As Cal grew up, he filled out to six feet one and 175 pounds. Nimble and wiry-strong, with fierce blue eyes blazing beneath a blond brush cut, he became the Canners’ starting catcher and also played baseball and soccer at Aberdeen High School. Washington and Lee University offered him a scholarship after he graduated in 1953, but he turned it down, intending to follow his brother’s example and try professional baseball.
Initially, no scout was impressed enough to sign him. Cal continued to play for a Susquehanna League team in Havre de Grace, Maryland. His odds of becoming a pro improved when the American League’s downtrodden St. Louis Browns relocated to Baltimore in 1954 and became the Orioles, and in 1956 an Orioles scout saw enough in Cal to sign him.
His first years as a pro were spent on the game’s outermost fringes: the Arizona-Mexico League, the Alabama-Florida League, the Northern League. He played in a dirt bullring in searing heat in Mexico, slept on overnight bus rides, earned $150 a month. Along the way, he married the former Violet Gross, a mechanic’s daughter whom he had known in high school. They made Aberdeen their home and had a child, a daughter named Ellen.
Cal recognized that his talents were relatively modest, so he sought to master what he could control, the fundamentals, a professional approach. “Cal was baseball through and through: respect the game, do things the right way on the field, don’t show people up, just go out and grind it out day after day,” said Pat Gillick, in those days a tall pitching prospect and teammate of Cal’s in the Orioles’ minor league system.
In 1960, Gillick, destined to become a Hall of Fame baseball executive, played with Cal on the Fox Cities (Wisconsin) Foxes in the Illinois-Indiana-Iowa League, a Class B circuit. Their manager was Earl Weaver, a diminutive former minor league infielder, feisty and foulmouthed at age 29. Weaver was tough, but so was his catcher. In one game, Cal could not find his mask as he headed to the field for an inning, so he grabbed a softball mask, which had a wider space between the safety bars across the front. The barrel of a bat came through the bars and hit Cal in the face. He kept playing. Another time, a foul ball gashed the middle finger on his throwing hand. Weaver trotted out to inspect the injury.
“I’m taking you out,” Weaver said.
“Like hell you are,” Cal growled. “Just put a bandage on it, rub a little dust on it. It’ll be fine. I’m not coming out of this game.”
In an interview for this book, Gillick explained his former teammate’s mindset: “In those years, and really going back to Gehrig and that era, the thinking at every level was, if you came out of the lineup, you might not get back in. It’s different now with so many guaranteed contracts, but before the 1970s and free agency, people didn’t want to go on the disabled list or come out of the lineup, because there was a chance someone would take your job. Cal was sort of a journeyman, so a guy like that, if you didn’t show up or were injured too much, you were gone. I was the same way. I played five years of minor league ball and went near the trainer’s room maybe two times. You didn’t want to be there. If you were there too much, there was always the chance you would get released.”
Cal’s wife, Vi, was with him at Fox Cities that summer until she left in July to return to Maryland to deliver their second child, Calvin Edwin Ripken Jr., who was born on August 24, 1960.
Weaver, the young manager, liked his dogged catcher. Cal was nothing if not resourceful. When the team’s bus driver proved unreliable, Weaver fired him and asked Cal to take the wheel on road trips. Cal handled the job while continuing to catch every day. He ended the 1960 season with a .281 average and 74 runs batted in, and at spring training in 1961, he was on the roster of the Orioles’ Triple A affiliate—one level from the majors, just like his older brother in the late 1940s.
But in an exhibition game in Daytona, Florida, in 1961, a pair of foul balls struck Cal’s right shoulder, one right after the other. He managed to finish the game, even threw out a pair of base runners, but his shoulder was so sore the next day he could barely lift his arm. His playing career nose-dived. The Orioles sent him to their Double A affiliate in Little Rock, Arkansas, thinking the warm weather would help his shoulder, but it continued to throb, and his batting average plummeted.
In June, Harry Dalton, a former sportswriter who now ran Baltimore’s minor league operation, asked Cal to become the player-manager of the Orioles’ team in the Florida State League, a lowly Class D circuit. Weaver had given Dalton a positive scouting report on Cal, suggesting he might make a good coach because he was smart and responsible, knew the fundamentals, and acted like an adult.
Cal took the job and finished out the season in Florida. The next year, the Orioles sent him back to Fox Cities, this time as a player-manager. The owner of the local bus company refused to rent the team a bus unless Cal agreed to drive it. He started at catcher early in the season, then cut his own playing time when a hotter prospect joined the club.
That was his final year as a player. Beginning in 1963, Cal became a cornerstone of Dalton’s player development operation, which would churn out major leaguers for more than a decade, helping fuel a long run of success for the Orioles. Dalton relied on Cal to complete an array of tasks. Cal drove the team’s spring training equipment from Baltimore to Florida every winter, barreling south in a wood-paneled station wagon with an Orioles decal on the back. During spring training, Cal worked with a baseball glove on one hand and a hammer in his back pocket, alternately running drills and maintaining the fields.
After spring training, Cal spent the summers managing low-level minor league teams such as the Tri-City (Washington) Atoms and Aberdeen (South Dakota) Pheasants. He drove the bus, threw batting practice, groomed infields, made out lineups, and managed games, all while continually mentoring raw prospects in nuances such as how to run the “wheel play” against a sacrifice bunt or how to organize a rundown. One of his favorite messages was football coach Vince Lombardi’s spin on the “practice makes perfect” cliché. “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect,” Cal declared.
After a few years, Dalton put him in charge of more polished squads in the high minors. Wherever he went, Vi and their four children (sons Fred and Bill had joined Elly and Cal Jr.) spent the summer with him. He set a tireless example: gone early, home late, always in motion, driving a tractor to prep an infield, throwing batting practice, managing a game.
The kids invented games in cramped clubhouses, sorted socks for pennies, shagged batting practice flies. In Asheville, North Carolina, in the early 1970s, Cal Jr. and Fred ran the visitors’ clubhouse, Bill was a batboy, and Elly swept the bases with a broom between innings. Minor league baseball was their world. Watching their father’s every step, they became steeped in baseball’s rhythms and rituals.
They similarly absorbed lessons when they returned to Maryland for the school year. “There was always something going on, growing up with dad,” Bill Ripken recalled. “Even if we were doing the smallest of tasks—cleaning the windows, shoveling snow, working in the garage, or cutting the grass—there was a right way to do it. And then there was that moment when you finished one of these tasks. Dad would poke you in the side and say, ‘Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?’ You’d say, ‘Yeah, it does.’ It was the pride of doing things right. He instilled that in all of us.”
One winter, Senior—as he would become known in baseball circles, differentiating him from his son with the same name, who would be called Junior—pulled out a makeshift plow to drag the neighborhood after a heavy snow. As he tried to get it started, a metal engine crank came loose and hit his head. Blood smeared his face, but when a trip to the emergency room was suggested, Senior snorted, applied a butterfly bandage, went back outside, started the engine, and plowed the neighborhood.
“Anything he did in his life, nothing could stop him,” Junior said. “He loved to play soccer. He’d get his big toe stepped on, and the nail would fill with blood. He would come home, take out an electric drill, and drill through the nail. Blood would
pop up. Tape it up, go on with his life. You wouldn’t hear anything else about it. It was almost like, ‘No matter what happens to you, the game goes on and you play.’ That was the mindset. That was the example he set.”
After more than a decade of minor league managing, Senior worked as a scout for the Orioles in 1975, then joined Weaver’s major league staff as the bullpen coach in 1976. Weaver had become a highly successful manager, leading the Orioles to five postseason appearances in seven seasons and a World Series victory in 1970.
One day at Boston’s Fenway Park, Senior stood behind a screen while throwing batting practice, attempting to help a young Oriole, Kiko Garcia, polish his swing. He became so absorbed in the job that he drifted out from behind the screen as Garcia whacked a line drive right at him. Senior put his glove up and deflected the ball, but it ricocheted off his face. This time, there was too much blood for him to stanch the wound with a homemade bandage. He went to the emergency room, fussing the whole way, but left as soon as a doctor finished with him. That night, he performed his usual duties during the game.
“That happened before I got there,” Junior said, “but you hear stories like that, and there were a lot of them about my dad, and you figured it was your role to play, regardless of what happens.”
As the four Ripken children grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, there was never any doubt about which one possessed the burning competitive streak. Cal Jr. was determined to win whatever contest he and his siblings undertook.
“Who could stay quiet the longest in the car? He would provoke the rest of us into making some sort of noise so he would win the penny being offered,” Bill Ripken recalled.
As a nine-year-old, Junior became so excited after winning a game of checkers on a park bench in Miami that he jumped up and conked his head on a tree, knocking himself silly.
“It was just the way he was wired. Playing checkers, playing cards, anything, he wanted to win as much as any individual I’ve ever been around,” Bill said. “If you gave him a challenge, he did everything he could to conquer it.”
Years later, many of Junior’s major league teammates would make similar statements. “It was like a sickness with him,” Rex Hudler said. “I had a competitive bug, but geez, not like that. I played in the majors for 11 years and there was only one other guy who wanted that badly to beat you in Ping-Pong or whatever you did, and that was [Atlanta pitcher] John Smoltz.”
As an emerging baseball prospect in the 1970s, Junior combined his natural competitiveness with a grasp of the game’s fundamentals, which he absorbed from his father. He often tagged along when Senior worked off-season clinics, the car rides presenting Senior with the perfect time to teach.
“Certainly Senior’s work ethic and thought processes were transferred to Junior,” Pat Gillick said years later. “Junior developed his own character, but a lot of the things that developed his character came from his father.”
Fortunately for Junior, he alone among his brothers did not inherit Senior’s wiry physique. Bill and Fred closely resembled their father as adults, but Junior sprouted 3 inches taller and 40 pounds heavier by the time he fully matured. He towered over his father even as a youngster. It did not look unusual for him to take infield with his father’s Double A team in Asheville in the 1970s. After Senior joined Weaver’s Orioles staff, Junior accompanied him to games at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium and took batting practice.
“I think I was 15 when I pulled the ball down the line and reached the seats the first time,” Ripken recalled.
Tall and commanding, he pitched and played shortstop for Aberdeen High School in the spring, then competed in a local summer league. On the mound, he dominated as a right-hander mixing 90 mph fastballs with sharp breaking balls. As a hitter, he routinely drove balls over the fences.
“He was a great pitcher, a great player. He’d throw a shutout and hit a home run to win the game,” said Fred Tyler, a shortstop for rival Bel Air High School in those days.
Tyler, like Junior, lived in an Orioles household. His father, Ernie, handled the balls at home games, and his older brother, Jimmy, worked as a clubhouse attendant. Junior and Fred were the same age and knew each other from being around the Orioles. When their high school teams played in the spring of 1978, their senior year, Tyler got the best of Junior.
“We won, and I got a couple of hits off him,” Tyler recalled. “But they were scared hits. One was a swinging bunt, and the other was a cheap shot over the third baseman’s head. I was left-handed, and his curveball was so hard that was all I could do with it. He was so much better than any other pitcher we faced.”
(Fred Tyler also eventually worked for the Orioles, running the visitors’ clubhouse for many years, and remained friendly with Ripken. On the day of Ripken’s final major league game in 2001, Ripken presented signed jerseys to Ernie, Jimmy, and Fred Tyler and two other Orioles officials in a pregame ceremony. “My jersey was inscribed with a message about how well I hit him that day in 1978,” Fred said.)
With pro scouts tracking him, Junior went 7-2 on the mound as a high school senior in 1978. There was little doubt he would get selected in baseball’s amateur draft that summer, but questions persisted. How early would he go? Which team would take him? Would he pitch or play shortstop as a pro? The scouts lacked a consensus on the latter question. At least one thought he was too big for the infield, writing in a report that a “lack of fluid mobility” limited him as a shortstop prospect.
When the draft unfolded on June 6, 1978, the Orioles selected Robert Boyce, a third baseman from Deer Park High School in Cincinnati, as their first-round pick. They had four selections in the second round. With the first two, they took Larry Sheets, an outfielder from Robert E. Lee High School in Staunton, Virginia, and Eddie Hook, a pitcher from Point Loma High School in San Diego. With their third pick in the second round, the draft’s 48th overall selection, they took Ripken.
The next day, he struck out 17 batters in seven innings to lead Aberdeen High School to an easy victory in a state championship game. Off that performance, his future seemed clear. “The Orioles picked me to be a pitcher, no question,” Ripken said years later. “I had a good arm, a lot of strikeouts. I was hitting 90, 91 mph on the [radar] gun. I was pretty dynamic. It was clear I was a pitcher. Everyone in the organization wanted that—Hank Peters, the general manager; Tom Giordano, the scouting director.”
In giving up only two hits to Thomas Stone High School in the title game, Ripken “left no doubt about his major league potential, as he zipped assorted fastballs, curves and change-ups past the Lions,” the Baltimore Sun reported. “For the most part, facing Ripken became an exercise in futility, as every Thomas Stone batter fanned at least once and many came back to the dugout shaking their heads in disbelief at Ripken’s pitching.”
But after the game, Ripken told the Sun he wanted to play shortstop, not pitch, as a pro. And Dick Bowie, the Orioles scout who had tracked him, also “had some feeling that maybe I could be a regular player,” Ripken recalled. “The issue came up because that’s what I wanted.”
Peters, Giordano, Bowie, Senior, and Junior met to discuss his future. Senior backed the idea of trying his son at shortstop. You could not start a prospect as a pitcher and then make him a position player later, because he would have missed too much important developmental time, Senior said, but if you started him as a position player and switched him to the mound later, it could work.
In the end, Peters asked Junior what he wanted. He was 17 years old. “A pitcher only gets to play one day out of five,” Junior said. “I want to play every day.”
That settled it.
Ripken and another well-known Baltimore-area high school player whom the Orioles had drafted, Tim Norris, a right-handed pitcher, signed their contracts in a press conference at Memorial Stadium, then climbed into Norris’s car and drove to Bluefield, West Virginia, where the Orioles fielded a team in a rookie circuit, the Appalachian League. Ripken slept for most of the drive, Norris recal
led. Their contracts called for them to make $400 a month and $6.50 a day in meal money. “It was enough for either one big meal or two small meals at Hardee’s,” Norris said.
The Orioles arranged for them to share a rented house with Sheets and Mike Boddicker, a pitcher from the University of Iowa. Away from home for the first time, the two Baltimore-area teenagers spent a lot of time together. “We were always at the ballpark, but if we weren’t on the field, it was me against him in basketball, pinball, wrestling, whatever,” Norris said. “We both wanted to win, no matter what we were playing.”
Typical of teams in a rookie pro league, the Bluefield Orioles played a “short” season of 69 games, beginning in late June. The manager, Junior Miner, gave Ripken the shortstop job.
“He was this tall, skinny kid. Some of the other guys were college players, and a few were a little more polished,” said John Shelby, the Orioles’ 1977 first-round draft pick, who played in the outfield for Bluefield that season. “You could tell [Ripken] was young; he looked young. The buzz started going around that he was the son of one of the major league coaches.”
His performance raised eyebrows. Although he hit a respectable .264, he produced just eight extra-base hits and no home runs. “I remember one time he hit a little flare for a game winner, and I kidded him about this later. He celebrated like it was the biggest hit of his life, this little flare,” Shelby said.
His defense was even more alarming. Ripken committed 33 errors in 62 games, mostly on wild throws. “Some balls went through his legs, too. I joked with him about me catching the balls hit to him. It seemed like every time one went to him, I was running in and fielding it,” Shelby said.
Ripken sensed the Orioles doubting their decision to let him play shortstop. “I felt they were looking at me every minute, saying, ‘He should have pitched, he should have pitched,’” Ripken said.
The Streak Page 6
