Money is fine—there’s no question that more is better than less. But I decided long ago, back when I didn’t have much, that I wasn’t going to let money be a measure of my happiness. I wasn’t going to let money be an end in itself.
My dad was happy because he was lucky enough to make a living—even if it wasn’t a lot—in baseball his whole life. He didn’t want to go to an office or knock on doors; he wanted to teach young guys how to make a squeeze play or field a two-hopper, to come home sweaty and do it all again the next day. (The story goes that when Cal Sr. signed his first contract with the Orioles, he didn’t have a pen with him to sign it and had to borrow one from a fan.) Like my dad, I can honestly say I was happy in minor-league ball. Sure, I wanted to move up, but day-to-day I was doing what I wanted, playing baseball for a living, and that was all I wanted back then.
I think you should define your own success, on your terms, or else there will just never be enough money. If you do that, you can be “rich” in the most important way—your own happiness. I try to remind myself of what’s important (and what’s not), and mostly, I try to do what makes me happy. No one has the same definition of happiness, but it’s crucial that you know what your definition is. I’ve been very fortunate to make a good living, but I got to do it by doing pretty much the same things in the majors that I did and loved in the minors—from the rookie league to single A, to AA, to AAA, to the O’s. Playing baseball made me happy.
I grew up around the minor leagues because my dad was a player, and then a coach in the minors for the first fourteen years of my life. Cal Sr. managed the Leesburg, Florida, Orioles in Class D the year after I was born; then he moved to Class B in the Fox River cities of Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. Next he moved up to Class A, first to Aberdeen, South Dakota, and then with the Tri-City Atoms in Kennewick, Washington, and next on to the Miami Marlins. From there he went to Class AA with the New York Pioneers, to Rochester in AAA, to the Dallas–Fort Worth Texas Spurs, and then to the Orioles of Asheville, North Carolina. And my dad worked two or three jobs in the off-season, too. I remember when a lot of kids had these expensive athletic shoes, my mom found a place where she got us three pairs of shoes for $2.99. My dad’s success wasn’t measured in money. It was doing what you wanted to do and hopefully moving up to the next level.
The same went for me as a player in the minor leagues. You weren’t there to make a lot of money; you were there to get to the majors. In the minors, if we wanted a raise, we “negotiated” by writing a letter to the farm director (and usually got turned down). A big raise might be $200 more a month, but it wasn’t about whether we made $800 a month or $1000. No matter what we got, we didn’t have enough to live very well. In Miami, we rented furniture, but we didn’t have enough for a television, so instead we played a lot of cards, sitting on that rented furniture. All-you-can-eat buffets were like gourmet dinners for us; we ate all we could, for sure.
There was a reason for all this. We were there to perfect our baseball skills and make it to the majors. It was our grad school. The fact that we got paid at all was a plus, and the teams knew it. Our bargaining power, on a scale of one to ten, was zero. Even so, we wouldn’t have traded our jobs to be anywhere else (except the major leagues, of course).
When major-league teams start to get serious with you, slick sports agents start coming around to take you out for a steak dinner. They’re well dressed, drive fancy cars, and take you to a restaurant with reservations and real tablecloths. It’s not subtle, but who doesn’t go for a big steak, a baked potato, and a few beers?
Nevertheless, the agent who impressed me the most didn’t buy me a steak dinner. Instead, he set up a meeting at his modest office in a nearby, not very fancy building. We sat around his conference table with tuna sandwiches he’d brought in from a deli. (In fairness, I think I had a choice of tuna or egg salad.) The agent, Ron Shapiro, had represented Orioles third baseman Brooks Robinson and, at that time, eight or ten more Orioles. He started the meeting by saying, “Cal, don’t hire me to get you the richest rookie contract in history. I’m here to work with you to make sure you have a long career, so that at the end of it, you can continue to live well, have a family, and achieve your goals.” No hype. No sizzle. Just substance.
Sold.
Ron’s approach wasn’t for everyone, but it was right for me. I stayed with the Orioles for my whole career, and I stayed with Ron my whole time with the O’s. How did I know at such a young age what mattered and what didn’t? Maybe I was lucky. Maybe it was growing up in baseball. Maybe it was my dad and his values. I like to think I’d grown up with some grounding in reality. Substance, no sizzle.
Maybe I just liked tuna fish.
There’s a minor league for everything.
One of the best lessons in the value of starting at the bottom came from my agent’s son, Mark Shapiro. Like his dad, Mark wanted to go into sports, but he was drawn to the management side. A few years after he graduated from college, he wrote letters to every major-league team’s front office. He didn’t take advantage of his father’s clout for introductions. He just wrote cold-call letters, and he got turned down by every team except one, the Cleveland Indians. What got them interested in him was the offer he made in his letter that he would “do anything at all,” even run errands or get coffee. The Indians took him up on his offer, put him at a desk in the middle of a hallway, and had him do the most menial tasks, picking up players at the airport, poring over their stats, studying up-and-comers, scouting opposing teams, and making sure the coffee machines were full.
Mark didn’t see the work as beneath him or menial. He saw it as his internship, his minor-league break, and he took every opportunity to show his dedication. He did everything they asked and more, getting in early, staying late, and always volunteering. Eventually, he got promoted to a real desk in a real office, and he was moved up again, and again, and again, until one day Mark Shapiro became one of the youngest general managers in the game, leading the Indians’ total rebuilding. Later, he was wooed away to become president of the Toronto Blue Jays. His version of the minors—starting at the bottom—took him to the top of the majors.
After six years in the major leagues, if you haven’t signed a contract for the following season, you can file for free agency, meaning you can accept outside arbitration or shop yourself to another team. It’s an important right, and one that was hard-won by the Players Association. But freedom is a double-edged sword. If you do accept arbitration and win a bigger salary, your current team has to pay you more than they would have, and you may have created an adversarial relationship with the team. If you lose and don’t get an increase, there might be hard feelings between you and your club.
Free agency means you can leave, but it may also mean you will leave. In other words, once you shop the market, your current team could decide they can’t afford you and don’t want to try to match another offer. Then you’re stuck moving to a higher-paying team that you might not want to play for in a city you don’t want to live in.
I decided early on that I wanted to live in Maryland and play for the Orioles, if possible, for my whole career. Was I hurting my negotiating power? Was I leaving money on the table? Maybe, maybe not. However, I had communicated that as a dedicated player, I was part of the worth of the franchise, an asset for the team’s fan base. That, in itself, had a value to the team. And even though my first choice was to stay, I could still leave, when and if my contract expired.
In fact, I once got pretty close to going. After the 1987 season, the Orioles and I were trying to do a multiyear deal, but we couldn’t seem to get it done. About ten minutes before the midnight deadline for free agency, we inked a one-year deal that got me what I wanted for the time being. I could stay with the O’s and retain my free agency option for the following year. As a result, when my father was fired after six games in 1988, I was eligible to be a free agent at the end of the year. Because of the way he was treated, I wasn’t feeling too good about my relationship to the team, and I made no secret of my feelings. Just the possibility that I might file for free agency was enough leverage to help me get a good deal. In August 1988, I signed for three years with an option to extend. That taught me a valuable lesson: sometimes your leverage doesn’t have to be stated. Just the idea that it’s possible to exercise it may carry more power than actually using it.
Here’s another lesson I learned over and over: making a lot of money doesn’t mean you get to determine your own destiny. That isn’t true just in sports. Ask the CEO of a public company, who has to answer to analysts and shareholders or the rock star who has to hide from fans when she goes out for Starbucks.
I never set out to make headlines or break the bank as the highest-paid player in the game or the guy who got the biggest bonus. Control was always more important to me. Playing where I wanted to play, a no-trade clause, even having the right to play basketball in my free time—these things mattered more than mere dollars. Control is especially important in the big leagues, where your life could change any day with a trade, an injury, or another player coming along to take your spot. You can’t control everything, but you can have some say-so. That’s not something money can buy.
I wanted to play close to my hometown and come home to my house after a home game. This was far better than the threat of waking up one day and finding out I’d been traded across the country to join a team that I didn’t want to play for. Longer-term stability and security—even if it meant passing up what might have been more money—and influence on what position I played mattered way more than being the highest-paid shortstop, though I also didn’t want to give up fair market value for any of these things. Of course, a lot of this stuff is up to the manager and the club, but I wanted a voice. I was very happy to take a good, respectable paycheck in return for getting as much control as possible over my life.
Edward Bennett Williams, Orioles owner and a famous trial attorney, was an enormously successful, larger-than-life guy, and he could be very intimidating. In the off-season, the team would ask us to make appearances. I did as many as I could fit in, but at the end of the 1983 season, after we’d won the World Series, I was physically and mentally beat, and I desperately needed to get enough rest to be ready for spring training.
The Orioles publicity department asked me to go down to the Jefferson Hotel in Washington, DC, for an event, and I just felt I was too wiped out and had to decline. The next day, I got a call from EBW. The first thing that impressed me was that he called me directly—no assistant or secretary getting me on the line and saying, “I’ll put Mr. Williams on.” Just EBW saying, “Cal, I know that you’ve gone above and beyond what anyone could expect in promoting the Orioles this off-season, and I understand why you declined our event, but I would look at it as a personal favor to me if you would reconsider. This event is very important to me.”
It became an easy yes. Of course, he was the owner, but he’d also called me personally.
When I arrived at the event, Mr. Williams came right over, welcomed me, and introduced me to everyone. He thanked me for changing my plans and for making the extra effort to be there. Edward Bennett Williams was probably the most important guy in the room, and I was still a young kid hoping to make it in the big leagues, but he treated me with dignity. There was a simple reason why he behaved the way he did; he believed that if you respect people, you treat them correctly.
I never forgot that, and I’ve tried to follow his example. Respect is everything.
In 1992, on my thirty-second birthday, after playing in 1,698 consecutive games, and after almost a year of negotiations, Ron Shapiro made a deal with Orioles president Larry Lucchino for $30.5 million over five years ($32.5 with a post-retirement front-office role). It was reported by the New York Times to be the biggest contract in baseball, edging out Bobby Bonilla’s $29 million deal with the New York Mets. But in case we need more proof that money is not a measurement of success—at least not for long—in the same Times article, it was reported that in the upcoming year, Ryne Sandberg’s deal with the Chicago Cubs would be extended from four to five years and at $31.8 million would be bigger than mine. Then Barry Bonds passed Sandberg, and on and on.
Nevertheless, I was happy. My contract gave me peace of mind, and I needed that. There were no more what-ifs. I wouldn’t be thinking about where I’d be for the next five years. I wouldn’t be preoccupied with free agency. I wouldn’t be feeling that I had a contract expiring. I wouldn’t be shopping for, or even thinking about, another team. I wouldn’t worry that if I had an off-week or month or even season, anything would change. It meant I’d probably play my entire career with one team, the Baltimore Orioles.
Eventually, though, those five years were up, and I negotiated my next three contracts myself.
Ron Shapiro had had a falling out with Orioles owner Peter Angelos over negotiations for another of Shapiro’s clients, Orioles broadcaster Jon Miller. Because I got along well with Peter, both Ron and I felt it was best for me to meet with the owner one-on-one; Ron and I could still get together to discuss strategy. Peter Angelos made his fortune winning huge asbestos settlements from some of the largest companies in the world, and he has a reputation as an aggressive lawyer and tough negotiator. I found that to be the case. He doesn’t give in on a deal easily.
Peter is also fair, however. He recognized the two main things that he and the team wanted from me: one, to continue to play well and produce, and two, to help with attendance. I’d played well over my whole career—the streak got a lot of attention—and it looked as though I had a good shot at the Hall of Fame. He also knew that I wanted two main things: one, to be at home (i.e., in Baltimore); and two, to be paid fairly by the standards of the game at the time. At that stage of my career, I didn’t feel that I had anything to prove, and I didn’t want to think about playing for another team. Mostly I wanted to finish my career where I’d started it and to do so with a good, fair contract in hand, even if it meant leaving some money on the table.
I enjoyed negotiating with Peter. I found him to be candid and straightforward, smart and strategic, fair and reasonable. One thing you could count on was that when he said we had a deal, we had a deal—his word and his handshake were as good as any contract. After two years of dealing directly with him, by the time of my final contract, our meetings were brief. Peter just said, “How about the same as last year?” and I agreed. We’d shake hands, and a couple days later his office sent over the contract, just the way we’d agreed to it. He knew there was more to me than money. And I knew he respected me.
No matter how much you make, somebody will make more. Today’s record-breaking salaries and bonuses will be history before you blink. In 1930, during the Depression, when Babe Ruth wanted $80,000 and a reporter supposedly told Ruth that President Herbert Hoover only made $75,000, Ruth replied, “I know, but I had a better year than Hoover.” In 1980, when Nolan Ryan broke the million-dollar barrier, everybody was sure that was the most you could pay a grown-up for playing kids’ games. In 1997, Albert Belle got $10 million, ten times what Ryan made. Then Alex Rodriguez signed a record-setting ten-year deal worth $275 million, only to be beaten by Giancarlo Stanton’s thirteen-year $325 million contract.
Today those deals are hardly at the top of pro sports. In 2016, NFL quarterback Cam Newton made over $53 million; NBA star LeBron James made $77 million; and Cristiano Ronaldo, soccer player for Real Madrid, totaled $88 million. Then LeBron signed a deal in 2018 with the Lakers for $154 million! In Hollywood, lots of stars make over $100 million from one movie. Businesspeople like Bill Gates of Microsoft, investor Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook are multibillionaires. But their records will all be broken. After all, Zuckerberg wasn’t even on the billionaire list until 2008.
Are some people overpaid? Sure. In the end, though, no one is paid more than the business they’re in can afford, at least not for long. At a dinner party in DC, I heard Jack Kemp, former Buffalo Bills quarterback and later a US senator, say that his own son, a young pro quarterback, was overpaid. Jack himself never made more than $15,500 in the NFL. He was picked up for $1,200 by the AFL Bills and finally, when he became a star, was paid better, at least for those times, but almost nothing by today’s standards. His son was being paid $300,000 to be a backup quarterback, and Jack said, “How can they pay him that much to sit on the bench and wait for the other guy to get hurt?”
I disagreed with Jack and said so. “Your son is one of maybe fifty to sixty players good enough to play pro quarterback. If the starter goes down, the whole game rides on your kid. The game could mean the division championship, the conference, maybe the chance to get to the Super Bowl. Today, the game is big business, bigger than ever. That’s what happens in sports. The dollars keep going up. The owners make more, and the players should make more, too. And plenty of backups have gone on to be stars. He’s worth that and more.” To me, you should get what you’re worth, but you still shouldn’t judge your life by it.
Money is no measure of real accomplishment or happiness. I made more than my dad or the guys in his era, and whoever came after me made more than I did. If you measure your life in money, you’ll always come up short.
When I started thinking ahead to retiring from playing pro ball, I had to think carefully about what I wanted to do with my post-baseball life. One of the options was to be a spokesperson for a company, maybe capitalize on my name and records. I would probably have been paid well for it, too, and even today, I still do speaking engagements and endorsements, but it’s not my full-time career.
I wanted more. I wanted to pass along the lessons I’d learned in sports to young kids—girls and boys—the same lessons I tried to pass along to my own daughter and son. So my brother Bill and I started a business devoted to youth sports. Is it a way to get rich? I don’t know; that’s not why we did it. You’ll probably never see us on Shark Tank or in the Forbes 400, but the job is something I know and understand, and more important, it’s something that needs to be done.
The lessons we aim to instill are simple but timeless: to play fair, to play as a team, to win with grace and lose the same way, and most of all, to do what you like doing, not what someone else tells you to like doing. If, along the way, we help some kids go on to play at the next level and the next, then that’s great—but many won’t. However, we hope all of them will learn the lessons and take them with them through life.
We don’t want kids to come to Ripken Baseball because a parent or a coach told them to, to impress a girl or a boy, or to put something on a college application. If a young person would rather stay indoors and make YouTube videos or build model airplanes, then that’s great. Kids should do what makes them happy. We hope kids come to us because they love baseball, want to get better at it, and want to be around other kids and coaches who love the game. There’s no guarantee anyone is going to have a career in baseball. Do it because you love it.
I know that principle well. I grew up in a family that never had much in the way of luxuries. We didn’t have fancy cars in the driveway. We had one TV, and it didn’t work so well all the time. My dad wanted to be a major-league player, but he didn’t make it that far. Instead, he stuck with the game as a scout, coach, and manager. It was what he loved, so he was happy, and we were happy. Money, or the money we didn’t have, just didn’t matter. Doing what you love and doing it well matters more. That was the family lesson.
When you die, what will you leave your children? Your house, your car, your life savings? Or what you stood for? I hope what my kids get is a collection of values from me and from their mom.
My son is trying to be a major-league ballplayer. So far, he’s played high-school ball in Baltimore; college ball at South Carolina and at Indian River State Junior College; and then in the minor leagues for the Auburn (New York) Doubledays, an affiliate of the Washington Nationals, and for the Aberdeen Ironbirds and DelMarva Shorebirds, both Orioles affiliates in Maryland. He’s a first baseman, and he’s been at it since 2014. Will he make it to the big leagues? It’s hard to say. He’s good, but is he good enough? Some days he asks me if he should keep at it. My answer is, “Do you want to?” If it’s what he wants, he should keep going. Nothing I or his mom—or a coach or a sportswriter looking for copy—says matters.
My daughter is in sports, too, but in a very different role. She’s the Director of Community Outreach in the University of Colorado Athletic Department, working with local organizations, arranging programs with CU athletes and facilities, and building bridges between the community and the school. She tells me she finds it very rewarding. It’s clearly not a way to make a fortune, but she loves Colorado, she loves sports, and she loves working with young people.
I like to think I’ve given my kids some good things and some values, but I also know I gave them something that can at times be perceived as a negative: the name Ripken. For my son, Ryan, it can be particularly tough; it’s not as though there are tons of Ripkens in baseball, and it’s natural, if unfair, to compare him to me.
The name is also tough for my daughter, Rachel. When she was younger, she worked a summer job for Ripken Baseball, and she took it very seriously, partly because that’s who she is but also because she’s rightly very sensitive about her last name. I wasn’t there every day, so it wasn’t as if she were trying to impress Dad. Still, she did everything asked of her and a lot more, working long hours doing the most menial tasks, like washing out Gatorade coolers. I lost track of how many people pulled me aside to tell me she was the hardest worker they’d had all summer. Rachel knew she had to prove her worth beyond her name, and she did so.
I’m told she has the same work ethic out in Boulder, in her outreach work for CU sports. She is very hands-on; she works weekends and late into the evenings. This doesn’t happen because I told her to—but because she knows that she has one shot to prove her worth. I can’t change their names from Ripken, but no matter: she and Ryan are making their way despite the name (and, I hope, a little bit because of it and the values it represents).
My kids are fortunate. They can do what makes them happy because they have the safety net of successful parents. But I hope they would do it anyway. I hope they’d follow the example of their parents, their grandparents, and other role models around them. I hope their real inheritance is doing what makes them happy.