I interviewed him in 2018 as part of the Great Americans series at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Although I am from Baltimore and had, like so many others, long admired his baseball talents, durability, and self-effacing manner, I had not actually met him before the interview. I quickly realized what a terrible mistake that had been on my part. How could one not have figured out a way much earlier to spend time with one of Baltimore’s and baseball’s finest? My failure. But Cal Ripken did not hold it against me—to my relief.
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DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Let me start by asking you about “the Streak,” as it’s called. Does a day go by in your life now when you’re not asked about it?
CAL RIPKEN JR. (CR): No. The special part about the Streak was that everybody has their own idea of what their own streak is in their lives. During that particular year, people would share their streaks with me: “Haven’t missed a day of work.” “My kid hasn’t missed a day of school for twelve years.” The important thing was showing up. I found that to be a wonderful sharing moment that went through that year.
DR: If you had not had the Streak, you still would have been one of the greatest baseball players ever by all measurements. When did you realize that you were doing something that was unusual? You didn’t start out saying, “I’m going to break the Lou Gehrig record.”
CR: I look back and say it was the manager’s fault that I started the Streak. Because my first manager was Earl Weaver, and you couldn’t imagine me going up and telling Earl Weaver, “I’m going to play every single game.” I just kept playing and they put me in the lineup. Everything started off with a bang. I played pretty well.
DR: At the end of five years, six years, ten years, did somebody say, “You know, you’re playing a lot of games in a row here”?
CR: I think around eight hundred to a thousand games, and I’m not sure why that was the case. My first year I won Rookie of the Year, and we finished one game out of the playoffs. Second year we won the World Series. I was the MVP of the league that season, and I played every inning of that year. And that just continued on. Once I got close to a thousand games, people started to take notice.
DR: Over sixteen years, major-league baseball plays 162 games a year. Sometimes you have a World Series or playoffs. You’re playing all those games, no injuries. I can’t go more than two or three days without something going wrong. How did you avoid injuries?
CR: I had a good body where I was resilient. You get hit by pitches, you slide wrong. I have a real funny finger that got caught on first base one time and dislocated. So you have all these small injuries that somehow you figure out how you can play through.
The real key is to push yourself through. The only time you’re a hundred percent for a season is the first day of spring training. After that, you’re playing something less, and some players can feel like they can compete and play with a little bit more than others. To me, if you find yourself and you push yourself through and then you do well, then you’ve answered your question.
DR: So you get to 2,130 games, Lou Gehrig’s record. That was thought, in baseball lore, to be one of the unbreakable records, 56 straight games by Joe DiMaggio [the longest hitting streak] maybe being the other. So you get to this point and all you have to do is play one more game, four and a half innings so the game is complete.
You get to the four and a half innings, it’s over. What was the emotion going through your head? You have the president of the United States there, the vice president of the United States there. It’s been voted perhaps the most memorable moment in baseball history.
CR: They made some plans to celebrate, but nobody could have choreographed how it played out. I never felt any pressure by playing in the games because it wasn’t my goal to break Lou Gehrig’s record. It was just to continue to play and keep your approach as pure as it was on the first day you walked on the field as the last.
But when I got to game number 2,130 and that game was over and I was going home—I got home at two thirty, three in the morning—I felt a sense of relief that it was a foregone conclusion that tomorrow’s game would happen.
DR: So 2,131 games, you break the record. Everybody’s happy. Most emotional moment in your life in terms of the baseball part. Why not just say, “Okay, I’m done. I broke the record. I can sit out”? Why did you continue?
CR: I thought it would be disingenuous or dishonest to stop playing, because I never played for that reason—to obtain that record and say, “Okay, now I’ve accomplished this. Let me just stop.”
It was almost as ridiculous to me as when somebody would suggest, “Why don’t you stop at 2,130 games and take the next game off and share that record with Lou, because Lou was such a great icon and a great person?” I’m thinking, “He would be mad at me if I did that,” because the idea is to play.
All good things I guess have to come to an end, but I remember thinking early in that season [1998, three years after he tied Gehrig’s record] that if we fall out of the pennant race, if there’s no purpose to play toward the end of the year, I’ll end this thing called the Streak, and we’ll start over brand-new. I first thought that I was going to do it the last day of the season, almost just to say I could have played 162 if I wanted, but the last day of the season was in Boston and that was on the road.
Some of the closest advisors to me said, “You should do it at home because everybody really celebrates it. They’ve been with you the whole time.” The last home game was against the Yankees. I went in and told the manager ten minutes before the game started that this was the game that I wasn’t going to play in.
And to see the look on his face—it was kind of shocked. He didn’t know what to do. I said, “Look, this is how I want it to play out. I don’t want to make an announcement saying, ‘Cal’s not playing tonight,’ and then have everyone react. I just want them to react to it as if I’m not there.” It was an opportunity to celebrate it as opposed to mourn.
DR: When the Yankees recognized you weren’t playing, what did they do?
CR: They looked over and they saw me not taking the field, and they looked in the dugout. I remember Derek Jeter was puzzled. He was looking both ways, thinking, “What are you doing?”
Then they got it. They all stood on the top step of the dugout and started giving me an ovation, which spread around the whole ballpark in Camden Yards. People realized what was happening and it became what I was hoping it would become—a celebration of the accomplishment as opposed to mourning the end.
DR: Let’s talk about how you got to be a professional baseball player. I played Little League baseball—as a shortstop, I should point out—but my career peaked at about eleven or twelve. When you were growing up, did you realize that you had athletic skills that were better than the average player like me? When did you realize you were really pretty good?
CR: I knew I was pretty good. I hung around the ballpark and I had a glove in my hand the whole time and I’d play catch and I always played with older kids. I realized I was pretty good. But when you play with older kids, you’re measuring yourself a little differently, and so you don’t stand out as much.
I was pitching in high school and I started to get a little bit of my size and I started to have really good success. My dad came to me, being a lifer in baseball and evaluating talent and being in the developmental system, and he said, “I usually can tell when a player has a chance at sixteen years old. You’re going to get a chance to play pro ball. You got a chance to make it.”
DR: In one high school game, you struck out seventeen players.
CR: Seventeen out of twenty-one.
DR: Did you think about being a pitcher?
CR: Yes. I was drafted mostly as a pitcher. All the teams that came to watch me play, except the Orioles, put me down as a pitcher and they were going to draft me pretty high as a pitcher. The Orioles drafted me in the second round. They had four second-round picks that year, so they had a better chance in the early rounds
.
When I signed, I think most of the people in the Orioles organization wanted me to pitch. Earl Weaver had a chance to see me hit in Memorial Stadium a couple of times, and he and my dad, who played a very diplomatic role in the decision, couldn’t decide where they wanted to place me.
Dad said, “When we’ve had a player like this, we’ve had great success starting him out as a regular player. If it doesn’t work out, then we can always move him back to a pitcher.” Then they all looked at each other and they looked at me and they go, “Cal, what do you want to do?” I said, “Pitchers only get to play one out of every five days. I want to play every day.”
DR: Your father didn’t think of Babe Ruth. Babe Ruth started out as a pitcher and then he turned out to be a pretty good hitter.
CR: Now, they’re starting to consider you can do both in the big leagues, which is pretty exciting.
DR: So you were drafted by the Orioles. You played in minor-league baseball. Now when you play minor-league baseball, you don’t stay at Ritz-Carltons and Four Seasons and charter planes, right?
CR: No, we don’t. I still don’t do that [chartered air travel], by the way.
DR: When do you realize that, yes, you can make it in the majors?
CR: It’s the success that you have, or you don’t have. I remember coming in at seventeen years old. You were a pretty big fish in your small pond, but now all of a sudden you’re a very small fish in a big pond and everybody was a star.
I was intimidated right from the get-go. They had a shortstop by the name of Bobby Bonner who was on that rookie card, star of the future. He came out of Texas A&M. He was twenty-three, I think, and he was great. I was taking ground balls behind him and I got all upset. I’m like, “I’m never going to play. This guy is way better than me.”
They sent him from rookie ball up to AA and then to AAA in the same year. And in two years I caught up to him and passed him, which is pretty interesting.
DR: He gave up baseball and became a Christian missionary, right?
CR: He did. Nice going.
DR: He got so depressed seeing how good you were.
CR: I’m trying to think if Earl yelled at him one or two times, and that made him quit too.
DR: You come up to the major leagues, and originally you were a third baseman. How did you become a shortstop? Shortstops were thought to be people who should be five foot nine, five foot ten. You were six foot four. How did they decide to switch you to shortstop?
CR: They had nicknames like Pee Wee and Scooter, those guys, but Earl Weaver had always seen me take ground balls as a fourteen-, fifteen-year-old hanging out at the ballpark. When I developed as a third baseman, probably that’s when my career started to take off. My skill set at the time was more suited to third base. My hitting really took off when I went and played third.
Then Earl wasn’t satisfied with who he was having for shortstop, and one day he just decided he was going to play me at shortstop. He called me into the office. He said, “Okay, when you go to shortstop, if the ball’s hit to you, I want you to catch it. Then I want you to get a good grip on the ball, take your time, and make a good throw to first base. If he’s safe, he’s only on first.”
I said, “That’s how I’m supposed to play shortstop?” I think what he was trying to tell me is, “Don’t try to reinvent it, just go and play, be yourself.”
I came back and I played pretty well. That move was supposed to be a temporary move to bolster the offense and get the team going. But that temporary move lasted fifteen straight years.
Let me speak to the size issue. I graduated high school about six two and about 180. I was roughly putting on about 10 pounds a year, and I grew almost three inches. So when I came to the big leagues, I was just a little under 220. The stereotype was a bigger person couldn’t play shortstop, but Earl had the ability to foresee that I had a chance. And he took a chance on putting me at shortstop.
DR: I know what it’s like to gain ten pounds a year, but not grow an inch or two. You became the Rookie of the Year. The next year, you were the Most Valuable Player. That, I think, was the first time a Rookie of the Year became the Most Valuable Player the next year.
So tell us about what it’s like to be a major-league baseball player. Is there camaraderie among the players on your team? Are you allowed to talk to people on the opposite side?
CR: Fraternization, I think that’s called. In the old school, you were supposed to hate the other team, but I found great value in befriending the other team.
I’ll use the example of Rick Henderson, one of the best base stealers in the history of the game. When he’s running to second base, he’s not paying attention when the pitch goes to home to see if the ball is fouled off, or taken, or if the ball is hit on the ground. He’ll come into second base with the idea “I’m going to slide no matter what.”
So early on, I’m covering second base and I see it. I say, “Hey, Rickey, you don’t have to slide.” He looks at me like, “Are you trying to trick me or something?” And he stands up and he looks at the umpire and the umpire says, “Yeah, it’s a foul ball.” So Rickey looks at me and he goes, “Rickey thanks you, you saved Rickey’s body.”
I found out really early on, and I think I was just being a good sport about playing, that there’s no sense in making him slide. If you can help him out at certain times, it doesn’t cost you anything, then you can ask him questions. By doing small things in there that would help them out in the game, I got information back that could help me.
DR: In the locker rooms, what’s it like in there? You just sit around for a couple of hours, talking about what the game is going to be like?
CR: Things have changed a lot since I left the game. Now players eat four meals a day in the clubhouse. I think it’s better that you have a balance of your time away from the ballpark, so you can recharge your batteries. When you come to the ballpark, you’re being pulled in many different directions.
DR: You’re flying around the country, you’re playing, what, eighty-one games outside of your hometown. Fans are coming, they’re looking for autographs. How do you get the rest you need?
CR: It’s pretty exciting, and it’s a lifestyle you get used to. You spend more time with that group of guys than you do with your family during the course of the year. So you make good friendships.
I used to always like the back of the plane and the back of the bus because people would sit around as we were traveling, and they would talk about their childhood. It was a very diverse group of people. You had rich, poor, country, city, any race back there, and you could share different stories. I enjoyed that part of it.
DR: Some players get on your nerves, don’t they?
CR: Oh yes. There’s a lot of internal fighting, too, that goes on.
DR: When you’re playing baseball, the scariest thing, I think, is if you’re a batter, somebody throws a ball at you and could hit you in the head. A famous baseball player was once killed that way. Did you ever worry that a baseball would hit you in the head?
CR: Yes, particularly if somebody was intentionally trying to hit me in the head. That’s a reality of the sport. There are people that try to intimidate you and intentionally throw the ball up around your head. And the league does it, pretty much when you first come in, to see if you can be intimidated. If you respond in another way, where you start getting hits and it doesn’t bother you, they end up leaving you alone.
Do you know how many times I was hit in the head?
DR: Three?
CR: No.
DR: More?
CR: Seven. Seven times hit in the head. And every time I got hit in the head, I was looking for a curve ball, and I was looking for the wrong pitch at the wrong time.
In the big leagues, if you have a weakness, they’re going to exploit your weakness. And either you make the adjustment and are able to hit those pitches, or you’re not going to stay around too long.
DR: You’re up at bat, you’re getting ready to hit the b
all, and you’re talking to the umpire, talking to the catcher. You’re saying, “Hey, let’s have dinner afterwards”?
CR: The old-school catchers used to try to chatter to get inside your head and make you not concentrate as a hitter. Sometimes you want to tell the catcher, “You better shut up, or I’m going to hit you in the mask with this bat.”
DR: When the umpire calls a strike and you think it’s not a strike, do you ever have any chance of convincing them otherwise? Do you say, “You’re wrong”?
CR: Oh, I was pretty sarcastic. I got thrown out of three games.
The first time I got thrown out of the game, the guy missed the first pitch strike on me. I swung at a pitch over my head and he called me out on the pitch, and I go, “Okay, you’re off to a good start. You missed two out of the three, the only one you didn’t miss, I swung out over my head.” And I started to walk away, and he started following me. I could hear him saying something to me, so I stopped, and I turned around and looked, and he runs into me.
And because there was contact made, all of a sudden he blanked out a little bit and threw me out of the game. I said, “Why’d you throw me out of the game?” And he didn’t have an answer for me. So that was kind of an accident.
The next time I got thrown out of the game was in the first inning. The first two hitters got called out on strikes. And I thought, “If this umpire’s got a big strike zone, I got to be the one to let him know he does.”
I take the first pitch, it’s barely on the outside corner and he calls it a strike. I go, “Okay, that’s not too bad. If that’s what it is, I can’t say anything.”
The next pitch was like a foot outside, and he calls it a strike. I said, “Hey, the first pitch was pretty good, but the second pitch was way outside.” He comes out from behind home plate and starts saying things like, “You guys are always crying.” And I said, “I get it. You’re the only one that counts.” That didn’t make him too happy.
He got so close to me that I told him to get out of my face. Then he told me to get out of his face. I said, “You brought your body out from behind home plate up here, and you’re telling me to get out of your face? You’re not very smart.”
The American Experiment Page 34
