Determined to prove himself, he fared no better early in the 1979 season. Now playing in Miami for the Orioles’ Single A affiliate, he struggled to drive the ball and continued to pile up throwing errors. The team’s manager, Lance Nichols, tried him at third base, searching for any spot where he felt comfortable. Every day, Junior came to the park early for extra fielding practice. Nichols hit him hundreds of balls. He made perfect throws in practice, but not in games, and injured his arm in the process, forcing him to sit out a week of games. “My arm was killing me,” Ripken recalled.
Then suddenly, in July of that season, everything clicked. He started hitting line drives and even knocked some pitches over the fence. His throwing accuracy improved. Shelby, also now in Miami, recalled it as “one of the biggest transformations I’ve ever seen in a player. He just developed all of a sudden. He hit his first professional home run, and then he hit another. His defense was so much better. He was stronger. He just seemed more polished and mature than some other guys.”
Near the end of the 1979 season, Ripken was promoted to the Orioles’ Double A affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina. He dislocated the little finger on his throwing hand but taped it up and played on, Senior’s stories echoing in his mind.
“Pain tolerance is a very subjective thing,” said Richie Bancells, a trainer who worked with Ripken in the Orioles organization for almost a quarter century, starting in Bluefield in 1978. “Some guys are able to minimize it, discern the difference between a truly debilitating injury and something they would call an annoyance. Those annoyances, whether they be contusions, sprains, a lot of guys will say they can’t play, but Cal said, ‘I can.’ He just thought it was part of the job to get himself on the field.”
Returning to Charlotte in 1980, Ripken blossomed, hitting 25 home runs, tightening up his defense, and making the Southern League All-Star team. He also played in every game of a season for the first time as a pro, starting 144 games, mostly at third base.
The Southern League split its season into halves, with the teams that won each half then meeting for the league title in early September. Two of Ripken’s teammates, Shelby and second baseman Tom Eaton, also played in every game in the first half as their team finished first. The manager, Jimmy Williams, wanted to give all three some rest in the second half so they would be fresh for the championship series. Shelby went first, taking the three days off Williams mandated. Now it was Ripken’s turn, and he balked. “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to take any days off,” he told Williams.
Williams relented. “I wanted to play. I was 19 and strong and wanted to be out there,” Ripken recalled. “By August, I was determined to hold on. I slumped pretty badly but held on. My average went from .290 to .276, and I remember thinking how exhausting this was. Then the playoffs started, and that renewed you and I got it going again.”
John Shelby recalled: “There wasn’t any conversation about playing streaks or anything like that. It was just what you did; you played every day. I was like Cal. We both wanted to play. I enjoyed it. When Jimmy came to me and said he was going to give me a few days off, I had a 21-game hitting streak. I told him, ‘I don’t want any days off,’ but Jimmy was very blunt and said I would take them. I went 0-for-12 when I came back. The time off didn’t help. Cal said the same thing I did, and Jimmy let him play.”
Ripken’s everyday habit continued the next year with the Orioles’ Triple A affiliate in Rochester, New York. The manager, Doc Edwards, put him at third base alongside a hot shortstop prospect named Bob Bonner. Ripken played in each of the team’s first 114 games, giving him 258 straight over two seasons, an inkling of what lay ahead. He batted .288 with 23 home runs and 75 runs batted in, and his consecutive-game streak ended when the Orioles called him up to the major leagues on August 8, 1981.
His arrival in Baltimore was a proud moment for the family. Ripken’s uncle had reached Triple A shortly after World War II. Senior never played above Double A. Junior was the first Ripken to reach the major leagues as a player.
Joining a veteran team in a pennant race, he sat in the clubhouse and on the bus among accomplished Orioles such as Jim Palmer, Ken Singleton, Mark Belanger, Doug DeCinces, and Eddie Murray. Living with his parents and driving to work with his dad, he felt like a kid and sought desperately not to be the reason the team fell short, if it did.
On August 10 in Baltimore, he made his major league debut as a pinch runner, replacing Singleton on second base in an extra-inning game. The Kansas City Royals immediately tried to pick him off. “Just checking, kid,” Kansas City second baseman Frank White said as Ripken slid back safely. John Lowenstein promptly doubled him home with the winning run. He crossed the plate wearing a broad smile.
His elation cooled when it became clear there was no spot for him in the lineup. DeCinces and Belanger were entrenched on the left side of the infield. Ripken was part of the Orioles’ future, but that future had not arrived. Weaver gave him a few shots at shortstop and third base, but he made three errors, went 5-for-39 at the plate, and mostly just sat on the bench munching on sunflower seeds. As the pressure on the Orioles mounted in September, he did not bat in the team’s final 27 games.
“It was a miserable time,” he recalled. “Sitting there watching every game from the bench, that was just painful. I had never done that and didn’t like it one bit. I made the comment that if I ever got a chance, I’m never coming out.”
5
Ironmen
CONFUSION
Seven years after George Pinkney’s playing streak ended at 578 straight games, Walter Scott “Steve” Brodie, an outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, was poised to pass him and become the new consecutive-game record holder. Brodie was just three games away after playing in the Pirates’ 5–3 victory over the St. Louis Browns on June 25, 1897.
After that game, however, the Pirates left for a weeklong trip to Cleveland and Chicago, and Brodie did not accompany them. His throwing arm ached. The Pirates hoped it would improve if Brodie took a week off. When they played without him on June 28 in Cleveland, losing to the Indians, 12–2, Brodie’s consecutive-game streak ended.
Given the acclaim Ripken and Gehrig later received for their streaks, it is hard to reconcile a player giving up when he was so close to the record. But if any player was unpredictable enough to do it, Brodie was. An early version of what would become known in baseball’s parlance as a “flake,” he talked to balls, caught flies behind his back, and wrestled a muzzled black bear in his backyard to stay fit in the off-season. He went by Steve, not his given name, because someone named Steve Brodie had once jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. One day, to avoid making a comment to an umpire that he knew would prompt his ejection from a game, he stuffed a sock in his mouth and kept it there while continuing to play.
It was entirely possible Brodie would abandon his quest for a record just before he reached his goal. What almost surely happened, though, is he did not know that he was close, or even that he had a long streak of consecutive games played. In his day, baseball record keeping was limited in scope, riddled with inaccuracies, and widely regarded as a lark more than the intrinsic aspect of the sport it would become. An achievement as complex as Brodie’s, which included games played for three teams over parts of five seasons, was more than record keepers could handle. And in any case, a consecutive-game streak was deemed trivial, a stunt more than a worthwhile achievement. The press ignored Brodie’s flirtation with the record.
The fundamentals of a more sophisticated statistical apparatus, which would soon evolve, were already in place. The box score, a numerical summary of an individual game invented and refined by Henry Chadwick, had appeared in newspapers since the game’s inception before the Civil War. An “official scorer,” usually a local sportswriter, oversaw every game, recorded what happened, and sent a box score to the league, which maintained ledgers for players and teams. Fans anticipated the year-end numerical summaries the leagues released, identifying which players fared well i
n such categories as hits, doubles, triples, home runs, and runs scored (for hitters) and innings pitched, strikeouts, and runs allowed (for pitchers).
But while this “system” conveyed a general statistical picture, it was flawed. Some official scorers were more enthusiastic than others, often depending on how much they were paid for the job. Some blatantly favored hometown players when making judgments. Printing errors were common, and basic communication was undependable, making inaccuracies likely, not just possible. The accounting of Steve Brodie’s consecutive-game streak illustrated these shortcomings.
A stout Virginian with a long neck and dark hair parted down the middle, Brodie had broken into the majors with the Boston Beaneaters in 1890, then joined the St. Louis Browns in 1892 and played in every game until the final day of that season, when a game against Chicago was moved to Kansas City. Brodie did not make the trip, and the fact that the game was played at a neutral site seemingly affected the official reporting of it. Some statistical accounts of the 1892 season failed to note that Brodie had missed the game.
The next year, Brodie played center field for the Browns in every game, hitting .319, until he was traded to the Baltimore Orioles in August. Baltimore’s manager, Ned Hanlon, wanted him because he hit for a high average, possessed a strong throwing arm, and was “as fast on his feet as a Kansas grasshopper,” one columnist wrote. In 1894, “Wee Willie” Keeler, the Orioles’ left fielder, batted .371; Joe Kelley, the right fielder, batted .393; and Brodie, the center fielder, batted .366, and all three played in every game as the Orioles won the first of three straight National League pennants.
After that season, a Baltimore sportswriter hailed Brodie’s “everyday playing habit,” calling it “a remarkable record any player should be proud of.” But the writer erroneously stated that Brodie had not missed a game since shortly after he broke into the majors in 1890. In fact, Brodie had missed the 1892 season finale.
That was not the only statistical mistake about Brodie that circulated that off-season. Because of a typographical error in a popular review of the 1894 season, he was credited with having played in 120 games rather than 129, the actual total. Thus, when Brodie again played in every game for the Orioles in 1895 and 1896, pushing his streak to 524 games, the league’s official records indicated that his streak was considerably shorter—not that anyone was looking.
Baltimore traded Brodie to Pittsburgh before the 1897 season, and he was so unhappy about leaving a pennant-winning club that the Pirates held their spring training camp near his Virginia home, seeking to appease him. He proved a disappointment once the season began. After his streak ended in June, he was in and out of the lineup for the rest of the season, missing more than 30 games. The Pirates finished eighth in the 12-team National League.
Confusion about his consecutive-game streak persisted for decades. After he died in 1935, the Sporting News investigated his career, discovered that his games-played total for 1894 was wrong, and reported that he had played in 727 straight games, making his streak the longest of the 1800s. “He went to his death not knowing he owned the record,” the baseball weekly stated. For more than two decades after that, he was credited with owning the longest streak of the 1800s. But the Sporting News had missed that he sat out the 1892 season finale. It took another round of painstaking research, conducted in 1961, decades after he played, to learn definitively that Brodie had, in fact, played in three fewer consecutive games than Pinkney.
Shortly after the turn of the century, the National League’s top executive, Harry Pulliam, surveyed his league’s reams of statistics and judged them “a tangled mass.” Pulliam was a notorious control freak who eventually committed suicide over the stress of serving as the league president, secretary, and treasurer at the same time. But before that, in 1903, he hired John Heydler, a slender, circumspect baseball fanatic from Rochester, New York, to clean up the statistical mess.
Originally a newspaper printer, Heydler had been working as a baseball writer, covering the Washington Senators, a National League club, for the Washington Star. He kept detailed statistical ledgers for players and dressed up his coverage with numbers, a tactic few of his press box colleagues used. Pulliam liked his work and hired him to improve the league’s efforts to keep accurate statistics for players and teams. Upon moving to New York, Heydler set up shop at the National League office in the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, high above Madison Square Park. According to The Numbers Game, a history of baseball statistics by Alan Schwarz, he charted 18 categories for hitters and 17 for pitchers, signaling the beginning of a more purposeful commitment to statistics throughout the sport.
Heydler, who would work for the National League for the next half century in roles of ascending importance—secretary-treasurer, president, chairman—belonged to the first generation of serious baseball statisticians, along with Al Munro Elias, founder of the Elias Sports Bureau, and sportswriters Ernest “Ernie” Lanigan and George Moreland. In the early 1900s, they all endeavored to keep more accurate current numbers and also delved into the game’s history, seeking to clarify what happened before their time.
In 1914, Moreland, who wrote for the Pittsburgh Press, published a groundbreaking baseball encyclopedia, the first of its kind. His 300-page volume, titled Balldom, detailed the histories of leagues and teams and identified yearly statistical leaders going back to the 1870s. It included a section subtitled “Hundreds of Records Never Before Published.” These were “facts that will interest fans,” Moreland wrote, and “if the reader wants to know what-is-what in baseball, he will find it here.”
The book represented the first attempt to identify and organize important statistics and records. It listed hundreds of achievements, but not George Pinkney’s 578-game playing streak. Pinkney’s name appeared only on a year-by-year list of who played for Brooklyn.
Lanigan, a frail nephew of the founders of the Sporting News, worked for newspapers in New York and Cleveland and doggedly delved into the game’s history. A statistical purist, he preferred studying his charts to actually watching games. In 1922, he published The Baseball Cyclopedia, another attempt to organize records and statistics. Again, Pinkney’s consecutive-game streak went unmentioned.
Lanigan admitted that his book, while admirable, was hardly definitive or complete. “Gallant work on the part of certain archaeologists in the last 15 years has brought to light a mass of valuable information,” he wrote in 1922, “but much more remains to be turned up before the statistical side of the game can be deemed near perfect.”
That was certainly true. Statistical focus was almost a matter of personal taste, it seemed. While Moreland and Lanigan ignored Pinkney and feats of endurance, the consecutive-game record intrigued Al Munro Elias. Although it did not require hitting, pitching, or fielding prowess, it did reflect determination and consistency. Few players stayed healthy enough and performed well enough to play in every game for several seasons in a row. It was actually quite remarkable, Elias thought.
A native of Charleston, South Carolina, Elias had moved to New York around the turn of the century because he enjoyed baseball and wanted to be nearer the game. He believed statistics helped fans understand what they saw. With an accountant’s resolve, he meticulously tracked the performances of players and teams, peering through round tortoiseshell glasses while maintaining elaborate ledgers for hitters and pitchers. Diminutive and formal, he started out peddling his findings to fans in bars and pool halls, charging pennies. Not earning nearly enough to live on, Elias and his brother, Walter, sold shoes, shirts, and salad oil on the side. But Elias built enough of a following to form what he called the Elias Statistical Bureau in 1913.
After the New York Evening Telegram began using his material in 1916, more freelance opportunities came his way, including a weekly column in the New York Journal-American. In March 1918, Elias devoted his column to the history of consecutive-game streaks. It was newsworthy, he wrote, because Eddie Collins, a second baseman for the Chicago Whi
te Sox, was about to set a record. The longest streak in major league history, Elias wrote, belonged to Sam Crawford, an outfielder for the Detroit Tigers who had played in 472 straight games before being sidelined by a cold in 1916. Collins had played in just three fewer consecutive games, Elias wrote, and would set a new record by playing in the first four games of the upcoming 1918 season.
Other players who had fashioned long streaks, Elias wrote, included George Burns, a New York Giants outfielder who played in 459 straight games between 1914 and 1917; Lave Cross, an infielder for the Philadelphia Athletics who played in 447 straight between 1902 and 1905; and Frank Isbell, a first baseman for the White Sox who played in 412 straight in the early 1900s. But it was “indisputable,” Elias concluded, “that Sam Crawford reigns supreme” as the major league consecutive-game record holder.
Elias’s conviction was admirable, but his research was incomplete. He had missed Pinkney’s streak of 578 straight and several others of more than 500. George LaChance, a muscular first baseman nicknamed “Candy” because he preferred sucking peppermints to chewing tobacco while he played, had appeared in 539 straight games for Boston’s American League club in the early 1900s. His teammate John “Buck” Freeman, a slugging first baseman, played in 536 straight. Clyde Milan, a speedy center fielder for the Washington Senators, appeared in 511 straight between 1910 and 1913. Elias had overlooked them all.
Elias experienced his big break at age 46 in 1919 when Heydler, now president of the National League, hired him to keep accurate statistics for teams and players, track weekly leaders, uncover interesting tidbits, and promote his work to sportswriters. Already known in the press boxes at the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field, Elias became even more of a regular.
The Streak Page 7