When I was called to the big leagues with the Baltimore Orioles in 1981, I sat on the bench for the first time in my life and, I have to say, this wasn’t what I had in mind for my career. My father was the Orioles’ third base coach, but my last name wasn’t going to help me win a starting position. It doesn’t work that way in the majors; in fact, growing up in a baseball family only made me more aware of how it sometimes does work: players—good players—traded or discarded into the minor leagues or relegated to the far corner of the bench, never to be heard from again. Now, it’s true that I was one of the top prospects in one of the best organizations in the game, and I felt I’d earned my shot and belonged up here, but I hadn’t proved it yet, and lots of players max-out in Triple-A. That’s as good as they’re going to get. I knew that.
So I chewed more sunflower seeds in two months in ’81 than I had in three and half years in the minors; I watched my new teammates, who’d won 100 games the previous season without my help; I thought about what my manager, Earl Weaver, had said about my immediate prospects—“He has some pretty good players in front of him”—and I wondered, How can I ever break into this lineup, and if and when I do, how can I be sure to stay there?
I came up with two answers: play well and play every day. If I do get the opportunity, don’t give anyone else with the same desire and motivation the same opportunity. I didn’t want Earl and the organization to have any reasonable option but to play me. That sounds cold, but mainly it’s just old-school, the way my father taught me. In the minors, I knew guys who didn’t want to become good friends with other players at the same position who might take their jobs; I knew outfielders who preferred hanging out with the pitchers. That’s old, old-school, and I didn’t feel that way, but I did take a proprietary interest in my position. As a ballplayer, you have to, because until you become established baseball gives you nothing in terms of income or job security, and it can take away your entire professional life in a heartbeat. If baseball didn’t invent downsizing, it perfected the practice, which happens at every level on every team every spring.
The truth is, breaking Lou Gehrig’s record for consecutive games played was partly an unintentional result of that early and then ongoing determination to keep as much of my destiny as possible in my own hands. Overall, I’m a guy who likes control. I even find myself dissatisfied with the instructions on some brands of microwave popcorn. “Pop on High setting for two to five minutes”? That doesn’t do me any good at all. With any new brand or with any new oven—in the houses my wife and I have rented for spring training, for example—I proceed logically, setting the timer for five minutes and listening carefully. When the corn’s ready, I check the elapsed time. After one more trial run, just to make sure, I’m all set with this brand. This is the way I go about almost everything, and sometimes my wife or friends or teammates tease me about going overboard. But to me, this is just taking care of business.
I’m instinctively analytical—something else for friends to rib me about. After I did break into the Orioles’ lineup as the third baseman in 1982, the year after I came up, Earl Weaver soon moved me to shortstop, and there’s been speculation ever since about moving me back to third base. That’s a long story, which we’ll get into when the time comes, but in 1996, when I did play six games at third in the middle of the season, without preparation, it was disconcerting. In Boston, I found myself standing at the plate after fouling a ball down the third base line and wondering why Tim Naehring, the Red Sox third baseman, was playing so far off that line. Was there some trick to the configuration of the stands at Fenway Park I didn’t know about? Should I be playing that far over as well? Those aren’t the thoughts you want in the batting box, but they’re the kind I can’t keep out.
For 1997, I’ve been moved back to third base permanently. I take this as a new challenge, almost like a second career, because I’m seriously competitive and persistent. I’m determined to play that position as well as I had in the minors, and as well as I had in Baltimore before Earl moved me to shortstop.
Baseball fans from outside Baltimore who tuned in to the hoopla surrounding streak week in September 1995 probably thought that the media and the fans had been on my side from the day I did crack that Oriole lineup in 1982. They probably didn’t know that in 1988, when the team was struggling and I was playing with a one-year contract and trade rumors were flying, some observers suggested that perhaps a change of scenery for me would benefit all concerned. Four years later, when I signed my next contract after “protracted negotiations” and during a slump—in the end, I went 73 games without a homer, which was grim—the Oriole front office flashed the terms of the deal on the big screen at the new ballpark at Camden Yards before the game, and I heard more than a few scattered boos. Maybe I did deserve some boos that day, but not because I needed a day off, like some people said. Had I needed a day off the previous year, 1991, when I hit .323 with 34 homers and 114 runs batted in? I guess not. So when the organization makes a financial commitment to a multiyear deal with me, when I’m able to play every day and make contributions to the defense, my instinct during a batting slump is to buckle down, take extra batting practice, and prove the critics wrong.
In short, playing 2,131 consecutive ball games and breaking Lou Gehrig’s record had nothing to do with extraordinary talent, which I don’t have, or a bionic body, which I don’t have either, or a burning desire for the spotlight, which can be fun at times and is really gratifying, but has its drawbacks as well. No, when I look back over those fourteen seasons of consecutive games with the Baltimore Orioles, I have to agree with Billy Ripken’s blunt conclusion. Billy knows me because he’s my younger brother, and he knows baseball because he’s also a major leaguer, and he says I broke that record because I could.
What a remarkable two nights those were, September 5 and 6, 1995, an experience that I still feel more deeply in my heart and bones than I can possibly express with any words. I said afterward that it was almost like a dream; over a year later, it still feels that way in my memory. In fact, I hadn’t even looked at the videotape of the streak week games until I was working on this book. I didn’t want to mess with my memories of that dream. Like my father, I don’t naturally or easily wear my emotions on my sleeve, and I worry that I was never able to express fully how extraordinarily touched I was by the response of the fans throughout 1995, and how grateful I was and am. Probably the most eloquent “remark” I made was when I came out of the dugout for another curtain call and touched my heart with my hand. For me, that said it all.
And wasn’t it a strange record? After all, I hadn’t broken Ty Cobb’s mark for base hits or Babe Ruth’s record for home runs. I hadn’t struck out 5,000 batters. Emotionally, I could understand the fans’ excitement; intellectually, I couldn’t figure it out, and I still can’t. I had showed up and honored the game of baseball by playing as well as I could and as often as I could—every day. I’d been lucky regarding injuries and illness, and I’d hung in there when I’d been criticized. I don’t think of myself as an accidental hero, exactly; unintentional is the better word. By playing every game I was paid to play, I unintentionally played 2,131 in a row and broke Gehrig’s famous record.
What if I’d pulled a hamstring in 1985 or 1988 or 1992 or 1994 and been forced to miss a day or a week? What if I’d gotten the flu and missed a series? Just one absence over those fourteen years and I would have been exactly the same ballplayer—posting the same numbers, earning the same salary, enjoying the same reputation as an iron-man kind of guy who puts in the innings—but I would have been a very different public figure. I might have been working on a new and modest streak of consecutive games, but I wouldn’t have been the recipient of tens of thousands of letters, or the shortstop whose name was mentioned in the same sentence with Gehrig and DiMaggio, or the player some people suggested had the responsibility to save baseball in 1995 following the disastrous labor dispute the year before. Nor would I have been the subject of the article in Sports Illustrated that depicted me as the lonely and isolated prisoner of the streak. (Actually, “lonely and isolated” would have been really nice some of the time, like when the guy hiding behind the ice machine in the hotel in Texas jumped out, bat in hand, targeting my autograph, not my money. Usually I’m an easy touch, but I felt no obligation to sign that P-72 model at 1 a.m. Although I might have signed. I was so surprised, I don’t remember.)
I’ve been lucky? No, I’ve been unbelievably fortunate. In the promo I shot for Fox Sports’ first-time baseball coverage, the sarcastic mailman asks me if I’ve seen any rabid Dobermans lately out by shortstop and then mutters as he walks away, “Mister I’ve-Been-Kissed-By-The-Baseball-Fairy.” That line was the actor’s ad lib, and a good one. I often wonder whether I’ve been blessed with most of the baseball luck in the Ripken family. After seven and a half years in the major leagues—mainly good years—my brother Billy spent most of 1995 in the minors with the Buffalo Bisons. Billy was as good an infielder that year as he had ever been, as good as most infielders in the major leagues. But his career had been interrupted for months at a time by an assortment of injuries, and he was trapped in the complicated situation that followed the shutdown of the game, so there he was in Triple-A, playing in a ballpark (New Orleans) that features a Port-A-Can in the visiting dugout and riding 6 a.m. flights from that city to Oklahoma City by way of Atlanta. There’s no luck there.
My father’s minor league playing career ended in 1961, the year after I was born, when a shoulder injury went undiagnosed for three critical months. Today, that injury would be diagnosed immediately and just about rehabilitated in that period of time. Things might have turned out very differently for him. Cal Ripken, Sr., spent his adult life in the Baltimore organization as a minor league player, minor league manager, scout, and then big league coach before he finally got his shot at managing the Orioles in 1987, after Earl Weaver had come out of retirement and then quit again. I think Earl knew that the O’s were a team in transition, and he didn’t need that frustration. So my dad got the job, but after just one full season and six games into the following one, he was summarily thrown over the side of that sinking ship. The following year he was brought back as the third base coach, then he was fired again four years later. Those episodes were tough on the Ripken family, as they would be for any family. But what if my father had inherited Earl Weaver’s team in 1983 and then managed that solid, veteran squad to victory in the World Series, as Joe Altobelli had done? Again, things might have turned out very differently for him. I hope he hasn’t spent as much time thinking about that scenario as I have.
With the Orioles, I’ve seen it all. In the thirteen years before I arrived on the major league scene in 1981, the team had exactly one manager—Earl Weaver. Now, in sixteen years, I’ve played under seven managers; eight, if you count Earl twice. The organization with the best cumulative record in the major leagues in the sixties and seventies, including eighteen consecutive winning seasons, six appearances in the World Series, and three championships, proceeded to have five losing seasons between 1986 and 1991. In 1988, we lost those first 6 games under the generalship of my father, then 15 more under Frank Robinson for a total of 21 losses to start the season, the record all of us would like to forget. Billy Ripken, a sophomore in the league at the time, became the national symbol of our futility and disgrace, featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated slumped on the bench after another loss, head lodged against his bat in despair. For baseball’s most successful franchise during the previous two decades and for my whole family, that was the embarrassing pits.
The national pastime has been through the wringer, too. Not by coincidence, I was called up from Rochester at the conclusion of the fifty-six-day players’ strike in 1981, when everyone involved swore to the fans, “Never again!” But “never again” happened yet again in 1985, 1990, and 1994. The year before I came up, Nolan Ryan with the Houston Astros had become baseball’s first million-dollar player. When I broke Lou Gehrig’s record fifteen years later, the average major league salary was more than that. We’re talking about a lot of money—not NBA money, but a lot. The salaries reflect the fact that the game is no longer just a game, but part of the vast entertainment industry. Salaries grew as the business grew. Still, they were also the reason the owners canceled the World Series in 1994.
For the Orioles and for the game itself, it’s been a sometimes bumpy, sometimes controversial ride. For Cal Ripken, Jr., what could I do but lower my head and soldier on, one game at a time? That’s my style. Years ago I told a reporter, “Some people will never understand why I go about things the way I do, and that’s okay. But I’ll keep going about them the same way until it’s proven to me that there’s a better way.” It hasn’t happened yet. To this day, the old-school Oriole Way that I absorbed from my father is the only way I know.