When I was a kid, I loved to win, so much so that I would even bend the rules a bit to ensure a victory. I even cheated at the card game canasta against my grandmother, who was losing her eyesight. Because she couldn’t see well, I could draw more cards from the deck than I was supposed to on my turn, but instead of feeling good, the victory felt sort of empty.
Somewhere along the line, I realized that all I was proving to myself was that I was good at cheating. I wanted to be good at playing the games. Playing fairly, within the rules, I could find out if I was really good. So instead of breaking the rules, the rules became my best friends.
Now, I didn’t come to this epiphany all by myself. It might make a really nice story, but it wouldn’t be true. The truth is, my parents were rule followers. In our house, there was always a right way (and a wrong way) of doing things, even down to board games, which we played a lot. We were constantly looking up the rules on the inside of the box lid to make sure we were playing the game right. I can still conjure up a mental picture of my dad looking up the official rules of Major League Baseball, just like checking out whether you have to charge rent when someone lands on your property in Monopoly. Knowing the rules so you could win by the rules was important.
My father, Cal Sr., played by the rules, practiced the rules, and instilled the rules in me and my brothers and all the players he coached. To him, playing fair wasn’t an option or choice; it was what you did, plain and simple. He didn’t give us lectures, but he constantly reminded us, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.” He lived that way, so we did, too. If he saw me or my brothers doing something that wasn’t right—say, trying to take a shortcut in our chores—he would point it out: “Cal, you just don’t do that.” There was no long discussion; there were no loopholes or excuses. “You just don’t do that.” My mom was the same. We never questioned it because it just was the way things worked. Maybe some people can look the other way when they or their kids do something wrong, especially if it’s “just this once” or “to win the game.” Not Cal Sr. or Vi Ripken. Every time we did a job or chore, my mom or dad would inspect it, and when we did it the right way, they’d say so: “Nice job. You should feel good about it.”
Many years earlier, the phrase “the Oriole way” had become the embodiment of the team’s attitude and behavior, and that way of doing things extended to our house. It was the way we lived at home—“The Ripken way”—and I still practice it, and we try to pass it on at Ripken Baseball today.
Why play fair, by the rules? Playing fair doesn’t guarantee winning. Should you do it because other people tell you to? Maybe, but other people’s values aren’t necessarily yours. Should you do it because you’re setting a good example? Sure, that’s a good by-product of playing fair, but it’s not the only reason. I play fair—by the rules—because it’s important to me. When I look in the mirror, I can feel good about what I’ve done. It means that when you win, you’ll know it was the best win you could have; you’ve earned it. There can be no footnotes or asterisks next to those wins. The more you develop a respect for the rules, and the more you compete, the more your sense of fairness evolves. No set of rules can cover everything, however, and it’s in the gray areas where your own values have to come into play.
In baseball (and other games) you can play by the official rules and, to me, still not be playing fair. Take the hidden-ball trick. It’s probably been around since the invention of the game. There are lots of variations, but here’s one way it works: Say a batter hits the ball deep to left field. He takes off, rounds first, and heads for second as the left fielder throws the ball to the second baseman. The second baseman catches it, but not before the batter has completed a stand-up double. Now, instead of tossing the ball back to the pitcher for the next batter, the second baseman pretends to throw it back but instead hides it in his glove. The pitcher pretends to catch it. The pitcher stands behind the rubber, rubbing the imaginary ball, giving the runner a false sense of security that he can take a lead off the bag. At that point, as soon as the runner steps off the base, the second baseman tags him out.
The hidden-ball trick can be done at any base, and it’s perfectly legal according to the rules of Major League Baseball. But I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea that it’s hidden or that it’s a trick. I don’t like the idea of acting out a make-believe skit to fool the opponent. It’s not fair by my rules. My dad always told me there was no place in professional baseball for the hidden-ball trick, so that’s that. Some of my old teammates would disagree, but to me, it wasn’t part of the game. One time one of my teammates was working the trick and gave me the “shush” sign to keep it to myself. Instead, I walked right up to the runner and said, “The second baseman has the ball. Stay on the bag.” I don’t know if the runner believed me or thought it was another part of the trick.
Not only is it bush league to me, but also it works only once, and then you get a reputation for being the guy not to trust. That’s not how I want to be looked at; I don’t want to be the guy who fools the other guy. I want to beat him, but I don’t want to do it by fooling him. By not doing the trick, I found I developed trust and respect from my opponents. Sometimes, I’ve even gotten helpful information from the other team, maybe because they could trust me.
What about stealing signs? Most people in baseball think it’s OK for a base runner to relay the catcher’s signs to the hitter. It’s considered OK by the rules, not because the rules say it’s legal, but because the rules don’t address it. It’s definitely not OK by my rules, for a lot of reasons. My basic disagreement is that it fundamentally changes the spirit of competition, because instead of it being a fair battle of batter versus pitcher, it gives the batter an unfair edge. In my rules, the pitcher and batter are in a duel. Whatever one can learn from the other is fine, but interceding to help one of them is not fine.
A couple of years ago, I was in New York on business with my team. We finished our meetings early, and my CEO at Ripken Baseball suggested we stop by and meet Aryeh Bourkoff, the founder of the investment banking firm Lion Tree. Aryeh had grown up in Baltimore. I hadn’t known that, but I found out almost the moment I walked in. Aryeh opened his desk drawer, pulled out an old photograph of the two of us from when he was ten years old, and told me the story behind it.
The Orioles used to put together a traveling basketball team made up of our players, and we were sent out to play against faculty, alums, or players they’d recruit at local high schools, clubs, and organizations as part of a community-relations tour. Sometimes we’d mostly entertain, as in a Harlem Globetrotters exhibition, but sometimes the games were highly competitive. The Orioles and the school would publicize the event, and pretty large crowds would show. It was a good way to build a bond with our hometown fans, an opportunity to sign autographs and create grassroots support for the team. Most of the fans were polite, but sometimes it could get a little crazy when we would sign autographs. It turned out that Aryeh was at one of those games, but being a little guy of ten, maybe four and half feet tall, he practically got run over by bigger fans. After I’d signed a bunch of autographs, I was backing my way off the floor for the second half, trying to escape. Almost out the door, I heard a voice say, “Could you just let him take a picture with you?” It was Aryeh’s mother, not shoving, not pushing, not waving a pen at me, just asking nicely. I looked down and found this little guy, and I knelt next to him while his mother snapped a picture. Aryeh was forty years old as he told me the story, but he said he’d kept that photo with him ever since he was a kid. He said it reminded him about doing the right thing, just because it’s right.
When I met him in New York, he was busy building his digital media business, and he thought of possibly working with me in creating content for platforms like YouTube or podcasts, programs for parents and kids on the values of hard work, perseverance, and fair play. Whenever he tells the story of the photo with me, it connects with people. Who knows where it will lead, but I like to think that it shows that fairness can have nice rewards, even if they come thirty-some years later.
Today my company has baseball complexes, called the Ripken Experience, in Aberdeen, Maryland; Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, with some others on the drawing board. The facilities have multiple fields, regulation-size diamonds, and youth diamonds, each named after historic ballparks and each with state-of-the-art synthetic playing surfaces, training rooms, pitching mounds, batting cages, practice fields, two-day, three-day, and weeklong tournaments, plus hotel and recreation, everything to make the visit great for the kids in the program and for everyone in a family. They’re all based on the ideals we believe in, practice, and teach.
Is that how all this “playing fair” stuff paid off? Well, not right away. Let me explain how we got here.
In 1995, the Major League Baseball Players Association Union got together and gave me a $75,000 gift, in honor of my breaking the consecutive-game record, to help me build a youth field in my hometown, a “field of dreams.” I was humbled by that gift, but when I tried to spend it, I realized you can’t build a lot of dreams on $75,000. I started thinking about how we could leverage the seed money to build something bigger, maybe four fields, a real complex, a place where my brother Billy and I could bring back some of the lessons my dad had taught in his baseball school.
Like most things in life, it was a lot easier said than done. First we pursued a deal to acquire independent (non-MLB-affiliated) minor-league teams, but that didn’t work out. Then we were asked to bid on USA Baseball’s possible move to Aberdeen. We pitched hard, developed great ideas, shared them openly, but lost out to another bidder. Then we had a chance for the contract to build the complex for USA Baseball at their new home in Durham, North Carolina—more good ideas shared but another setback and more disappointment. After that, once we were finally getting our footing with our Aberdeen complex, we were given the opportunity to partner with the key folks at the summer resort of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. And we won! Myrtle Beach became the first Ripken complex beyond Aberdeen, and the prototype for an entire business model. We had lost a lot of things along the way—our first minor-league partner, the USA Baseball headquarters, a USA Baseball design competition, and a lot of good of ideas, too. But we played fair throughout, and in the end we won. We won by learning, by refining our ideas, by making Aberdeen better, and then Myrtle Beach, and then Pigeon Forge, and hopefully every complex we build in the future. Does it always work that way? Of course not—but when it does, it feels great.
A lot of people in baseball think the only good trade is one in which you get a good ballplayer and pawn a worse player off on the other team. If you must trade a good player to get a good player, the common wisdom is that you don’t make that trade in your own division. The Red Sox don’t want to make the Yankees stronger and then play the Yankees, for instance.
I disagree. I think that’s not only not fair; it’s dumb. I learned the way the Orioles always did it, from before the time I played until well after. I say the best trades happen when both sides get someone they want and need. If we had a first baseman with promise, who wasn’t going to play much with us because we had a Hall of Famer like Eddie Murray already in that position, it would be best for us to trade the promising guy for another good guy we need, say an outfielder or relief pitcher. This would potentially make both teams stronger. When there’s relative parity in a trade, a number of things accrue. The two teams tend to trust each other and might want to make further deals, and the games between the teams then come down to how well each club plays, not just one player or another. On the flip side, stick the other team with a loser, and they’ll never want to make another deal with you, or they’ll be waiting for the time they can stick you with a stiff. It’s the hidden-ball trick of baseball trading; it’s not fair, and in fact, it’s kinda dumb.
Trades good for both sides are not only the Orioles’ way. Ask Mark Shapiro. When he ran the Cleveland Indians, he always believed in trades that were good for both sides. (He grew up a Baltimore fan, so maybe the Oriole way rubbed off on him.) “Your goal in doing trades is to have them be a win-win,” Shapiro says. He engineered the controversial trade, halfway through the 2002 season, of two Cleveland pitchers, minor-league player of the year Tim Lee and All Star Bartolo Colón. They went to the Montreal Expos in exchange for some relatively unknown prospects and first baseman Lee Stevens. Among the unknowns were pitcher Cliff Lee, who went on to average 15 wins a season for the next three years and win the Cy Young award in 2008; center fielder Grady Sizemore, who became the Indians’ leadoff batter and an All Star averaging 25 home runs and 78 RBIs; and Brandon Phillips, who didn’t get much of a chance in Cleveland but went to the Reds, where he averaged 21 homers and 81 RBIs. Proof that it was a win-win was Colón’s finishing the season with 20 wins and later being named a Cy Young winner. Shapiro explains it this way: “You want the player you send to the other team to provide them with what they want. You’re not looking to steal players and win trades. You like trades to be a foundation for a future trade.” Shapiro moved to the Toronto Blue Jays, practicing the same philosophy. Then the Blue Jays faced his former team, the Indians, in the 2016 baseball playoffs. The Indians won the American League pennant, not because they’d gotten the better of other clubs in trades but because their total team—all players, all coaches—beat another very good total team.
That’s fair.
Everybody drives over the speed limit.
Everybody cheats a little on income taxes.
Everybody tells “little white lies.”
Everybody says the traffic was bad when they’re late.
Everybody tastes the grapes in the grocery store before buying them.
Lots of people “forget” to count all their shots on the golf course.
Lots of people promise to call you back and then don’t.
Lots of people find wallets and don’t return them.
Lots of people cut in lines.
Some people park in loading zones.
Some people bump your car and don’t leave a note.
Some people steal towels from hotels.
Some people rob banks.
Where’s the line between what everybody does and what no one should do? Is “everybody does it” just an excuse for doing the wrong thing? I’m not perfect. I do some of these things, but I do try to do the right thing. There are no fairness police—just ourselves and our sense of what’s right and wrong.
When I was a kid, my dad didn’t do the grocery shopping often, but when he did, sometimes I’d go with him and sit up in the little seat in the cart. First thing he did was go down the candy aisle and grab a box of chocolate-covered peanuts; we ate them while shopping. By the time we’d finished, we’d have eaten the whole box. I thought, uh-oh, this is wrong. Then, at the checkout, he’d show the empty box to the cashier so she or he could add it to the bill. He was his own fairness cop.
Until a few years ago, some batters were known to “cork” their bats—bore out the core of the bat and fill it with cork. Supposedly, corking had a “trampoline effect,” so the batter could swing faster, and the ball would go farther. Later, MythBusters, the Discovery Channel television show, proved that corked bats are somewhat lighter but actually transfer less force to the ball, so they don’t really do anything.
The use of pine tar was also popular, first on the handle to get a surer grip on the bat, which was perfectly legal, but later on the barrel of the bat, which was not. Some people believed it would not only give you a better grip but would make for better contact with the ball. No one ever proved pine tar worked, either for grip or contact.
Then there are spitters. Pitchers have been using the spitball for decades, and it can work. If you get enough slippery substance on the ball, it shoots out of the pitcher’s hand without the same spin as a regular pitch, so it drops like a sinker—making it harder to hit. At one time, spitters were legal, or at least tolerated. But since then, the game cracked down on them and enforced the rules. Then the challenge became finding ways to get away with the spitter. The definition of a spitter has come to include a pitch with almost any substance to make the ball slippery. Yankee pitcher Whitey Ford created what he called a “gunk” by combing a weird bunch of things—baby oil, resin, and turpentine—and then applying it to the baseball from an old underarm deodorant dispenser. There is some evidence that Yogi Berra once used Ford’s concoction on his armpits, thinking it was actual deodorant. Another favorite lubricant is hair gel. Gaylord Perry wrote a book called Me and the Spitter, in which he fessed up to his techniques: hiding Vaseline on his hat brim or in his glove or having dry soap on his pants that he could rub with his sweaty palms to make a slippery coating. Should Perry and Ford get credit for being creative by using any weapon they could get away with? The answer, to me, is simple: Spitballs can give the pitcher an unfair edge over the hitter. Unfair, whether it’s creative or not, is still unfair.
Even more effective (but more obvious) than the spitter is cutting the ball. Some pitchers will surreptitiously make small cuts in the ball with a razor, push pin, or even sandpaper. When the ball is thrown, the air currents hit the uneven surface and it moves left, right, up, or down, depending on where the cut is. It’s a lot harder to sneak a sharp object into the game than a wad of hair goo, but people have still tried. Several sportswriters cite stories of Whitey Ford, in search of another edge, using the rim of his wedding ring to cut the ball. Supposedly, catcher Elston Howard scratched the ball by rubbing it across his shin guard buckle.
For Rick Honeycutt, veteran pitcher for several big-league teams, a favorite method was a thumbtack taped to his finger. Unfortunately it made for another legendary story. After opposing Mariner Willie Wilson hit a double, he noticed Honeycutt’s tack when he stood on second base. Wilson alerted the umpires, who came to check it out. In the meantime, Honeycutt had inadvertently rubbed his own forehead with the thumbtack and opened a big cut that bled down his face, so the umpire’s “investigation” was pretty short. Honeycutt was suspended and fined (and became the butt of a lot of jokes).
Yankee pitcher Tim Leary, facing the Orioles, used a small piece of sandpaper. When the ump came to investigate, he put the sandpaper in his mouth, leading to a league review of the game broadcast tapes—and endless jokes about smooth tongues and sore throats. Leary was warned but got away with it, at least that time.
You have to wonder, if people put as much effort into trying to win fair as they do into cheating, wouldn’t they be more successful at baseball?
Legal and fair are not the same. Legal is supposed to be pretty clear. There’s a rule that says you can or can’t do something. You are forbidden to drive the wrong way down a one-way street or drink if you’re underage.
I’m a big fan of sports, not just baseball, so I tend to apply my outlook—fair versus legal—to every game I follow. You can’t throw a pitch at a batter. You can’t trip an opponent on the basketball court or hold one on the football field. So you don’t. Or do you?
Like a lot of people, I watched the 2017 College Football National Championship game. With two minutes left, Clemson was down by three points to Alabama. Clemson quarterback Deshaun Watson led the team down the field to the Alabama 26-yard line, first down with twenty seconds on the clock. He completed a pass to Jordan Leggett to the 9-yard line for another first down, with fourteen seconds left. The next pass was incomplete; it was now down to nine seconds. On second down, the pass was also incomplete but an interference call put the ball at the 2-yard line and gave Clemson another first down. With six seconds left, Watson rolled out and found Hunter Renfrow in the end zone for a touchdown, and that plus the extra point put Clemson up 35–31, one of the great upsets of college football. Alabama did everything they could to stop Clemson. Or did they?
The next day, Mike Golic and Mike Greenberg, the ESPN commentators of the Mike & Mike show, dissected the game and came up with an alternate strategy. Why didn’t Alabama intentionally hold as many Clemson players as they could, drawing a penalty but running the clock down to one second? Because the game can’t end on a defensive penalty, their worst-case scenario would have been a tie and overtime. Alabama could have purposely taken the penalty and still have had a chance to win, because the game allows a team to break the rules and accept the consequences. They didn’t. Alabama didn’t break the rules or incur a penalty, and they lost. Did Alabama do the right thing by not committing a penalty? Fairness is sometimes not so clear-cut.
What’s fair or unfair about getting into another person’s head or under his skin? Is psyching somebody out OK? You’re not holding or tripping or throwing spitballs, after all. You’re just talking or teasing or giving a funny look. You’re planting seeds of doubt or playing on a fear or weakness. There are no rules against it. When I retired, I found myself a guest at a dinner at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump’s golf resort in Florida. Trump was there, too. We had met before. I didn’t know him well, but eventually we got to chatting. We talked a little about my career in baseball, life after baseball, and how I was enjoying my stay at the resort, and then he asked if I was a golfer. I told him that now that I was retired from baseball, I was getting out on the golf course more often. He asked me if I was any good. I said, “I’m getting better.”
Then he said, “I’d like to take your money on the golf course.”
I was a little surprised by this and said, “Well, you must be pretty good.”
“There are golfers that are better,” he said, “but I have it right here,” pointing to his head. To him, psyching out an opponent on the golf course was part of the game.
I didn’t want to be a contrarian, but I did find myself saying, “I like to think, if I win, it’s because I’m the better player.” I don’t want to win just because I’m better at psyching out my opponent. Donald Trump and I agreed to disagree.
In baseball, I could have tried to mess with every player who got to second base, but I didn’t do it. Trash talking in sports in general is common, and in the NBA, it’s practically an art form. Michael Jordan is famous for using it off the court, too. When he plays golf, the story goes, when an opponent asks him, “What are we betting?” Jordan answers, “Anything that will make you nervous.” This is not a criticism of Donald Trump or the great Michael Jordan. Clearly both have been successful with this approach. It is simply not mine.
The Donald Trump encounter reminded me of a time when I was on the other side of getting psyched out, though I’m not sure it was intentional.
In 1984, I was on a hitting streak. One day we were playing the Angels, and Ruppert Jones hit a double. When he was on second base, Ruppert said, “Cal, you look good with your hands away from your body. You’re red-hot at the plate these days. Keep swinging it.” That stuck in my head. I started thinking, that must be it—I’m holding the bat a little farther away from my body, and it’s working, so I should make sure I do it all the time.
I hardly need to tell you what happened. My next at bat, I didn’t get on base, and I immediately went into a slump. Did Ruppert Jones say it on purpose to get in my head? Or was he just giving me a compliment that I overanalyzed? I’ll probably never know, but something changed, for sure.
Playing head games is not the way I want to win. I prefer to earn the W by how I play.
Sometimes head games can get personal, as when they’re directed at someone else’s head, someone you care about.
When my son Ryan was about eleven, he played on a travel baseball team, the Baltimore Buzz. It was tough for him in some ways, having the Ripken name. He struggled at first, and always had other players and parents watching him and expecting him to be a certain kind of player because of his name. At that age, he was smaller than a lot of the other players, so he sometimes struggled just to get in the game. Sometimes he’d trudge back to the bench crying or come home upset, but he hung in, didn’t quit, and eventually became a pretty decent pitcher—not fast, but with good control. His travel team had made it to the finals of a tournament in Minnesota, playing a tough team from Florida, and I went out for the game. Ryan was pitching, and he was holding his own, pitching against another kid who was bigger and had a real fastball, especially for his age. In the stands, I could pick up on some chatter, “Is that him? Let’s see if he’s any good.” I felt bad for Ryan but tried to tune it out. If he could, I could.
Midway through the game, the opposing coach stopped the game and went to the umpire, who then called Ryan’s coach over. They were huddling about something, so I went over and stood on the other side of the fence, listening. The other coach was complaining that Ryan’s motion of raising his front foot up in his windup, then replanting it as he threw, was a balk. Ryan’s coach said it wasn’t a balk, but the ump wasn’t sure. I couldn’t help myself and said, “You’re nitpicking the rules. That’s just his motion. It makes no difference in the game. Let the kids play baseball.” The other team’s coach looked at me and asked, “Hey, are you a coach?” I replied sarcastically, “No, are you a coach?”—my meaning pretty clearly being that he wasn’t setting much of an example for kids. Why should a grown man try to get in the head of an eleven-year-old? Is that the way to teach kids to play? Ryan’s coach spoke to him, explained it very carefully, and to Ryan’s credit, he adjusted his motion and finished the game. My sense of fairness was simple: Let the kids’ play determine the outcome; don’t let a technicality affect the game.
By the way, Ryan’s team won.
There are lots of ways of intimidating the other team—planting stories in the media, on- and off-the-field taunts, illegal hits during and after plays. In baseball, one of the most common ways to get in the heads of the other side is literally by way of the head: the pitcher intentionally throwing at the batter. Just the idea that it might happen can create tension, for the batter and for the whole team. It’s human nature to do something—defensive or aggressive—when you sense you’re facing a “headhunter.” You might back off the plate, anticipating the brushback, and be vulnerable to an outside strike. You might think, Hey, I’m not gonna let this guy get to me, crowd the plate, daring the pitcher to throw inside, and then get drilled by a high, tight pitch.
The dustoff, brushback, knockdown, plunker, clunker, headhunter, beanball, and “wild pitch” have been used since the beginning of the game. It’s a tactic that is the opposite of fair and one I personally hate, but it’s a reality in the game and has been for a long time: Walter Johnson, the all-time leader in the modern era in hitting batters at 205; Sal Maglie, known as “the Barber” for the close shaves he gave hitters; Pedro Martinez, known as Plunk, who was thrown out of twelve games in one year for headhunting; Juan Marichal, whose behavior started more than one brawl; Roger Clemens, who threw a brushback pitch at his own son in spring training; Don Drysdale, who was infamous for throwing not one but two knockdown pitches so the batter would know the first wasn’t a mistake; and Bob Gibson, who wrote in his autobiography that he threw the nine pitches: “two different fastballs, two sliders, a curve, changeup, knockdown, brushback,” and one he actually called “a hit batsman.” Then there was Early Wynn, who pitched in the 1950s, and who supposedly said he’d throw at his own grandmother because, he said, “My grandma could really hit the curveball.”
I didn’t try to get into anybody’s head. I wouldn’t use the hidden-ball trick. I wouldn’t steal the catcher’s signs and relay them to batters.
Looking back, though, I realize I did something else that’s in the gray area.
When you take a full swing and hit down on the ball, it sometimes hits you in the foot. That’s a foul ball. But if you hit down and it doesn’t hit your foot, it’s a ground ball, which most likely turns into a dribbler, and you’re probably going to get thrown out. There were times when the ball hit my foot and the umpire didn’t call it, and there were also times when the ball didn’t hit my foot, but I acted as if it had, wincing and shouting, “Ow!” I guess I rationalized that the umps had missed a few of those calls so I’d get a few in return. Was it wrong or was it gray?
Back then, they didn’t have the technology of instant replay to show what really happened. Speaking of technology, there’s a flip side to what it can do to monitor what’s fair. It can also be used to play unfairly. Late in the 2017 season, the Boston Red Sox were found to be using an Apple Watch to relay the Yankee catcher’s signs from a video booth to the dugout and from the dugout to the Red Sox batters. Stealing signs isn’t against the MLB rules, but the use of electronic communication during the game is.
For me, playing fair isn’t just what you can get away with; it’s what your own standard of fair is. No matter how much you think you’ve got “fair” figured out, you have to keep reevaluating for new situations, new technology, and new challenges—forever.
In the end, we each have to find our own values, backed by our own reasons, to arrive at what’s fair. Going back to my roots—what was ingrained in me as a kid—is the way I judge fair versus unfair. I remember the lessons my dad and mom taught us. Fairness was practically in the very air we breathed.
Every spring my dad, as an Orioles coach, had the job of driving the Orioles station wagon, with a trailer hitched to the back, loaded with all the baseball gear, from Maryland to Florida for spring training. We had a ritual the day before he left: my brothers, my dad, and I would clean the car. Dad was proud of his job and took pride in the fact that his official team car would be in good shape for the annual trip.
However, one particular year, the day before the trip, Dad came home from the Orioles’ offices and was beat. He fell into a chair in the den, practically dead to the world. I asked him if we were going to clean the station wagon, and he said that it was probably clean enough.
Leaving him to rest, I went down to the garage and just started wiping down the seats, vacuuming the carpeting, and cleaning the windshield. At my size, it was all I could do to reach the top of the windshield. I heard the door to the garage open and there was my dad, not saying a word, but smiling.
I did it when no one was watching. I was only eight, but the sense of responsibility that he taught me has stayed with me to this day.