strategy is to keep the throw as short as possible, but the problem is that cutting down the distance between the two fielders as a way to achieve shorter throws makes it less likely the runner will be at full speed when the ball is thrown. If the runner’s not running almost full speed, he can change direction and you end up throwing the ball back and forth. The Oriole system teaches its method as the best way to assure one throw. The third baseman catches the ball, takes a step or two, and applies the tag on the runner who can’t turn around.
Fielding errors and throwing errors will happen, but strategic and mental errors can be minimized. That’s what the Oriole Way accomplished, mainly with simplification and dedication to execution. For Earl Weaver, losing “mentally” was not acceptable. Earl would eat you up for a mental lapse, because he understood that if you make the other team earn every base it gets and if you’re alert and take every base the other team gives you as a gift, you’ll win more games than you lose because the game can be decided in any one of the nine innings, and in most games every run counts. Don’t beat yourselves; make the other team beat you.
However, if you’re short on talent, the best instruction can’t make you a good major leaguer. Good instruction makes winners out of talented ballplayers. The Baltimore organization identified, drafted, and developed their baseball talent and kept it flowing up through the ranks. As a kid hanging around my dad while he did his paperwork in the mornings before going to the park, I was always asking him, “Why did you send this guy to Double-A? Why did this guy get traded?” And he had a specific answer every time, not just, “He was ready.” When Senior joined the club in Baltimore in 1976, twenty-three of the twenty-five players on that roster had played for him in the minor leagues. During that entire era, just one player released by the Orioles got to the major leagues with another organization. That’s my father’s recollection, though he doesn’t remember who that player was, and neither does anyone else I’ve asked. Maybe there was more than one guy, but there weren’t many. On the other hand, a lot of guys developed by the Orioles ended up with other major league teams. Senior used to say every year in spring training, “If you get all the way through our system, you will play in the big leagues. Maybe not with the Orioles, but with someone.”
Other organizations were looking to the Orioles not only for players, but for managers as well. Billy Hunter, Joe Altobelli, George Bamberger, Jim Frey, and Ray Miller all left the Orioles in a short period of time around 1980 to manage other major league clubs.
I’m not suggesting that the Orioles were the only good organization in the sixties and seventies. During that period, the Dodgers also developed a productive organization: Dodger Blue. The Yankees had a strong minor league and scouting system, and won and lost the World Series twice each between 1976 and ’81. The fact remains, however, that people throughout the game would agree that shortly after Bill Veeck sold the St. Louis Browns franchise to a group in Baltimore in 1954, Paul Richards and his team of scouts and coaches, some of whom I probably have never heard about, began to set up one of the very best organizations in the business. (Richards also made the key suggestion to shift minor leaguer Brooks Robinson from second base to third base.) The Orioles had just one losing season, 1967, in the twenty-three seasons between 1963 and 1985. To accomplish that, the engine had to be hitting on all cylinders in the front office and on the playing field, all the way from rookie ball to the major league club.
As I surveyed the scene in 1988, the engine had been sputtering for a number of years. I have a lot of pride in the way I was brought up in baseball, and I was concerned. Another factor that concerned me in ’88 was the impending departure of Eddie Murray at the end of the year. He had asked to be traded after ’87, Roland Hemond’s first year as the general manager. Hemond said, “One reason I’m here is you, Eddie!” Eddie had destroyed the White Sox, Hemond’s former team. But now the bad blood between Eddie and the media and the front office was too much to overcome, and that whole situation was one of the saddest I’ve witnessed in baseball.
According to Murray mythology in Baltimore, his problems with the papers began during the 1979 World Series, the one in which the Orioles took a 3–1 lead in games over Pittsburgh before losing in seven. On the day of Game Two, a Dick Young column about Eddie’s family appeared in the New York Daily News. The piece was flattering regarding Eddie but unkind about the way his family had treated the scout who signed him. Eddie couldn’t understand how someone would write a story like this without talking to him about it. Of course, I wasn’t on that team. When I did join the O’s, I knew about the Young piece, but not the details. Eddie and I never talked about it, that I recall.
The piece scarred Eddie, but it didn’t keep him from talking to the press. When I came up a couple of years later, he talked if the situation warranted it, but there’s no doubt that he had a way of keeping the media at a distance. A dirty look or short answer would do the trick. Often, though, Eddie was just frustrated that attention directed his way should have been directed elsewhere. Say Eddie has hit a homer in the first inning and those two runs hold up as the difference in the game, and say Mike Boddicker has pitched seven shutout innings for the victory. The reporters file into the locker room and immediately take a right turn (this is in old Memorial Stadium), heading for Eddie’s locker. Eddie says “The story’s over there,” points to Mike’s locker, and walks away. If you know Eddie, he’s trying to give credit where credit is due, paying tribute to a teammate by saying, in not quite so many words, “It’s no big deal that I hit a homer in the first inning on a mistake pitch. The pitcher deserves the credit for this game.”
If Eddie did get the big hit in the ninth or made the error to cost the game, he’d usually be available to the press for a brief interview. Get Eddie going in a restaurant or over the telephone and he can talk for hours—he loves to talk on the phone—but the man is basically very reserved, and I don’t think people understand this. He rags on himself about being so quiet. He tells the story about when he made the Orioles in 1977, and he and Earl Weaver didn’t exchange a word for months. One day in June, they happened to pass each other in the tunnel and Earl said “Hi” and Eddie said “Hi.” Eddie then overheard Earl stop Doug DeCinces and ask, “What about this kid?” Doug replied, “What makes you think he talks to me?” (Doug and Eddie knew each other from playing together on a winter ball team in Los Angeles.)
I don’t think a player should be penalized for being a short interview. Usually there’s not that much to say anyway. Reporters, however, can take brevity personally. This attitude might have been part of Eddie’s problem with them. He might also say something like, “I’ll talk to you today, I may talk to you tomorrow, but I might not next week. I’m here to concentrate on baseball.” He just wanted to do his job to the best of his ability. He’s so honest and direct it’s scary, and, as he puts it, media coverage was something he did not dream about when he dreamed about playing baseball while growing up in Los Angeles. Eddie said with some bitterness before he left Baltimore, “The only thing that counts is what the media does,” but here’s a guy who nevertheless does not care what the media does. He just wanted to be one of the team, not a vocal standout. He wasn’t impressed by huge books of clippings on himself. In his large family—eleven brothers and sisters—there had never been a lot of “I and me,” as he put it, while interviews are nothing but “I and me,” and he wasn’t comfortable with them. He didn’t mean to be rude with anyone, he meant to be good-hearted, but his attitude didn’t come off that way, and I guess it was inevitable that he’d feel his answers and the context for those answers were sometimes distorted.
The serious deterioration started in 1986, I think. He was upset when the club publicized his purchase of seats for kids, after he’d asked that the program be anonymous. He thought a conversation he had with Hank Peters, our general manager, about wearing glasses or contacts was private and off the record, but within a week the story was out that Eddie Murray might need glasses. Maybe Eddie blamed the messenger of this message. Then came the killer, the interview with Edward Bennett Williams I’ve mentioned, in which our owner questioned Eddie’s desire and work ethic. Eddie prided himself on playing every day. That year was the first time he’d even been on the disabled list, so he was upset with the story and everybody knew it. What everybody didn’t know was that the interview was supposedly off the record, as I’ve explained, and the story never should have come out.
Mistake or otherwise, the damage was done. Eddie wondered how the owner of the team could even think something so off base. Eddie Murray a bad influence? He was a tremendous presence on the team! He was a leader of the Orioles almost from day one. When he was on the DL in 1986, he drove the guys on the bench crazy with his cheerleading. I thought the situation could have been defused if Williams had said he wasn’t criticizing Eddie, but trying to motivate the team by challenging Eddie, because Eddie was the leader. But nothing like that was said.
Larry Lucchino, the president of the club, asked Eddie how Williams and he could get back together. Eddie asked for an apology. Williams did call him one night to apologize, and Eddie said, Thank you, but I want a public apology, the same way the story was put out. Over the off-season, Williams did apologize publicly and Eddie said, Fine, we’re straight.
He may have been straight with Williams, but now the criticism was picking up all over town. To put it bluntly, in my opinion Eddie became the scapegoat for the team’s declining fortunes. Being the proud and stubborn man he is, he pulled back. Now he wasn’t talking to the press at all. I’ve been told that the writers covering the game in the press box were silently hoping that Eddie wouldn’t get the big hit so they wouldn’t have to try to interview him after the game and be rejected. A sad situation with misunderstandings all around, and I urged Eddie to go public with his feelings about being a proud Oriole, about wanting to play in Baltimore, where the fans are special. Eddie did give one television interview, I think, but his words didn’t come out the way he wanted them to. It sounded as if he was knocking the fans, which was the opposite of what he intended. When I say this, I’m not just covering for Eddie. I know what he felt because we had talked about it, and I know what the fans felt, too, because I’d heard them roar “ED-DIE! ED-DIE!” a thousand times since the day I’d joined the team.
I look back over Eddie’s last couple of years with the Orioles in 1987 and ’88 and think maybe I could have done more to shift the momentum. I worry that I came up short here. Maybe I could have said in the strongest terms, “Wait a minute! We’re about to drum out of town the greatest teammate ever, and one of the greatest Orioles ever.”
But that kind of outspokenness isn’t really in my nature, either.
On the positive side regarding the Baltimore organization, work was scheduled to begin in 1989 on the new downtown park at Camden Yards, although this wasn’t much of a factor for me because I loved old Memorial Stadium anyway; everyone who played there did. What was most important to me was the fact that the Orioles were no longer pretending to have all the pieces of the puzzle. Too late to help my father, we had admitted we were rebuilding and had already made one good trade, getting Brady Anderson from the Red Sox. Brady had been one of the names mentioned in the Ripken blockbuster that never happened. After he arrived at the end of July he struggled statistically, but I saw a lot of talent and potential. My brother was struggling, too, but he was still the steady fielder, and I liked knowing that he should be at second base for years to come. Billy just couldn’t shake his feelings about the firing, but he would. (A day or two after the event, he traded in his number 3 for Dad’s suddenly unused number 7. He and clubhouseman Jimmy Tyler did this without consulting the front office. “Minimal paperwork,” Billy said. We all had to figure out how to deal with the situation; this was one of Billy’s ways.)
I thought about all these pros and cons and then thought about them some more. By August, my anger had modulated. In the end I made the decision to stick with the rebuilding, thinking it might take a few years for us to be a contending team again. I thought that I was young enough to withstand the rebuilding process, and I wanted to help bring the Orioles back. But my agent didn’t tell the Orioles this. They’d been trying to set up a trade under the assumption I was angry enough to leave. In their minds, there was always the chance I’d leave. For the sake of the negotiations, Ron Shapiro let them continue to think this. He told them I’d been hurt by the way they handled Dad’s firing, which was true. Negotiations moved along, and in August we signed a three-year deal with an option for a fourth year. That’s the way the deal was advertised, but the fine print said that the option had to be exercised at the end of the first year. What kind of option for the club was that? None at all, really, unless all of a sudden I just couldn’t field or hit the ball at all. For all practical purposes that was a four-year deal, but the club wanted “three-and-one” because those were collusion years, when no contracts were being written for longer than three years. So we came up with this wrinkle to get the four when only three could be official. That was also the contract with the all-important no-trade clause and the provision that I would not violate the contract if I got hurt playing basketball in the off-season. Some of the commentators said the Orioles got a steal, that I could have made much more on the open market. Maybe I could have, but my priorities were to wipe 1988 out of my mind, get the no-trade clause, settle down, and forget “the business side.”
Then that tough season was over. Not a great one for the Ripken family, although Dad did come back. In June, he agreed to be a special assignment scout for the remainder of the year. After the shock of the firing had worn off, and when he got some feelers that Frank Robinson might want him back in the coaching ranks the following year, he and I had several long conversations about what he should do. These weren’t so much father to son as baseball man to baseball man. My view was that the negative reaction around Baltimore when he’d been fired gave him a pretty good opportunity careerwise, and maybe even financially. If I were in his shoes, I said, I’d ask for the opportunity and the power to revamp the whole minor league system, while getting paid well for the job. The Oriole Way as I’ve just introduced it in the simplest terms was one of the subjects of our conversations, and we agreed that the system had only one way to go: up. He could make a huge impact and, frankly, get the credit I thought he already deserved—he and a lot of other people, because the sustained achievement of the big league club for a couple of decades was due to the talent drafted and then developed by the minor league system over all those years.
But could any one person reenergize the tradition? If anyone could, it would be my dad. Think about it. He’s a great teacher of the game, he understood how to implement the Oriole Way in every way. But did he still have the enthusiasm to give it a try? No. He didn’t feel he had the time or maybe even the energy for a huge undertaking like that. He had given sixteen- and eighteen-hour days for fourteen years in the minors, and the idea of going back and almost starting over, in effect, was too much. And there wasn’t any way to do it while sitting behind a desk. I thought there might be some way requiring less time but still having a huge impact, but Dad thought he’d have to be absolutely hands on, like he’d always been. Delegation is not one of his strong suits.
When he talked with the club about returning in some capacity, he didn’t even broach the idea of running the minor league system. However, returning as third base coach was feasible. He said in so many words, “I’m coming back for Billy. You’re developed. You don’t need my help anymore.” He wasn’t thinking in terms of a protective capacity, but of a teaching capacity, being a presence with the team. After the firing, Billy’s emotions had gotten the better of him, there’s no denying it. He hit .207 in 1988, which is a sophomore slump and then some. Just as Senior had acted as a father as well as a manager in putting an end to my consecutive innings streak, now the father in him was coming out again.
Following a brief, secret meeting in a hotel in Pikesville late in 1988, Senior agreed to return to the field the following year as Frank Robinson’s third base coach. He would also run spring training camp for Frank, just as he had for Earl Weaver, Joe Altobelli, and himself. Back to the future, I guess. By way of explanation for this decision to come back, Dad said with his usual dry understatement, “I guess you know I’m an Oriole.”