Senior never had a chance. The Orioles actually got off to a fast start in 1987, thanks largely to Murray and Ripken. In late May, they were in second place in the division, six games over .500. But they crashed hard as summer arrived, losing 4, 10, and 5 games in a row at different times to sink to last place.
For Senior and Junior, the disappointment was mitigated to a degree by the arrival of another member of their clan. Bill, the youngest of Senior’s four children, was promoted to the Orioles on July 11 after having percolated in the minor leagues for five years. The move generated feel-good stories that circulated nationally. Never before had a father managed two sons at the same time in the major leagues. Sports Illustrated had ruminated on the possibility months earlier in a spring training cover story headlined THE RIPKEN GANG. Now they were all together in Baltimore.
The Orioles had drafted Bill in the 11th round of the 1982 amateur draft. A second baseman built more like his wiry-strong father than his towering brother, Bill had followed Junior’s path through the minors, starting in Bluefield and rising to Charlotte before reaching Triple A Rochester. The uncle he was named for—Senior’s brother—had also reached Triple A before quitting baseball, but this Bill Ripken persisted. His fielding had been major league caliber for several years, the Orioles believed, and when he collected nine hits in 10 at-bats for Rochester in early July, they brought him to Baltimore.
Senior gave him a job. Bill started on the day he arrived and quickly proved he belonged. After going hitless in his first two games, he doubled off the outfield wall in Kansas City for his first major league hit. Two days later, he homered.
More outgoing than his taciturn father and reserved older brother, Bill brought life to what had been a depressed clubhouse. The Orioles won 11 straight games with the Ripkens manning the middle infield. By early August, Bill was batting second, in front of his brother, with an average over .300.
“I was having as much fun as I ever had playing baseball, swinging the bat well, playing between Junior at shortstop and Eddie at first,” Bill recalled.
By early September, Bill had played in 50 games in a row, and Junior had played in 900 straight. “I didn’t pay one bit of attention,” Bill recalled. “It was just a normal thing for me to see Junior out there every day. It always seemed like the right thing. Even if he struggled at the plate, he brought stability and normalcy. It was just normal to see him there. We never talked about it.”
But though the brothers did not discuss his playing streak, Senior was keenly aware of Junior’s budding bona fides as an exemplar of extreme baseball endurance. Nine hundred games in a row was a feat, but more remarkably, Junior had not missed an inning in more than five years. Since Jim Dwyer hit for him in the top of the ninth in Minnesota on June 5, 1982, he had played in more than 8,000 straight innings.
Reporters and statisticians had paid little attention to his consecutive-inning streak as it grew. Though baseball’s record-keeping apparatus was infinitely more sophisticated than it had been earlier in the century, it had never tracked consecutive innings played. There was no record in the books, no threshold for Junior to surpass, no top 10 list for him to climb.
In 1987, though, the Elias Sports Bureau—founded by Al Munro Elias in 1913 and now baseball’s official record keeper—investigated Junior’s streak and discovered it was the longest in history. Lou Gehrig had come out of games often enough to prevent him from building a run of consecutive innings. Everett Scott also missed innings now and then. It turned out George Pinkney had held the record before Ripken, having played in 5,152 straight innings between 1885 and 1890. The record had stood for 95 years until Ripken passed Pinkney on August 31, 1985, without a soul knowing, conjuring the sport’s prehistoric statistical era.
When the news broke about Junior owning the all-time record, Senior shrugged. There were no plans to rest him. But by September, Senior was having second thoughts. Junior was mired in the worst slump of his career, his average having plummeted to .258 from a high of .326 in May. Senior wondered if the consecutive-inning streak was part of the problem. Now that it was news, reporters constantly asked Junior about it, and inevitably, with his average declining, they wondered whether he needed a day off. Ripken lashed back at the suggestion.
“I was irritated and it probably showed,” he later wrote. “I didn’t want an excuse for my slump, especially one as weak and wrong as needing an inning off. When you feel sluggish, you don’t feel better sitting on the bench, at least I don’t. I perk up when I trot on the field.”
His rationale for continuing to play every inning, even as his average dropped, would become familiar. He was not tired, he said, and he believed he could always help the team in some way—with his defense, experience, and sheer presence—even if he did not hit. He believed his slump was attributable to a problem with his stance, approach, or confidence, maybe all three, but certainly not fatigue. Between the six-month off-season and nearly two dozen off days during the season, he had plenty of time to rest, he said, even while playing thousands of innings in a row.
Regardless, Senior saw the streak becoming a burden. “I had been watching Cal closely for two weeks in the locker room, and the poor guy could barely get dressed,” Senior later wrote. “He was having to hurry to get on the field because he was being hounded by the media so much. I said to myself, ‘It’s time to give the guy a break.’”
On September 14, 1987, the Orioles played the first-place Blue Jays in Toronto. The surge precipitated by Bill’s arrival had given way to a late-season collapse. The Orioles were in the process of losing 17 of 18 games. On this night, Toronto’s hitters pulverized Baltimore’s pitchers, hitting 10 home runs and building an 18–3 lead in the first seven innings. As the deficit grew, Senior saw an opportunity. After the bottom of the seventh, the manager asked his son in the dugout, “What do you think about taking an inning off?”
Ripken stopped, knowing what was at stake. “What do you think?” he replied cautiously.
Senior said he thought it was a good idea. There was a pause. “OK,” Ripken finally said.
Neither mentioned the streak.
Three other Orioles were due to hit before Ripken in the top of the eighth. “If you hit this inning, you’re going to come out,” Senior said. Ripken ended up batting and grounded into a fielder’s choice. He was on first when the inning ended. Bill, performing a routine courtesy, brought his glove out from the dugout, thinking they would play the bottom of the inning alongside each other, as always. But Ripken took the glove and said, “That’s all right, I’m out of here,” and walked toward the dugout.
“The look on Billy’s face was total disbelief, just complete shock—almost like time had stopped or something,” Ripken recalled. Seeing his brother almost start to cry, Ripken suddenly felt like crying himself. A teammate, Ron Washington, who would later manage the Texas Rangers, took over at shortstop. It was reported that Ripken had played in 8,243 straight innings. (In 2012, Trent McCotter, vice chairman of the Society for American Baseball Research’s records committee, reported that Ripken had actually played in 8,264 straight innings.)
Ripken’s teammates offered congratulations and support in the dugout when he left the game. They slapped his back, shook his hand. Ripken was dazed. “I felt out of place, didn’t know what to do,” he recalled. “I didn’t know if I should go in and take a shower or just sit there.” Larry Sheets, a teammate who had lost a starting spot, joked, “Here, sit by me. I can tell you about the bench.” Ripken sat by Sheets as the game ended. The media peppered Senior afterward. Why had he taken his son out? Did he not want his son to make history? Senior took full responsibility, saying it was his decision; Junior did not have an opinion, and it just was time. “He wasn’t going to hit a 20-run homer,” Senior groused to reporters.
Junior was emotional. At the team hotel later, he went to see his father and they talked. Senior said he knew Junior was worried about the team and his hitting, and now he would have one less thing to wor
ry about. It did not hurt for him to miss a few innings in a blowout, Senior said. “I thought it was the right decision for Cal and the right decision for the team. It was a team decision and Cal accepted it as one,” Senior later wrote.
Junior went back to his room, pulled out a yellow legal pad, and started writing. He filled nine pages that night and two the next day. “I’m not a diary guy, but at that moment, I had some thoughts to get out of my system,” he recalled. “Was I happy or sad? Did I give up on a certain principle or approach? Was it weakness or strength? Was it the right thing or the wrong thing? When you play every inning for so long, there’s a certain emptiness. I had to figure that out.”
Once he expressed his doubts on paper and reflected on them, he concluded that he had not given in—it was not a failure. His manager had simply made a decision. “If I had said, ‘I don’t want to come out,’ and insisted, he would have left me in,” Ripken wrote in his autobiography. “But I wouldn’t have insisted because I had faith in his judgment. This one time, Senior was dealing with me as my manager AND my father.”
On the legal pad, Ripken wrote that he took pride in his ability to play in every game, and that if Senior had wanted to end his consecutive-game streak, he would have objected. “I always thought both [the games and innings streaks] would end at the same time,” Ripken wrote later. “I do, however, have strong feelings about continuing the games streak & I probably would have objected to ending that.”
That was not about to happen.
8
Gehrig
A FAMOUS HEADACHE
Everett Scott was nestled in his sleeper-car bunk when a loud noise reverberated through the train traveling from Fort Wayne, Indiana, to Chicago. The train jerked sharply several times before coming to a stop. Scott threw off his covers and went to investigate. He found the engineer and asked what happened.
“Blown cylinder head,” the engineer said.
“How long are we going to be stuck here?” Scott asked.
It would be hours before another train came, the engineer replied. Scott’s heart sank. The date was September 14, 1922, just before dawn in the Indiana countryside east of Chicago. In seven hours, Scott was due to play shortstop for the Yankees in a doubleheader against the White Sox at Comiskey Park. In his first season with the Yankees, he had played in every game so far, just as he had in Boston for so long. His playing streak stood at 970 straight games. But now it was in jeopardy.
Scott had been with the Yankees the day before as a train ferried them from the East Coast to Chicago. They were battling the St. Louis Browns for the American League pennant, so every game mattered. Huggins had not given Scott permission to leave the team, but Scott had hopped off the train anyway to spend the night with his wife and son in Fort Wayne, where he lived in the off-season. He had checked the train schedules and knew one departing before dawn would get him to Chicago in plenty of time to play. But now that train was not going to make it.
Scott’s mind raced. How could he get from here, basically the middle of nowhere, to Chicago in time to play? Looking across a moonlit field, he spotted a dim light in the distance. He slipped on shoes and jogged through the field toward the light, which hung on the front porch of a small farmhouse.
Scott banged on the door. The farm’s animals barked, clucked, and howled. “Who goes there and what do you think you’re doing waking us at this hour?” came a voice from inside the house.
Scott identified himself and explained that he was the Yankees’ shortstop and needed to get to Chicago. There was a pause. “So you’re Everett Scott, are you? I’ve heard of you,” the farmer said. “What do you want?”
Scott asked to use the phone. The farmer let him in. He dialed a nearby garage, hoping it employed a driver who could pick him up and take him to South Bend, Indiana, 60 miles away. From there, he could catch a trolley to Gary, just outside Chicago, and then grab a taxi to the ballpark.
It was a sensible plan, except the garage did not have a driver on call so early. Scott pleaded with the owner and finally got his way. A driver picked him up at the farmhouse and drove him to South Bend. Arriving at the station just in time, Scott handed the driver $25 and jumped on a trolley.
As the trolley rolled toward Chicago, Scott reflected on why he was going to such extremes to get to the game. He was obligated to the Yankees, of course; the last thing he wanted was to let down his teammates in a pennant race. But he also wanted to keep his playing streak going. He was near his goal of a thousand straight games and proud of his record as the sport’s all-time leader in consecutive games played. He could not wow crowds like Ruth or Ty Cobb, but he was durable and dependable.
As the trolley rattled toward Gary, the Yankees and White Sox warmed up for their doubleheader at Comiskey Park. Miller Huggins waited to make out his lineup, expecting Scott to come through the clubhouse door at any minute. It was unlike the captain to leave the club hanging.
Finally, with the game about to start, Huggins posted a lineup with Mike McNally, a reserve, playing shortstop. When Red Faber, Chicago’s starting pitcher, began the game by tossing a fastball to Whitey Witt, the Yankees’ center fielder and leadoff hitter, Scott was still on the trolley, many miles away.
When the trolley reached Gary, Scott hopped off, hailed a taxi, and explained that he was in a desperate rush to get to Comiskey Park. “Go ahead and speed. I’ll pay your ticket if you get pulled over,” he said. The cabbie drove so fast that, indeed, a policeman stopped them. Scott leaned out of a rear window and explained the situation. The policeman let them go. A few miles down the road, another policeman stopped them. Scott again explained the situation. This policeman agreed to escort the cab to the ballpark, siren wailing.
Scott was running out of time. After the Yankees took a 3–2 lead in the first inning, four scoreless innings quickly rolled by. Many major league games lasted little more than two hours in the 1920s. Would Scott make it?
He arrived at the park as the White Sox were scoring three runs in the bottom of the sixth. Scott hurriedly changed into his uniform in the clubhouse and jogged to the dugout. Huggins gave him a disgusted look. Where had he been? How could he have done this? “Oh, Hug had some serious words for me,” Scott recalled with a smile years later.
The fate of his streak lay in the manager’s hands. Huggins could punish Scott by keeping him on the bench. But besides this incident, Scott was a pleasure to manage—unlike Ruth, never a headache. His streak was quite a feat, and Huggins was not going to end it.
When the Yankees took the field for the bottom of the seventh, Scott was at shortstop. He never batted but played two innings of defense and recorded a putout on a ground ball. The Sox won, 7–3, but Scott received credit for playing in the game. He had traveled by train, hired car, trolley, and taxi; sweet-talked a farmer, a garage dispatcher, and two policemen into helping; and spent $40 on his wild ride, but his consecutive-game streak was still alive.
After the Yankees lost again to the Giants in the 1922 World Series, sportswriters speculated that Scott might not play every day for much longer. He had turned 30 and committed more errors during the season than in any campaign since he was a rookie. A Detroit News columnist wrote that his play during the Series had been “a bitter disappointment.” Some fans blamed him for the Yankees’ defeat. He simply could not cover as much ground and admitted during the Series that he “felt older.” It had been six and a half years since he sat out a game.
But he was determined to press on. If he played in the first 14 games of the 1923 season, he would reach a thousand in a row, his stated goal. Plus, the Yankees were moving into their new ballpark that year, and he did not want to miss that. He spent part of the winter in Hot Springs, Arkansas, taking therapeutic baths and going on long jogs. When the Yankees opened their spring training camp in New Orleans in March 1923, Scott was among the first players to report.
Shortly before the season began, though, he tripped on second base during an exhibition game and needed hel
p leaving the field. The Yankees’ doctor said he had suffered a sprained ankle and possibly a torn tendon in his right foot. It seemed he would not make a thousand games in a row after all.
But on Opening Day, Scott wrapped his ankle with tape and convinced Huggins he could play. He hit a double, scored a run, and converted several sharp ground balls into outs as the Yankees defeated the Red Sox, 4–1, in the inaugural game at Yankee Stadium. Seventy-four thousand fans filled the Yankees’ majestic new ballpark, and Babe Ruth gave them what they came to see, smacking a home run.
But though Scott made it through the opener unscathed, he told an interviewer later that he “suffered a lot” by playing on his injured ankle and foot early in the 1923 season. Clearly laboring, he bungled easy defensive plays. Huggins pinch-ran and pinch-hit for him several times. It was not unthinkable to suggest that a healthier, presumably more effective teammate should be playing shortstop. Scott, however, did not want to miss a game.
Huggins was ambivalent. The manager appreciated Scott’s streak and valued his defense, but truthfully, playing him every day, without fail, was not an absolute must. If Scott had not been so close to his goal, Huggins might have rested him. But Huggins faithfully played him, as much out of loyalty as for any other reason.
On May 2, 1923, Scott’s big moment arrived. Ignored until now by most statisticians and previously buried for many years in the game’s confusing annals, the consecutive-game record vaulted into the sunlight before 10,000 fans on a cool afternoon at Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C. Before the Yankees and Senators played, Clark Griffith, the Senators’ owner, staged a festive ceremony honoring Scott, with help from the American League office.
Twenty minutes before the first pitch, the teams ended their warm-ups and lined up on the foul lines, the Yankees stretching from third base to home, the Senators from first to home. A line of marines in crisp military dress stretched between them, across the infield. When Griffith gave a signal, a marine brass band struck up a tune, and Scott emerged from the Yankees’ dugout with Ban Johnson, president of the American League. They walked together to home plate, where a tall, horseshoe-shaped wreath of roses stood upright against an easel. Scott admired the flowers and shook hands with a bald, husky, jut-jawed man standing by the easel. It was Edwin Denby, U.S. secretary of the navy.
The Streak Page 11
