When my father was managing the Rochester Red Wings in 1969 and ’70, he’d come into the boys’ bedroom on Saturday mornings and shake me in my bed to see if I wanted to go with him to an early clinic he and a couple of his players held for Little Leaguers and their coaches. Fred was uninterested, Billy was too young, and Elly wasn’t invited, or so she says, because this was before girls played Little League, but I usually went along, and not for the baseball. Sitting in the stands watching the clinic for two or three hours was boring, but it was my chance to have Dad to myself on the rides back and forth, and I knew he enjoyed having me along. I was nine years old. For my tenth birthday the second summer in Rochester, I took my first plane ride, joining him on the road for games against the Tidewater Tides and Richmond Braves. A real grown-up thing to do. I was with him all the time and wore a full uniform when the team was on the field. The ultimate baseball field trip, as well as my first time away from “home.”
By the time we lived in Asheville, North Carolina, during the summers of 1972, ’73, and ’74, all of us kids were old enough to help out at the park in some useful way, selling candy, working in the clubhouses. I was a batboy as well. Elly couldn’t go into the clubhouses, and she resented that, but she swept the bases after the fifth inning, and would occasionally playfully whack the umpire on the butt or kiss him on the cheek. Dad didn’t mind; he just told her to keep her eye on the games so she’d know which gesture was more appropriate.
Aside from our chores, however, I was the only one of the three older kids who voluntarily spent much time at the park before the games. I wore my professional-looking batboy uniform at all times. Of course, Dad was conscientious about doing everything right on the field, and he would never have interrupted the pre-game routine in order to play around with me—that’s not the Ripken way—but he let me hit some balls and field some grounders before everybody else arrived. However, I had to stand on the outfield grass taking ground balls so I wouldn’t scuff up the infield dirt for his real players. During batting practice I was allowed to shag fly balls, but I wasn’t allowed on the infield, except when the infielders needed me to take their throws, when I was protected by the screens in front of first and second base. (This prohibition was smart policy. One time at Memorial Stadium, when I was quite a few years older, about sixteen, I sneaked onto the infield during batting practice and took a hard shot off my wrist. That hurt, and, worse than that, it was embarrassing. I slunk back to the outfield.) Sometimes in Asheville I donned Dad’s old catching gear and got behind the plate for some throws from the BP pitcher—Senior—and these were the hardest pitches I’d ever seen.
When I was finally old enough to take advantage of the baseball opportunities afforded by my father’s job, I did so with a vengeance. It also turned out that I already knew more than was expected, so I must have been paying better attention during those Saturday clinics in Rochester than I’d realized at the time. Now I tried to soak up everything I could. I pestered the players for tips, and I questioned them about the smallest details I observed. One afternoon I noticed that Doug DeCinces put on his sanitary socks and stirrup socks and then rolled them differently from my father. I wanted to know why. (Answer: No particular reason.)
During the O’s actual games, I was watching, not just goofing off. And at some point I suddenly decided that these Double-A baseball players were making a good living at the game. Dad might be working twelve hours a day twelve months a year to support his family, but most of these guys were single and self-sufficient and, as far as I could tell, living the good life. I was impressed. The question I’ve been asked more often than any other over the past fifteen years is what I would have done for a career if I hadn’t made it in baseball. I can honestly say I’ve never seriously thought about it, because starting with those three summers in Asheville, all my energy has been focused on pro ball.
Those were really great times. The town of Asheville in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains felt like a home away from home, Dad’s clubs were good (a combined 222-193 for the three seasons), and for the last two summers we rented the same house, the former owner’s residence behind an old inn. For the first time in my life, I had a separate bedroom. In our backyard, I played hundreds of baseball games against myself, if necessary, or with Fred and Billy for some one-on-one or two-on-one. Against Billy, I got only one out at the plate, and I had to play lefthanded in the field. We had two teams, the Orioles against the Reds—the Orioles because they were Dad’s team, and they were also good, and the Reds because they were good, too, in the National League. It was easy to root for winning teams. If Dad had worked for the Chicago Cubs, say, who haven’t won much during my lifetime, this might have been a serious conflict for a front-runner like me. Among the Orioles, the third baseman was probably my all-time favorite. When I made a great backyard stab I yelled, “Brooks Robinson!”
But the best thing about Asheville was that it happened to have a great Little League program, with good fields and coaches, and with lots of tournaments. I really think those summers were important to my development as a player. We won the state championship one year and went to the southeastern regionals in St. Petersburg, Florida. Dad got time off and the whole family drove down for the games. The team had to collect money door-to-door to meet expenses, even after a local food company donated bus money. As it turned out, the parents couldn’t find air-conditioned buses, so we flew down to Florida but drove back in vans. The airline lost my luggage, including glove and uniform. The gear showed up in time for the first game, but I never forgot that close call. When Elly started taking bowling trips—she’s an ace, with an average in the 180s, which would theoretically qualify her for the pro tour if she wanted to try—I encouraged her to carry her equipment with her on the plane.
I’m not sure how close we came to going to Williamsport for the Little League World Series, but I do know we won one game in Florida before I gave up the key homer in the final 4–3 loss. That was a high fly, almost a pop-up in my mind, that kept drifting back before barely clearing the left field fence. Distraught, I wanted to blame our fielder for not reaching over and catching the ball, but ended up blaming myself for throwing the pitch in the first place. I was crying along with everyone else.
Great baseball every summer, but then frustration every fall when I’d get back home to Aberdeen and start arguing with my friends about the quality of the league in North Carolina. They had never heard of Asheville and assumed the kids there played on dirt fields. My friends asked me what I’d hit over the summer, and when I said .500 or .600 they put down the competition. That made me mad, of course. No one knew what level I was at because I hadn’t showed them firsthand. What’s more, in Asheville I had fit in because I was a good player, but I didn’t have that advantage back home. As a young teenager, I found this whole situation with my friends—two sets of friends—about as frustrating as anything regarding my life growing up on the road.
Then, after three summers in Asheville, our traveling days were finally over. In 1975, Dad became based in Baltimore to scout for the Orioles before joining the big club the following year. Now I’d be playing all my baseball with my friends and I could show them what I could do. When I made the varsity team as a freshman in high school, in the spring of 1975, they had to quit ragging me, even though I made the team only because we needed a second baseman. I was only fourteen, weighed about 125 pounds, and I was playing against a lot of juniors and seniors. In later years, our manager, Don Morrison, liked to tell the story about the time he was bragging about this “star player” he had coming onto the team as a freshman, and then this star player—myself—tugged on his sleeve and introduced himself in a squeaky, preadolescent voice.
Overmatched at the plate, I was 4-for-about-35 that season. Coach asked me to bunt a lot. One of the stories about that first varsity season that always came up in the streak publicity was the time a huge kid named Steve Slagle flattened me at second base. The ball was a slow bouncer to shortstop, and I was stretching for the throw with my back to Steve, the runner from first. This was a force out situation, there wasn’t going to be a double play, but Steve was a football player who thrived on contact and he made an aggressive slide anyway, slamming into my back. In the big leagues, that play might have earned some retaliation, but there’s no code at the high school level. Steve thought he was making a heads-up play, and I guess he was. Anyway, I got hit and hit hard, and while flat on my back with the breath knocked out of me I supposedly said, “Don’t take me out, Coach. I’m okay!” But what kid wants to come out of any game?
The girls’ varsity softball team played their games in the opposite corner of a big field from our games, with no outfield fence for either game. My sister Elly was a star of the girls’ team. When a ball from their game rolled onto our field, it was usually her home run. Guys kidded me that my sister had a better arm than I did. I was immature physically, and Elly was a terrific athlete, and a year older. We had a lot of good games in the backyard batting cage, up where the horseshoe pit is now. Our mother sometimes expressed regret that her daughter had never had the opportunity to play professional ball. And Elly likes to kid that she might have been the third Ripken making some money playing baseball if she had had the opportunity. Sometimes I think she’s more than kidding. She would have liked that chance. In high school, she was the All-County third baseman. The team won the state championship her senior year. She lettered all four years in basketball, volleyball, and softball—twelve letters in all, the maximum. She’s still passionate about fast-pitch softball—one of her early teams went to the national tournament—but not as much as before back surgery forced her to move to the outfield.
Elly and I not only played on the same field but traveled to the games in the same team bus. Her team was good, and she was often the hero on the ride home. Our team wasn’t that good, and I wasn’t contributing much, so those were long rides for me. There was also the fact that I was shy and introverted, socially. When Elly’s teammates teased me and pinched my cheek, I probably blushed violently. At some point in those years I quit walking home with her, even when our schedules coincided. Now I know this hurt her feelings, but then, it was just too embarrassing.
The good news to report from that freshman baseball season is that I got better toward the end, and for an important reason. For one of the few times, my dad was able to work with me. Although the team wasn’t too good, somehow we made the playoffs for our classification, and right before the first game Dad took me into the batting cage in the backyard and we worked on a triggering mechanism that would help me get the bat started sooner. I’d been waiting until the ball was thrown before I made any move at all. I could get away with that in Little League, but not against high school guys who threw harder. In just one session, Dad taught me to turn in my left shoulder during the pitcher’s windup. This helped me time the delivery, and it also got more of my body into the swing. In my first at-bat in the playoff game, I stroked a line drive up the middle for a single, and the next time I lined out to center field. Those were the two hardest hit balls I had all year. We developed a baseball confidence on the spot.
In my sophomore year I was once again competitive at the plate—not that this necessarily means much regarding professional prospects. A lot of players hit .500 in high school but aren’t considered prospects, for a variety of reasons, including the level of competition in the league. Or maybe the kid has matured quickly for his age but doesn’t have the actions scouts are looking for. In my own case, I also hit well in the summer seasons, especially the summer after my junior year, when I played for the Putty Hill Optimists in the Mickey Mantle League based in nearby Parkville. This was a sixteen-and-younger tryout league, essentially an All-Star team that would have been competitive with high school teams stocked with seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds. After I made the Optimists, I was approached by Johnny’s, an even better, semi-pro–type team playing in the Babe Ruth League. Johnny’s had a great reputation, and I wanted to back out on the Optimists and play for Johnny’s instead. In fact, I probably would have done that except that I told Dad what I had in mind, and he set me straight: I had made my commitment to the Optimists, and I would honor it. The Optimists won the district championship in New Jersey and went to the finals in Sherman, Texas, before we lost. And once again, just as in the regional playoffs with my Little League team, I was on the mound for the final loss. Maybe this is why I wanted to be thought of as a position player by the scouts.
The Optimists had games almost every night, but so did the Orioles. Therefore Dad saw almost none of mine, just like he had seen only a few of my high school games. He saw maybe five or six games altogether during those years, and a couple of times he had to leave early. I know I cared about his absence, because when he was able to be there I tried too hard and didn’t play well. My senior year in high school I struck out a total of four times, I think, and three of those were in one game when Dad was in the stands.
The year I played for the Optimists, I dropped Dad off at Memorial Stadium, drove to my own game, then came back to the stadium to pick him up for the drive home. Waiting for him in the clubhouse I’d talk with Doug DeCinces, Kenny Singleton, Mark Belanger, Eddie Murray, all these guys. Al Bumbry liked to joke that he could tell whether I’d had a good game by the condition of my uniform. If it was dirty, I had some hits; if it was clean, probably not. By that time, I was really into baseball. Totally into baseball. Driving home, I peppered my father with questions about the two games, mine and his. I really started to understand how to analyze a baseball game and how to think like a baseball player. Occasionally the Orioles let me work out at Memorial Stadium, and when I was fifteen I cleared the fences off my father. Now Dad was beginning to take me seriously as a ballplayer. Still, the ultimate irony is that he knew much more about me as a soccer player than as a baseball player.
Soccer was the winter game for both of us. He coached two or three different age-group teams each winter, and my senior year I played on his under-twenty-one team, when I was only seventeen. A baseball man of the old school, he might just as easily have been a soccer man of the old school if that sport had offered the same professional opportunities. There was a pro soccer league in the Northeast in the fifties and sixties, with teams in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, Trenton, Brooklyn, Bridgetown (Connecticut), and two in New York City, but it was a marginal operation and soon went out of business, partly because it was a summertime league and thus in competition with baseball. The Baltimore Bays played at Memorial Stadium, where the Orioles also played. Growing up, all the Ripken kids played a lot of soccer because Dad loves the game, and loves to teach it as much as he loves to teach baseball. During the World Cup, especially, it’s easy to get Senior to analyze the play of midfielders with exactly the same precision and passion with which he analyzes center fielders.
It was on the soccer field my senior year in high school that I was in the biggest fight of my life. Before this game, one of our vans got lost somewhere en route, so we—Fred played on this team of older guys as well—pulled Billy up from his younger team in order to fill out our lineup. At the start of the game I told the other team that the little twelve-year-old kid was my brother, and don’t take advantage of him. Immediately, of course, they went right at him with a hard tackle, and words were exchanged. Then a major fight broke out, and Fred was tossed by the referee. In the second half, there were a couple more fights, during which Fred came racing up from our Buick Elektra, where he’d been sitting. He wasn’t going to miss out on this action. Dad was in the middle of things, too, trying to break it up to our advantage. Chaos, and the game was finally suspended. The postscript here is that the following summer, when I was off playing rookie ball in the Orioles organization, one of the guys on the other team sued one of our guys for the cost of his dental work. I was subpoenaed, but our lawyers talked their lawyers out of bringing me home. Dad testified, though. The judge dismissed the suit.
That was one of the few fights in which Fred and I were on the same side. More often, we fought each other. When we were little, Elly would sit on my chest and beat me up, and Billy and I scuffled because I taunted him unmercifully before he retaliated in a rage, but Elly was my sister and Billy was four years younger, while Fred and I were close enough in age and strength to have a match. By the time I was nine or ten I was taller but he was stronger, pound for pound. He’s built like Dad in that regard: lean, wiry, really strong, and at some point he lifted weights, which made him even stronger. Fred got into Pumping Iron in a big way. We fought for a lot of reasons, including silly arguments over TV shows, and sometimes it got a little scary. He’d have no trouble picking up a screwdriver or anything else to throw at me in the heat of battle. Sometimes after we really got into it Fred would say, “I’ll get you back.” I’d say, “Why don’t you get me back right now?” Then he might say, “Well, you gotta sleep sometime.”
I wondered, Does he mean that? After all, we slept in the same bedroom. In all our fighting I didn’t really want to hurt my brother—I pulled back; I walked away from some fights—and I don’t think he wanted to hurt me, but at the time I wasn’t absolutely certain. However, I did provoke him, I realize that. A few times I even shattered one of his beautifully constructed model ships.
Finally Dad would take some disciplinary action of his own by ordering us down to what he called the “woodshed,” which was the downstairs bathroom. He didn’t care whose fault the fight was. He swung the wooden paddle with equal force on both of us. One time Fred hid the paddle, I suspect, because Dad couldn’t find it. Okay, he said, follow me out to the garage. So we had to watch with rising anxiety as he deliberately sorted through his scrap plywood to find a piece about the right size, cut a new paddle on his table saw, sanded or maybe taped the handle, and then drilled the holes. Then he took us back inside. And this paddle was bigger than the other one.
I guess the fighting kept Fred and me together. After we got older—fourteen or fifteen—and too big and with better things to do, we went our separate ways, for the most part. I buddied around mainly with some of the high school jocks, while he was off with his pals. Fred told a reporter that he had better physical skills and better instincts than I did when we were kids. Still needling me, after all these years; we’ve always been good at that. Well, Fred was and is a terrific raw athlete. I have no doubt he could step into the batting cage right now and hit line drives. Everyone in the family remembers the day he climbed onto the high board of the local swimming pool and made a perfect dive. Said he’d been watching the Olympics. He was a good baseball player but preferred soccer, with its nonstop action, and he could kick the dog snot out of a soccer ball (his phrase). Baseball had too much standing around for him.
But Fred was not a dedicated athlete. With all the baseball around the Ripken family, maybe he wanted a separate identity. He’s a bit of a renegade, too, and one way that expressed itself, I believe, was by not playing baseball seriously. We’ve never talked about the subject in just those terms, but that’s what I think. Also, the way it seemed to work out, I got feedback and esteem from our dad through sports, while Fred carved out his niche fixing things and getting into Dad’s mechanical interests, with which I have no patience whatsoever. I’d try to care, but eventually I’d take off to go play some game. Meanwhile, our brother Billy took up Dad’s athletic and mechanical interests; Billy’s a really good woodworker.
Like Dad, Fred is pretty much a genius at mechanical work, and he has the perfect family trait for it. He’s persistent, and if he sits down to do something, he does it right, like those model ships. He has this innate sense of responsibility and a different kind of competitiveness than I have: he doesn’t compete against someone else so much as against himself. Fred’s mechanical interests soon led him into motorcycles. My childhood hero was Brooks Robinson; his was Evel Knievel. Today he’s a motorcycle mechanic. I don’t ride the bikes—I can’t; it’s in my contract with the Orioles, along with prohibitions against skydiving and skiing and a lot of other activities—but if I did, Fred would be my mechanic, and not just because he’s my brother.
I don’t guess every high school student gets into soccer brawls that cancel games, but for the most part my high school years were normal and even boring. I was less rowdy than a lot of the guys, although the soccer fight did mark the beginning of a somewhat more aggressive posture. Before that, I hadn’t been much of a risk-taker at all. For one thing, I matured late physically. One reason I quit basketball after one season was that the uniform revealed my lack of underarm and chest hair. And if I was on the “skins” team in practice, that was even worse. At the time, I came up with a lot of reasons for playing winter soccer instead—including the fact that I was a better soccer player anyway—but my embarrassment was a big factor. (Football wasn’t an option. The uniform covered everything up, but my mother didn’t approve of football for any of her sons. She used the fact that we often missed the first week or two of classes in September as a reason that we shouldn’t play, but mainly she just didn’t want us out there.)
I wasn’t likely to go up to a girl to ask for a date, although I ended up with my share of dates, one way or the other. I was a typically awkward adolescent. Just look at the picture of me on my way to the senior prom! (On the other hand, there’s a second story behind that picture: I ended up going to our prom with my best friend’s girlfriend, and he ended up going with mine. I’m not sure why that happened, but I know we couldn’t even go out for dinner beforehand or afterward, because there would have been too much friction.)
I was an Honor Roll student. Math was my best subject, I was always in classes with older kids, and I probably would have studied it in college, although with what career in mind? I don’t know. For me, the great thing about math was that there was always a right answer. I could see the right answer. Geometry threw me off at first, but then I caught on. For trigonometry and Algebra III my junior year, we had a really good teacher who liked to challenge us with one tough homework problem every night. Early in the semester, the same girl was getting the right answer day after day. She was the only one holding up her hand, but one class the teacher practically said that even she wouldn’t be able to solve the next problem. I guess I had less homework than usual that night, and I accepted the challenge. I worked for hours, studied all the books, walked away for a few minutes, came back and studied some more. I was really grinding, and slowly but surely I put it together. At 1 a.m. I wanted to shout when I finally got it right, but I couldn’t, because everyone else was asleep.
The next day, I was pretty confident I’d be the only one with the answer. Sure enough, when our teacher asked who’d solved the problem, I looked over at the girl, who did not raise her hand. The teacher looked at her, too, naturally, and just as he was about to go to the blackboard to give us the answer, I raised my hand. Sure he was surprised. My equations took the entire front blackboard and part of the smaller one on the side wall. It was a great moment for me.
On the baseball field, it was also exciting when the scouts were in the stands. I knew they probably were looking at me, because Aberdeen was not exactly a hotbed for pro scouts. Mike Gustave was the only player who’d ever been drafted out of my high school. That had been in 1974, the year before I made the team as a freshman. When I was drafted four years later Mike was pitching in the minor leagues in the Twins organization, but he never made the majors.
At least one scout talked about bringing in a cross-checker—a supervisor—to come in and take a look at me. Someone said I might even go in the first round of the draft. One observer who wasn’t impressed by what he saw of me as pitcher or shortstop was Walter Youse, longtime scout for the Orioles, Angels, and Brewers. This was ironic, because one of Youse’s first scouting assignments many years earlier had been to check on the young catcher Calvin Ripken out of Aberdeen, Maryland—my father, who was signed by the Orioles on Youse’s recommendation.
Everyone knew that I’d decided to try pro ball rather than take the college route. I was a good student, but my father believes that professional baseball is the best place to develop professional baseball players. I agreed (and still agree). I had an all-consuming drive to get to the majors, and the quickest way to achieve that was to go straight into the pros. I told my coach I wasn’t going to college, and I never solicited colleges’ attention, although a few letters and queries came through anyway. West Point was interested in me as a soccer player; my mother liked to think they were interested in my academics as well.
I first caught the attention of the scouts on the basis of some strong pitching performances my junior year, and for two seasons it seemed to me that they always came to watch when I pitched, which was every other game. A few did see me play shortstop, and they saw me hit, but most thought of me as a pitcher. This bothered me a little. I had a good fastball—eighty-seven miles per hour, according to one clocking—and a 7-2 record with a .79 ERA my senior year, but I also hit .496 and led the team in hits and RBIs—set the school record, in fact—and played a good shortstop as well. I had reasonable speed. In soccer, I was even considered fast, and playing baseball for Putty Hill I had 21 steals in 22 attempts, and the one time I was out I didn’t slide.
Officially, the Orioles had me penciled in as a pitcher-shortstop. Tom Giordano, the scouting director, was thinking of me mainly as a pitcher, but Dick Bowie, the scout, thought I could play every day, and he thought this even more after giving me a private workout at Memorial Stadium in which I hit the ball hard and fielded well. Earl Weaver had also seen me hit some balls in Memorial Stadium, and I heard he was interested in me as a regular player because I had some pop in my bat. When my large size as a shortstop became an issue in Baltimore years later, people thought this disagreement had started before I’d even signed with the team. But I don’t think my size was a factor at all back then. I was about six-foot-two, maybe a little taller, and I weighed about 185 pounds. No one knew I’d end up two inches taller and thirty-five pounds heavier.
I told everyone who asked that I’d play anywhere, but I preferred shortstop. So did Dad. Probably a majority of the players on every major league roster pitched in high school, mainly because they were the best athletes, so Dad accepted the fact that I was considered a pitcher, too. However, and speaking as the teacher–evaluator–organization man he was, he explained that if I started as an everyday player but didn’t make the grade, I could always go back after a couple of years and try to succeed as a pitcher. But if I started as a pitcher and didn’t make it, I was probably out of professional baseball. You can lay off from pitching if you maintain your basic arm strength, but you can’t lay off from hitting because there’s no substitute for hitting. Facing minor league pitching after four or five years of no hitting at all since high school is really difficult. Numerous big league pitchers have played other positions until they were in their twenties—in 1995, Nerio Rodriguez was a catcher in the Orioles organization; the following year he pitched a few innings for us in the big leagues—but I can’t think of one player in recent decades who pitched until he was twenty-one or twenty-two and then converted to the field. Michael Jordan’s minor league career is instructive on this point. I’m amazed Michael was able to hit even .200 against good Double-A pitching. That’s a tribute to his natural talent. I don’t think there’s any question that the only reason he wasn’t able to hit a lot higher was the lost years. Of course, Babe Ruth was initially a pitcher, but that was seventy-five years ago, another era, and no analogy at all. He was a hitter all along. In 1918, Ruth was 13-7 as a starting pitcher with Boston while also leading the majors in home runs, with 11.
Dad wasn’t pressuring me about playing a position. He just pointed out the facts and then asked, “What do you want to do?” I took his advice at face value. I wanted to play every day, not so much because I could return to pitching, but because I liked the action. I wanted to be in the lineup. Pitching is great when you’re pitching. You’re in total control, and there’s no better feeling. In high school ball, you pitch or play your position in the field every other game, but in the pros, you start every fifth game. What do you do on the other four days? As a reliever, you pitch more often but fewer innings. And I’m not just making this point now that I’ve played 2,300-plus consecutive games. I already felt that way when I was seventeen years old.
By the way, and for the record, I think I’d have had a good shot at being a major league pitcher, if not “The Best Pitcher You Never Saw,” as the headlines sometimes read years later. I had a good fastball, a very good curve, a slider, and a pretty effective change-up taught me by George Bamberger, the O’s pitching coach at the time. And I had command of these pitches. Size doesn’t always translate into power, but I’ve got to believe that all the size I put on after I became a pro, combined with greater arm strength, would have translated into a little more speed on the fastball. I probably could’ve broken ninety.
My senior year, the Aberdeen High School Eagles played for the Class-A state championship about a week before the June draft. I was tired and pitching on one day’s rest and I wasn’t sharp, and in the fourth inning we were losing 3–1, and the opposing bench jockeys were razzing me about my prospects in the draft. Then I saw the storm clouds rolling in. Like in the majors, high school rules require five innings for an official game, so I stalled by throwing over to first base. I wasn’t counting, but our manager, George Connolly, told everyone I threw over nine times. Anyway, the rain arrived and saved the day. In the make-up game, I was rested and strong, struck out seventeen, threw a two-hitter, and the Eagles were the state champions. The bench jockeys didn’t have much to say that day.
I didn’t know how the Orioles plotted their draft choices, and I didn’t really care. I didn’t judge the draft as a contest between me and some guys in California or Texas. I thought I’d go pretty high, and I didn’t know what the Orioles’ priorities were, nor did I know they’d end up with four picks in the second round. Deep inside, I wanted to be drafted by the O’s, but any organization would have been okay. There are no guarantees; with trades and everything, you don’t know where you’re going to end up anyway. You just need a starting point, and that’s what the draft is. So I drove off for school the morning of the draft not knowing where I’d be playing baseball one month later. Dad was in California with the team. I can’t report a lot of details about the big day because it’s not one of those indelible moments—in fact, I’ve almost forgotten it. I think someone from the office brought me the news at school, but I don’t really remember. My mother came to school but never found me. In any event, the Orioles drafted me as their third pick of the second round, the forty-eighth selection overall. Bob Horner out of Arizona State was the first pick in the nation. The Orioles took third baseman Bob Boyce in the first round, then Larry Sheets and Ed Hook ahead of me in the second round. The organization had those four second-round picks because three had been awarded in compensation for losing players to free agency for 1977. If Baltimore hadn’t had those picks, another organization might have taken me, and I’d probably be playing somewhere else today.
We didn’t have a big dinner that night, or any other celebration. When Dad returned home from his road trip, he conveyed his pride with a handshake and a look and a certain pat on the back. When we gathered at home to sign the contract, the Harford County Aegis was on hand to record the event. My signing bonus would be paid in two equal installments; I put the first $10,000 in the bank that same day. I was a professional ballplayer, with plans to give the game five or six years. If that career didn’t pan out, I’d enroll in college as a twenty-five-year-old. In fact, my signing agreement with the Orioles included a full four-year scholarship to the school of my choice, if things didn’t work out on the field.
Has the statute of limitations run out on that clause?