No sugarcoating these facts: while my team had been going strong in 1992, I finished with 14 home runs, the first time in my career I’d had fewer than 20; I had 72 RBIs, my lowest total by far; I hit .251. This was my worst season. And after being the MVP in ’91, it was really disappointing. Then, to top off everything, my father was fired by the Orioles in the post-season, for the second and last time.
I knew it was likely. During the last series of the season, Johnny Oates had asked me out to lunch in Cleveland and warned me that some people in the front office didn’t want my father back. “I’m fighting for him,” Johnny said, but he also warned me that he couldn’t put his own job on the line by saying, “Rip comes back or you lose me.” I understood that. If push came to shove, Johnny said, if the organization refused to have Senior back as third base coach, he hoped he could retain him as his bench coach.
Much later, Johnny told me that in the big organizational meeting after the season, the executives said they’d think about the bench coach possibility in the time it would take Johnny to drive to his home in Virginia. When he got there he called the office and got his answer: “No.” When Johnny called my father after the news had been officially delivered, Johnny told him pretty much what he’d told me, that this job offered him a chance to send his kids to college, and he couldn’t afford to quit, or even threaten to quit. Knowing Dad, I’m sure he threatened Johnny with his life if he did.
Johnny has always given my father the credit for making him into a big leaguer in the first place. He had come to the Orioles as a catcher out of Virginia Tech, but he didn’t know much about the position. Dad put him behind the plate in Florida and hit hard fungoes from the mound and said, “If you can block these, you can block any pitch.” Then Dad took his bat to the infield and hit hard fungoes and said, “If you can handle these, you can handle any throw from the outfield.” They worked hard and talked baseball for hours, and soon enough Johnny was a student of the game. I met my future manager when I was a kid hanging out with Dad at the Instructional League fields at Jack Russell Stadium in Clearwater. I’d kicked a soccer ball against the outfield wall waiting for Johnny, who was usually the first player to arrive. Then I’d approach timidly and ask, “Mr. Oates, wanna have a catch?” Johnny has probably told that story dozens times.
In 1988, he managed the Triple-A franchise in Rochester the year Senior managed the big club for the infamous six games. For the four prior years Johnny had been a coach with the Chicago Cubs, so that spring he worked especially closely with Senior. He didn’t want to send anyone up to Baltimore who didn’t know the Orioles’ plays. When the two were both coaches on the Orioles, Johnny, who has a passion for tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, lived for the day in July when Dad would bring the first box of his Better Boys into the clubhouse. Johnny and his wife, Gloria, and their two kids spent some of the off days in the summer in my parents’ backyard in Aberdeen, barbecuing and swimming and throwing horseshoes.
The two men were good friends, and to this day Johnny will tell you that he doesn’t talk to my father as much as he’d like to because he’s embarrassed about what happened in 1992.
The club told Dad he could have some kind of consolation prize, probably a job in the minor leagues. My father, who’s not a diplomat, said he’d think about it, but he didn’t think about it very long. He said no thanks.
What happened between Dad and the Baltimore Orioles organization? Well, there was tons of speculation, of course. It was said that the organization didn’t like his old-school approach, the way he rode the umpires, for example, although he rode the umpires less than Earl Weaver had. Or that the club wanted Johnny Oates to establish himself as an independent force with the team, without Senior at his side. Or that my father had never released his bitterness over the firing after six games in 1988, and had withdrawn from the players.
Lots of explanations, but I didn’t buy any of them. I still don’t. I think the firing was wrong, but I’ll never know the complete story. I hate to believe the decision had anything to do with the one play in late September that got so much press at the time, and then came up again later in the postmortems. That was when Senior held up Tim Hulett at third base in the ninth inning of a game against Toronto, with us on the short end of a 4–3 score. It was a big series: we were five and a half behind the Blue Jays and couldn’t afford many losses. With one out, Tim represented the tying run when Mark McLemore lifted a fly ball to short center field. On any kind of decent throw, sending Tim was suicidal; a bad throw and he might have been safe. With a good arm in center fielder Devon White, with Brady Anderson coming up next, Senior elected not to take the big chance. He held Tim, and when the throw came in way up the third base line, some of the crowd groaned. Brady then walked and Mike Devereaux popped out. John Feinstein wrote in Play Ball that Larry Lucchino watching from the press box screamed about “coaching malpractice.” I don’t know about that, but even if the club president or someone else in the front office thought that Senior had made a mistake on the play, you don’t get fired for one “error.” So I don’t believe that can be the explanation, either.
Looking at the big picture, maybe the situation boiled down to this: a lot of changes had taken place in the Baltimore organization and across professional baseball, and my old-school father no longer fit in with the business of baseball. Maybe it’s as simple—and as complicated—as that.
A couple of years after Dad was relieved of his duties, Bob Costas was on Nightline discussing with Ted Koppel the problems with the national pastime post-’94 strike, and Bob said, more or less, that the main problem is that some of the people running baseball and baseball clubs today have either forgotten, or in some cases never even knew, what it is that makes this game special. I think Bob was drawing the same distinction I draw between the business of baseball and the game on the field. What’s special is the game on the field. Everything else should serve the purpose of this game, but does it? Could Bob be correct? Let’s consider the situation.
There’s no doubt that the major league game has evolved into a major form of entertainment, and there’s no doubt that the growth of the business has introduced millions more fans to the beauty of baseball, in person at the ballparks, over the airwaves, and in the newspapers. This is great, and I think this popularity can only increase. At the same time, we might as well acknowledge that this market growth has inevitably brought to the forefront the business side of the game. Ironically, some of these businesspeople may look at the game on the field as only a game, not as a demanding vocation that requires and rewards expertise from the scouts, coaches, and other people who have made it a career. Individuals who wouldn’t dream of walking into a courtroom and telling their lawyers what to say may feel perfectly qualified to make major decisions about baseball talent after just a year on the job, thereby devaluing the decades of baseball experience and savvy of career baseball men. So who’s making the baseball decisions, baseball people or businesspeople?
I wonder.
In any event, my father and his thirty-six years of experience and old-school craftsmanship were deemed expendable by the organization. I don’t know any other way to look at it. What’s more, the Orioles also let my brother Billy go after the ’92 season. A lot of people around town, including myself, naturally wondered whether there might be more than coincidence here. Should I resort to the ballplayer’s standard lament? Probably so: “I’m just a player, I don’t know, I do what I’m told.”
I was more puzzled than angry or resentful about my dad and my brother. I didn’t understand, and still don’t completely, although I do know that the business side directly affected Billy’s career and the careers of many, many other players around the league. In the nineties, management has tried to defeat the arbitration process by releasing players when their contracts expire, thereby making them free agents almost automatically. The team could lose the player, but it could also “start over” in contract negotiations, in effect, and get him back at a much lower salary, especially in a flooded market. Back in the late eighties, the collusion cases had been clear-cut. What has been going on in the nineties could be collusion, but the owners could also claim it’s just smarter business. One thing is clear: the trend was and is to devalue the importance of the middle-salary player and to eliminate his salary, strictly as a financial move. This is a fact.
On the Orioles, Mark McLemore, Sam Horn, Randy Milligan, Joe Orsulak, Bob Milacki, and my brother were all released in one way or another after 1992. (McLemore then re-signed with the team for ’93.) Billy said they were trapped in baseball’s twilight zone. Early in December, our friend Keith Mills, a television reporter in Baltimore, called Billy at 10:30 a.m. Keith calls Billy all the time, but usually not in the morning. He passed along the word that the Orioles were going to sign Harold Reynolds and release Billy. This was out of the blue. My brother had had no indication he wouldn’t be tendered a contract. In fact, he thought he had more job security that year than he’d ever had, because he and Mark McLemore had been such a solid platoon at second base in ’92. After the deed was done, Billy pointed out this irony (he’s always pointing out ironies): every prior winter he had been rumored to be leaving the Orioles; this was the first time there hadn’t been any rumors at all. After the warning call from Keith Mills, Billy drove over to my house for the regularly scheduled basketball game, but when Ron Shapiro called—Ron handles Billy, too—with the official news, he left after one game. The rest of us kept playing, but it wasn’t a lot of fun.
That was a rough winter for my brother. At least Dad had some finality. He was no longer with the Orioles or with anyone else in baseball. He told me he’d take a year off to figure out what to do, but he was very possibly out of the game for good. At fifty-seven, he could retire. His youngest son was just twenty-eight. Billy received the pink slip on his birthday, in fact; he should have years and years of good major league baseball in front of him. At first he wasn’t too worried that someone would want him, but as time went along and the holidays came and went and the phone at Ron’s office was quiet, my brother began to worry. Finally, in January, two calls came in. Oakland first, then Texas. Oakland under Tony LaRussa? Billy was definitely excited. The two men talked on the phone. Billy wasn’t promised a starting position, but he thought he could make the team and get playing time. Then Texas’ Jeff Frye blew out his knee in January and the Rangers needed a starting second baseman. Billy went with Texas, of course, agreeing to terms on Super Bowl Sunday during the annual party he throws for that occasion.
As luck would have it, the Orioles hosted the Rangers on Opening Day 1993. There was my brother trotting out from the third base dugout for the introductions of the visiting team, and it was gratifying to hear the cheer he got from the Orioles’ fans. They know Billy and what he brings to his team. Standing on our respective base lines during the ceremonies, I caught his eye. Strange feeling for both of us. We had grown up together, teased and tussled together, started side by side in 634 major league games.
But that’s baseball.
Our parents stayed away from the game.
Has respect for the craft of baseball been compromised because of the growth of the business side? That’s certainly one explanation for the fact that players with proven skills and experience have been devalued in the first place. It’s also one explanation for the fact that the quality of instruction in the minor leagues has gone down in recent years. How do I, a major leaguer, know this for a fact? Because more teaching of fundamentals is now required in the major leagues. No one in the game disputes this observation; it’s become a cliché. I see it every spring. In the minors, the guys aren’t learning what they need to know. In addition, players are sometimes rushed to the majors before they’re ready, another sign that the crucial role of the minors is devalued, or at least misunderstood. Is the minor league system seen as a nagging above-the-line expense rather than as the heart of the organization, and worth its weight in gold? In a lot of organizations, I suspect this is the case. It has to be one factor.
Regarding baseball, at least, I’m a conservative, a stickler, and there’s no doubt I acquired this trait from my father. Maybe I’ve overstated my ideas here; I probably have, in order to make my point clearly. I don’t want to sound like I know everything in this area, because I don’t. I have more questions than answers, and I guess I’d have to spend a season roaming the minor leagues to get a complete picture of what’s going on, and I can’t do that. But there are also some telltale indications that really make you wonder about the craft of the game, fundamental failures like messed-up rundowns and outfielders missing the cutoff man (a daily occurrence). And think about the increasing number of successful trick plays in the major leagues. A good example is the double steal, runners first and third. This should be almost suicide at the big league level because it depends on a failure in execution by the defense, but it works with some regularity now. There are also more circus-type innings than there used to be, more “Little League home runs,” you might say, with multiple mistakes, throws going every which way, bases left uncovered, and the guy just keeps running. All this is entertaining, but it isn’t good baseball, and there’s only one plausible explanation: minor league instruction hasn’t covered all the bases.
There’s no doubt that young players today are bigger, stronger, faster, and more talented in every respect than their elders, with remarkable combinations of speed and power. Sixty home runs seems almost inevitable sometime soon. Conditioning is vastly superior. All I’m saying here is that the craft of the game has slipped a little overall, and craft reflects instruction, pure and simple.
Another inkling of a basic problem is uncoachable players. I know my old roomie Floyd Rayford, now managing the Batavia Clippers in upstate New York, believes he sees more of these players—and Sugar Bear’s not even an old-timer. He has a novel explanation: too much attention in the training room, which leads to too much babying overall. I don’t know about that, but I’ve seen one or two uncoachable players as well, and there must be some truth to the theory that this is probably a young guy with dominant physical talent who has been catered to, maybe all the way back to Little League. I’m not a sociologist, this is not my area of expertise, but the situation must also reflect what’s going on in society as a whole, with pressures exerted by everyone for kids to succeed at an early age. For the coach, this is the kid who can take him all the way, so rather than coach, he caters; rather than risk alienating, he indulges. If this goes on until the kid is no longer a kid, until he reaches the high minors or even the majors, he might not be coachable at all, and you can’t blame the player entirely. If I’m the teacher and the student doesn’t learn, I’d blame myself.
What about the highly touted prospect who seems to want it all and want it now, who thinks his signing bonus is a free pass to a long-term contract in the majors? Floyd Rayford believes he sees more of these players, too. I know I’ve seen guys in spring training play a night game followed by a day game who are then ready for a day off. Where’s the mental toughness? But I also believe there are just as many or more guys who have been ill-served by their amateur and minor league experience.
They haven’t been taught to care.
Okay. If the instruction and development and assessment of players in the minors is not up to par, it stands to reason that this deficiency would spill over into spring training. I think it has in some cases. More and more often, you read where someone says, “We’re going to see who performs in camp. We’ll see who makes the club.” As far as I’m concerned, if you’re really looking for your team in spring training, you’re in trouble, because you can’t bring lots of players to camp in the hopes of getting quality out of quantity. Furthermore, it’s dangerous to use a player’s performance in a single spring training as an accurate measurement of anything. You should use spring training as part of an ongoing evaluation. An organization should already have the book on the prospects before bringing them to camp. The evaluation should be well in hand, based on a player’s long progress through three or four years in the minors. The last Triple-A season is more important than one major league spring training performance, when, for starters, the pitchers aren’t really pitching to the hitters. They’re working on getting into shape, working on their pitches, and aren’t necessarily trying to exploit the hitter’s weaknesses. Some players have come from winter ball and are ready to go from the first day, some have come from warm-weather climates, some have been shoveling snow. This last group may be behind the others in their training. I’ve seen zillions of players who are world-beaters in spring training, but only spring training; start the season and it’s a different story. And I’ve seen the opposite. Shouldn’t every organization understand this?
One final point: as minor league franchises have become more successful and valuable, with many of them building new stadiums, pressure is put on everyone involved to produce winning seasons. This is a fact of life now in baseball, but, ideally, the emphasis for the big league organization should be on developing talent to win at the major league level. Winning seasons in the minors don’t prove a thing in this regard. They definitely don’t prove that good things are going on, development-wise. In fact, a winning record might be totally the opposite of the truth. The Orioles did have winning teams in the minors, for the most part, during their heyday (my dad had 11 winning seasons out of 14), but this was a result of good scouting for talent, and then good coaching. You want a winning environment for the minor leaguers to grow up in, but making every last move in order to win every game is not the point.
What’s more, it could be that some minor league managers are now managing for themselves and their résumés, and not to develop their players. They’re managing to win. They pinch-hit, platoon, send pitchers out on three days’ rest—anything to win. How do you even begin to find out if a guy is a good clutch hitter if you immediately pinch-hit for him in A-ball because you’re trying to win that game? How does this guy learn to control his emotions and hit in the clutch? Or maybe a manager chooses to keep a slightly better player coming out of college over a more talented but necessarily less developed eighteen-year-old coming out of high school.
Sorry if I sound negative here. I don’t intend to. I’m just concerned, because baseball has been my whole life. If you want, blame my parents for getting me into this. I do sit around and worry about botched rundown plays; I don’t like to see them even from the other team. I’ve had the opportunity to learn the game in many different ways, from many different perspectives. I think of myself as having carefully observed four generations in the minor leagues: while I was growing up all over the country, while I played in the minors, while my brother came up through the ranks and I got his reports, and now as I see the latest crop of graduates. I’ve been able to translate instruction into actual experience, so I have a lot of firsthand as well as secondhand knowledge, and next—in the fifth generation, so to speak—I’d like to see some changes.
Throughout baseball today, front office people are always proclaiming that they’re going to build their major league team through the system and rely less on free agency. For one thing, building from within gives the front office better fundamental options. “Payroll containment” was the buzzword in the labor-management disputes, but there’s a legitimate way to utilize payroll containment. Now I guess I sound like management, but I don’t see any contradiction between turning a profit and maintaining a quality system and a quality product. There’s no inherent contradiction between the business side and the baseball side of the game. The Orioles were known for years as a club with a low payroll. But, you counter, that was before free agency. True, but it’s a fallacy to believe that a small-market team can’t compete in this era. A small-market team with a sound minor league system could compete. The Orioles competed in the early years of free agency.
How do you build “through the system”? You have to have knowledge and commitment. The phrase “Dodger Blue” wasn’t a slogan dreamed up by some marketing whiz. It was created through hard work; the same holds for the Oriole Way. So how many people can still do this work? I think there are plenty. You also have to have stability. There was a time in the Oriole organization when the same men were in just about the same positions throughout the system for six or seven years, and I’m betting the same was true with the Dodgers. This is the way you get your teaching system down. But is that kind of stability even possible today? According to everyone I’ve discussed the subject with—players, coaches, trainers, anyone who’ll listen—it would be tough. Tough, I agree, but doable. For starters, you commit real money to upgrade salaries for the minor league staff—instructors and managers. You deem the rookie ball manager just as valuable as the Triple-A manager, because he is. You do a million things that don’t cost a lot of money but that instill pride and purpose. You hire men who want to teach, and know how to.
In a very small nutshell, those are a few of my thoughts on the state of the game. The future of professional baseball is unlimited, I’m convinced, and all I want is for the game on the field to match in all respects the better-than-ever talent of the players. I think it’s possible with the right direction, focus, and hard work. Someday, maybe sooner than I think, I’d like to test my knowledge and ideas. But would it be a real test without ownership? Now, there’s a lofty goal. I like the idea of putting together an organization, or getting a good organization back to the way it was—just the baseball side. I’d love the opportunity to test my ideas with the Orioles, obviously, but anywhere, if necessary. Starting from scratch with an expansion franchise? That would be interesting.
While we’re on the subject of change: in 1993, I started staying in a different hotel than the team in some cities, at my own expense, of course. In the contract negotiations the previous year, I more or less reserved this right if I felt it was necessary, mainly when my wife joined me on the road, but at other times as well. Kelly and I had already been doing that occasionally, and she suggested it as an option for me at other times. After thinking about it for a while, I agreed, because with or without her, I needed peace. Call it a weakness if you will—I do—but staying elsewhere was much more peaceful than staying at the team hotel. For the ten or more hours I’m at the ballpark, I give everything I’ve got to baseball. So do the other guys. Beforehand and afterward, I need my time to regroup. I’m that kind of person. In the minors and in my early years in the majors, I’d been a fanatical card player, but when life became more complicated, I cut way back. I no longer wanted to “kill” time; I wanted to maximize it. Some things that shouldn’t have bothered me did bother me. Some people can shrug off stuff a lot easier than I can; stuff bugs me. I guess that’s clear by now.
It all happened by accident. Toward the end of ’93 the team was staying at the Grand Hyatt in New York (that’s no secret; the list of the Orioles’ hotels is printed in the media guide), and I was elsewhere on the East Side. (I’ve been tracked to the new place, but I really like the hotel and the situation isn’t out of control.) At the last minute my wife had to cancel her planned visit, so I was all alone for that series with the Yankees. I have the clearest memory of coming downstairs in the morning, buying a newspaper, sitting in the restaurant catching up on the scores and the news, looking around in total anonymity and privacy—or, if not anonymity, at least privacy—and then walking out the front door for a tour of the neighborhood streets. I’d forgotten what this could be like, and I thought, This is nice. This is really nice. Even in the middle of Manhattan, the feeling that I could pick and choose what to do was so peaceful. For my frame of mind—for my peace of mind—it has made all the difference.
Of course, now I look back at some of the crazy and funny things that happen in hotels and laugh about them. Example: at 2 a.m., there’s a knock on the door. Get up, look out, nobody there, go back to bed. Then there’s another knock on the door. Ignore this one but call security. Then security bangs on your door. Example: several times around the country, people convinced the staff at the registration desk that they were relatives of mine and that I must have forgotten to make the hotel arrangements. Not only did they manage to talk themselves into the adjoining room on each side of my own room, but then they left the door open to each of those adjoining rooms and kept a lookout, so they’d know when I left or returned.
A lot of players have to use an alias when they register, to cut down on the unwanted phone calls, but even if you use an alias, the moment a room service person or bell captain comes up, you’re busted. The list of room assignments for the players was readily circulated, and sometimes this list had the name and the alias. Or if twenty-one players have actual names and four have aliases, the aliases and their room numbers are easy to pick out. The keys to the rooms are put on a table in the lobby when we troop in from the airport, and people watch as you pick up your key.
If you don’t want phone calls, even with the alias, turn the phone off, but then your real family can’t get through. Ask the operator to hold all calls except for your wife, but that doesn’t always work; I’m not sure why, but it often doesn’t. And then there are the radio stations. Calls from them at 7 in the morning, maybe even earlier, became really fashionable at some point. On the Orioles, my brother Billy became a favorite target.
“This is your wake-up call.”
“I didn’t order a wake-up call,” Billy would say, according to his favorite rendition of this story. “I don’t want a wake-up call.”
“Well, this is WUFO, and you’re on the air!”
“Oh, yeah, well @#*# you!”
Of course, the station got exactly what it wanted, a crude response they could bleep and have some fun with. I swear someone was being paid by the stations to provide the room numbers. Then there was the time in Texas when the guy hid behind the ice machine on my floor—the episode I mentioned in the first chapter. I think Texas was a hot spot because of Nolan Ryan mania. The memorabilia and collectible business is much bigger in the Arlington area than in most others. Anyway, your guard is down, all you want is some ice, then all of a sudden you see blurred movement and a guy steps out wielding a baseball bat at 1 a.m.! Maybe he was about to knock on my door when I surprised him by coming out, so he ducked into this little room off the hallway where the ice machine was. But there was nowhere to hide except behind the machine. When he knew he’d been discovered, he came out.
One year in Seattle I stayed in a hotel right around the corner from the team hotel and got cornered even though I’d been extra careful. I offered a trade with these guys: “My autographs for learning how you found me.” Turns out they had divided into teams of two, equipped with cellular phones, and staked out every plausible choice (in Seattle, there aren’t that many).
I knew my teammates didn’t care where I stayed—nothing happens at the hotel anyway, no one has a roommate, guys scatter—but I polled them anyway, just to make sure. What I thought was unfair, what hurt me, was when a few people (no teammates, incidentally) said that my staying at a different hotel in some cities affected team chemistry. This boiled down to an attack on me as a teammate—as a team player. How does sleeping in a different hotel affect team chemistry? When the team is playing at home—half the season—we all sleep in different homes. Does this affect team chemistry, or is there chemistry only on the road?
What is team chemistry, anyway? Is it rah-rah, American Legion–style camaraderie with everybody sleeping in bedrolls on the floor while sharing the same hotel room during the big tournament? Is it being a group of twenty-five good people? Is it getting along with and liking your teammates as friends? Is it eating in restaurants and going out to movies with them? I don’t think so. I believe chemistry is formed mainly at the ballpark: on the field through the experience of success and failure, then in the clubhouse by talking about and analyzing these successes and failures. Winning instills confidence and provides a blueprint for the future; losing teaches you how to cope and regroup. To me, chemistry is a blending of individual responsibilities into a team focused solely on winning. Everything is directed at winning. Stability within an organization and team helps build chemistry. You know the guys, they know you, you know how to deal with them, they know how to deal with you. You focus on good communication. Misunderstandings are cut to a minimum. Without a doubt, constant turnover does impede chemistry.
Chemistry is a necessary part of winning, but not the largest part. Talent is. Talent rules in big league baseball. Without it, you can’t compete over the 162-game season. As an exercise before every season, my father and Jimmy Williams used to match up for each team in the league the eight starting position players, the designated hitter, role players, five starting pitchers, middle relievers, and the closer. I’ve also done these match-ups. If you like the Orioles’ guys in eighteen of the twenty-five positions, you have to like the Orioles to beat that team in the standings. I’m not saying that the final standings will reflect the match-ups in every instance, because a lot of match-ups will be close, some guys will have unexpected career years and others will have off-seasons, but talent does come first. All the intangibles and team chemistry and managerial magic in the world can accomplish only so much. A team can overachieve only up to a point.
When Senior took over as manager of the Orioles in 1987, he was adamant about preparation and the execution of fundamentals, but when he was asked if he was the kind of manager his players would run through walls for, he quipped, “Rather than have twenty-four men run through walls, I’d rather have fifteen who hit it over the wall.”
Given the talent, you need experience, individually and collectively. To win championships you have to win one-run games, and talent and experience allow you to execute at a high level. In a bunting situation in the eighth inning, runners on first and second, the winning team has the ability in August or September to pounce on anything but a perfect bunt and turn it into a force at third, and maybe a double play; it has the talent, experience, and guts to make that play. I think immediately of the great play the Yankees’ Andy Pettitte made against the Atlanta Braves in the fifth game of the 1996 World Series, throwing out John Smoltz at third on the attempted sacrifice in the sixth inning. Pettitte is a young guy, but he had the poise to make that play anyway, one of the big turning points in that Series. On a championship team, poise is contagious.
I choose a defensive play as the example because in professional baseball pitching and defense win games. Especially pitching, because pitching is defense. The pitcher makes the rest of the defense good. The Dodgers won for years with that formula, but name the team that has won with offense alone. I don’t think you can. The Yankees and the Red Sox have been known for offensive teams, especially the Yankees, who scored 800-plus runs almost every year in the Mickey Mantle era. But look at the pitching on those teams: in 1956, Yankee pitching was second in the league in ERA. Over the following eight years of that dynasty their pitching was first, first, third, first, second, second, second, and third in the league. When Boston finally had a chance to win it all, in 1986, they had pitchers who kept them in the game and gave them a chance to win on a daily basis, led by Roger Clemens. Their team ERA? Lowest in the division. A decade later, in 1995 and ’96, Cleveland’s offense got most of the credit for that team’s success, which they deserved, but their starting pitcher was good and their closer, former Oriole Jose Mesa, was untouchable. In 1996, the world champion Yankees won with pitching above everything else, including their untouchable bullpen. Mariano Rivera was awesome—the most dominant performance by a middle reliever I can recall.
One reason some people might not see that talent seasoned with experience rules is that they focus on short periods of time: a red-hot April or May, or a ten-game winning streak in June or July. I don’t play a lot of golf, but apparently golfers make the same mistake, remembering their two or three best shots in a round and thinking that these indicate their true talent level. They don’t. The true talent level is the final score over a period of time. The handicap takes into account the bad shots as well as the good shots, the ability to handle a long iron out of the rough, the mental lapses, the ability to make the shot under pressure. In baseball, fans and sometimes management, too, see the team leading the league on June 15, only to fall back and end the season eight games out, and they conclude that the talent had been there but that something else went wrong. They’d do better to take a closer look at the actual talent level, especially in the pitching and defense departments, which always comes to the forefront later in the season.
Now, it’s true that there are teams with lots of talent that don’t win. The talent does have to blend together to form a team—that’s how I define chemistry. Many baseball people believe they can build team chemistry just by carefully selecting the players, but I don’t believe anyone is smart enough to know ahead of time who will mix and match and blend. It’s almost impossible. On the other hand, you can know who has a specific talent and how this fits on your twenty-five-man roster. So when I think about the makeup of a ball club, the Orioles or any other, I don’t get carried away looking at personalities and off-the-field habits. I imagine there are a few players around the league I just wouldn’t want on my team, if I had my choice, but I also know that one or two of them have a World Series ring and played a big role in their team’s winning it.
Peaceful teams have won the Series and teams that seemed to be coming apart at the seams have won the Series. In 1996, the Orioles made it to the American League championships after a year with quite a bit of controversy. In short, all kinds of teams have been successful—all of them talented, but with very different chemistries. I sometimes wonder: is chemistry only truly defined by winning?
Recall the hotel situation? There’s a sidebar to that one: transportation. At some point early in 1993, somebody observed that I didn’t leave the airport on the team bus, but stayed behind and then drove away in a town car. The rumors started immediately. “Cal has changed,” they said. “He’s taking limos everywhere. His big contract has gone to his head.”
But the issue was simple: I had to get to my hotel somehow, and I was told the airports wouldn’t allow regular cabs on the tarmac. It has to be a specially licensed car. I eventually wound up with just a licensed van with writing on the side, because there was no way it could be confused with a limo. And in New York, for the sheer fun of it, I went one step further. I called the car company and asked if they had a paneled station wagon, preferably one with some rust on the side and with the driver in a fishing outfit, maybe, with flies and lures stuck all over his hat and vest, the whole bit. They fixed me up, and when this model pulled up beside the plane, the players started laughing. I said to myself, “Perfect.” For the next three days that’s what I drove to the ballpark in.
I think Brady Anderson was the only player who knew I did this to make a point. Speaking of Brady, his family was in town for the games that weekend at Yankee Stadium, and on Saturday they were going out to eat after the game. Brady splurged and asked the clubbie to call him a limo—a real limo. I was taking a while to come out of the locker room after the game, as I always do, sitting around talking about the plays, so Brady walked outside before I did to meet his family. The driver of my ride—a new guy—mistook Brady for me (lots of people say we look similar—except for his sideburns, I guess) and walked up to him to direct him to the Ripken vehicle. What was Brady thinking? He had ordered a limo but he and his family stepped inside this ratty-looking station wagon instead and rode off. When he presented the driver with his credit card, the guy said the car was paid for, but he called his dispatcher on the radio to make sure. When Brady heard the name “Ripken” during this conversation, it dawned on him.
When I heard about this snafu, I said to Brady, “Wait a minute, you’d seen the car at the airport, you laughed along with everyone else, didn’t it bang you in the head that this was my car?” He swears his explanation about all the confusion outside the dressing room is plausible, but I don’t buy it. I haven’t let him forget this screwup. Meanwhile, I was now stranded back at the stadium because Brady had my station wagon, and I was going out to eat with ballplayers Rick Sutcliffe and Mark Parent, a New York friend, Bobby Zarem, and a friend of Zarem’s. Five altogether, maybe a sixth, and at least three of us were big guys. We wound up in Zarem’s friend’s hatchback, really smashed in. And what happened to the limo Brady had ordered? That’s a mystery to this day.
Did I say I hit rock bottom as a hitter back in the 1990 slump, or maybe in the ’92 slump? Well, I really hit rock bottom in May ’93 when my average sank below .200. That’s riding the interstate, as in I-99, and I had over 150 at-bats. A serious hole. I’d worked hard in the batting cage over the winter to keep the better feeling I’d had at the end of ’92. I’d had a strong spring training, I felt great, I was excited about the season and about Kelly’s and my second child, due in the summer. I had a strong first week or so—and then, nothing. All of a sudden I couldn’t hit, and I was very stubborn about my squat stance. As I’ve explained, when I get excited at the plate I don’t relax, I go after the ball too soon, my body gets out front, and I can’t buggywhip from that position. One way I had learned to control that tendency was to spread my stance and squat a little. That’s what I had worked on with Frank Robinson that second half of 1990 and then carried over into ’91, when I hit everything hard.
In ’92, the squat worked off and on. Now in ’93, I just couldn’t find the feeling at all with that stance. But so what? It’s not how you start the swing, it’s how you hit the ball, and if you compared videotapes of the different swings of any particular hitter, these swings would look remarkably the same when the bat hits the ball. So if one trigger’s not working, why not try another trigger? But I stayed with the old one, maybe exaggerating the squat even more. It took me a long time to admit that I couldn’t bring back the MVP numbers with the MVP stance.
And so much for the theory I read somewhere that the dimensions at Camden Yards had been tailored after those at one of my favorite hitting parks—the Metrodome in Minneapolis—in order to assure good times for me on my new home field. According to this theory, the short foul lines in old Memorial Stadium had supposedly enabled the left and right fielders to shade a step toward the gaps, hurting line-drive gap hitters such as myself. Well, it’s true that Earl Weaver, taking into account our good pitching staff, liked to play his outfield deep to cut down on extra-base hits. Playing deep at Memorial Stadium, they therefore also played over in the gaps a little. Mainly, though, they were playing deep. On the other hand, Jesse Barfield with the Toronto Blue Jays played almost on the right field line because he had Devon White in center field, who caught everything between left-center and right-center. There wasn’t just one way to position the outfield at Memorial Stadium.
As I see it, I hit well at the Metrodome mainly because of the artificial turf. I don’t think my success has much to do with the dimensions. A field designed for me and all the other ground ball and line-drive hitters would have, first of all, a fast infield and outfield—artificial turf, ideally. You hear that Camden Yards is a great hitter’s park, and for home run hitters you could make the case, but for the rest of us, this isn’t particularly true. It’s a slow infield. But this wasn’t my problem in either ’92 or ’93.
If you have major league talent, hitting is mostly mental. The confidence factor can’t be overestimated. I’m so analytical and such a worrier sometimes that I can get caught up in the finest points of technique and forget to let my natural talent flow. It’s frustrating, but it’s the way I am sometimes. My manager Johnny Oates said at some point in ’93 that maybe I just wasn’t going to hit home runs anymore. So I was washed up as a pretty good power hitter at the age of 32?
Reporters and fans suggested that I was putting too much pressure on myself to justify the new contract. Yes, I felt some pressure to have a good season, and maybe I did feel a little extra pressure, but I can’t swear to that. Any extra pressure in 1993 was more likely because I wanted to be sure to make the All-Star team, since the game was being played that year in Baltimore, my city. I’d thoroughly enjoyed every All-Star appearance, but I really wanted to be in this one.
Frank Robinson was still with the organization as assistant to the general manager, and I worked with him on my hitting. I worked with Greg Biagini, our hitting instructor that year. I talked with my father on the phone. I hit a lot of balls off the “T,” which I’ve always thought helps me.
Last, but definitely not least, I wondered—like everyone else—whether the streak of consecutive games was the source of most of my problems. In my mind, this became the focus. I had read or heard about Billy Williams and his streak, which he voluntarily ended at 1,117 games in 1970 because the pressure got so great. Billy found himself saving a little energy from this game in order to have some left over for the next game. One afternoon at Wrigley Field he settled for a double on a drive that might have yielded a triple, and that’s when he realized he had had enough and said so to Leo Durocher, his manager. As Steve Garvey’s streak of games kept growing, he started having dreams about bizarre things that ended it, like the one in which he was driving on the L.A. freeway at 3 p.m. on his way to Chavez Ravine for the night game and hearing that the afternoon game was already in the bottom of the ninth. I didn’t dream about the streak I had going, not that I remembered, but I did get paranoid about the starting times. I was extra careful about twilight games and Wednesday afternoon day games.
At the All-Star game in 1986, I asked Dale Murphy about the streak of 740 games he had recently voluntarily terminated. Dale said he’d just gotten tired of dealing with it, but he urged me not to sit down for the same reason.
By June ’93, I was thinking about doing just that. My spirit was zapped a little. In times past, I’d always laughed when Kirby Puckett pulled up at second base after yet another double and called over to me, “Cheer up, Cal, just four more years and you can have a rest!” In ’93, maybe I didn’t laugh very hard.
Those first months of the season were the only time in my career I ever got so discouraged that I asked myself, Am I still doing the right thing by doing the right thing—playing every day? The only comparable time was during the bad patch in 1990. At Memorial Stadium, I used to walk out to the center field fence for some quiet time. That spot was pretty isolated, and I’d lean against the wall and think about things and try to straighten them out in my mind. One afternoon I spotted Brady Anderson walking in my direction, and he kept coming even after I tried to signal that I needed to be by myself. Brady can be a forward kind of guy, and he didn’t retreat, and just as well, maybe. For quite a while we talked about the situation and I asked him what the streak meant to him. Did it mean anything at all in a baseball sense? Was it even meaningful that I played every day? Brady said, “It’s one of the greatest records in baseball history. You’ll be considered one of the greatest players ever to play.” Brady says I shook my head negatively. I’m sure I did, because his answer made no sense to me. I was supposed to be one of the greatest players just because I’d played all these games? No way. I’d always thought my approach made perfect baseball sense. But did it really? My doubts remained.
Three years later, I was even more doubtful. In Oakland, I believe, I got word that Barry Bonds had taken a day off for the Giants and his father Bobby had criticized me for never doing the same. “If I were his manager,” Bobby said, “he’d be out of there. He’s hurting the team and showing that personal goals are more important. He wants to break Lou Gehrig’s record even if it costs Baltimore the pennant.” Bobby soon sent word that he’d been misquoted, and there was some irony here, too, because Barry began his own streak of consecutive games later that season that stretched to 357 before a pulled muscle stopped it in August 1996.
During this period, Sports Illustrated ran a piece titled “Solitary Man.” All in all, it painted a pretty sorry picture of me and my “somber solitude.” But I didn’t live in somber solitude. The fact that the consecutive games streak was beginning to define me about that time, as I stated in the story, didn’t mean that I was retreating from the world. Nevertheless, an SI piece gets your attention, and the timing of this one contributed to my concerns about my hitting. I was getting seriously worn down, and one afternoon I said to Rick Sutcliffe during batting practice in Cleveland, “Sut, let me talk to you a minute.” Sure, Rick said, and we stepped to the side, and I said, in so many words, “All this stuff is really bugging me. I don’t know what to do. Am I doing the right thing? Maybe I should take a day. I’m thinking I should get this over with. Just one game and all this stuff will be gone. If I knew that sitting down would break this slump and end all the constant talk, I’d do it in a second. I hate to capitulate, I’m paid to play, but maybe I should sit down. Maybe it’s the only thing left to try.”
Rick looked at me like he’d heard dumb statements before, but nothing quite this dumb. Then he said, “We need you in the middle of the lineup, in the middle of the field every day. The only problem you’re having is your hitting. Fix your hitting and all the other stuff will go away. Just fix your hitting. The answer has nothing to do with taking a day off.” Then he added, “Or do it when I’m not pitching.” He wasn’t smiling, either. “I’m pitching tomorrow night, and your name’s going to be in the paper one way or another. You’re either going to be in the lineup or in the obituaries.”
As you can see, Rick is a plainspoken guy and he’d gotten himself worked up. For myself I was thinking, Fix my hitting? I wish it were that simple.
Rick turned more lighthearted and said, “Look, can you get one base hit tonight? If we’re down nine to one in the eighth inning, can you get a bunt single?”
“What do you mean?”
“Cal, if you go just one-for-four, nobody’s going to mess with you after the game. Nobody will say you’re tired. Look, you’ve spent your whole life worrying about the Orioles. Why don’t you take the next two weeks and just be selfish, get one hit a night no matter what it takes.”
Of course, it’s not selfish to get a hit. Rick was just trying to channel my focus, sort of like I’d been able to channel Mike Boddicker’s focus years earlier by telling him to forget about winning, forget the final score, and just concentrate on limiting the other team to three lousy runs.
What Rick said was just what I needed to hear at that time. I would have had no problem if the streak were broken because I pulled a hamstring or caught the chicken pox from Brady Anderson (actually, my mother reassured me that I’d had it already), but in my heart I knew that sitting down for a game as a way to break a slump would be so foreign to what I believe that it might put me in a worse slump. To me, this is running away from the problem instead of facing it.
I didn’t sit down. Instead, I won a round with my stubbornness and altered my stance a little, stood more upright, and almost immediately began to relax at the plate. I hit .280 the rest of the ’93 season, and with good power, and ended up with 24 homers and 90 RBIs. Before that, at midseason, I was voted onto the starting All-Star squad as well, although I got such a late start averagewise that I thought about declining. I was hitting about .215 when the teams were announced, Travis Fryman had the numbers that year, and one part of me thought the thing to do was somehow to let him have the honor of starting the game. But I couldn’t really do that. The voting can be controversial, but I think it’s great that the fans make the decision, and two million of them had taken the trouble to vote for me. And I’ve admitted it already—I did want to be on that team. Everybody does, despite what guys occasionally say about not caring, about being just as happy to spend three days at home.
By the time of the game, I had gotten hot and collected my 2,000th hit, off Wilson Alvarez, and my doubts about starting the game eased. As part of the pre-game festivities, Michael Jordan participated in the celebrity home run hitting contest (in which Tom Selleck was the only participant who actually cleared the fence), and Michael collected autographed bats. I was honored to give him one of mine, because I’ve always admired him. But the greatest honor I received that day was the standing ovation during the introductions. This was overwhelming. Along with September 5 and September 6, 1995, that evening was the most thrilling, gratifying experience I’ve had in baseball. After all that had gone on in my career for the past bunch of years, after the terrible start I’d had in ’93, to have the fans give me an overwhelming vote of confidence was just unbelievable. I felt that the ovation wasn’t for that year, but for my whole career.
My emotions almost got the better of me. They did get the better of me at the plate, where, naturally, I wanted to do something great as a way to show my appreciation. But I couldn’t control my excitement. Jumpiness doesn’t translate into good hitting or good fielding, and I struck out once and grounded out twice, while my friend Kirby Puckett picked up the slack for the good guys with a homer and a double.
Around Baltimore, by the way, that’s the famous All-Star game in which American League manager Cito Gaston didn’t pitch our Mike Mussina. After Cito put his own pitcher, Duane Ward, in the game in the ninth inning of a 9–3 American League blowout, Mike got up in the bullpen and started throwing, getting in the work he needed. I never understood the brouhaha that followed. Cito hadn’t been snubbing Mike, and Mike hadn’t been trying to incite the fans against Cito, but for some reason that’s the way Cito took it, and Mike did nothing to correct this impression. This controversy really sparked our fans, and when we got as close as a half game behind Toronto in August, Baltimore fans had visions of a beautiful revenge series at Camden Yards to close out the season. But the Blue Jays again poured it on, just like they had the previous two seasons, while we dropped 14 of 22 and slipped a full 10 games back.
My wife entertained forty people at that All-Star game in a skybox at the stadium. A couple of weeks later, on July 26, she delivered our second child, Ryan. People said how fortunate that it was an off day. More than fortunate, it was planned, and it happened to be during one of my road trips. I hoped I could sneak in, sneak out, and nobody would be the wiser, but it didn’t work out that way: after the delivery in the morning, Kelly saw the report on the noon news. As always, the stats were instantly available, this time about our big baby boy. As with Rachel, we hadn’t known whether we had a boy or a girl, and didn’t want to know, although I have to admit that when I sat in on a couple of the sonogram sessions I couldn’t help studying the screen looking for some little indication, one way or the other. But, again, what did it matter when the first cry rang out in the delivery room?
And then I was gone. I’d flown in from Minneapolis early in the morning and had to leave again late that evening for Toronto. I did not want to leave. Make no mistake, the separations throughout the season from Kelly, Rachel, and Ryan are the toughest thing about this game. I love baseball, it has provided a wonderful life for my family, but as I’d found out from my father, the scheduling is tough. This particular departure and separation was the toughest of all for me. I was a little rueful while passing out chocolate cigars in the visiting clubhouse at the Skydome the following afternoon.