The Streak

by John Eisenberg

  During spring training before the 1988 season, the Toronto Blue Jays had offered to trade slugger George Bell to the Orioles in exchange for Ripken. Bell, the American League’s reigning Most Valuable Player, was unhappy about being moved from the outfield to the designated hitter role. Toronto’s general manager was Pat Gillick, the former Orioles minor leaguer who had played with Senior in the early 1960s. Now an aggressive, forward-thinking roster architect, Gillick envisioned Ripken as a third baseman.

  Hemond was unwilling to make the deal, but his phone continued to ring during the season. The Boston Red Sox, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Houston Astros all called with offers for Ripken that the media reported. Ripken was distracted and conflicted. Though upset about Senior, he had been in the Orioles organization for a decade. Rumors about his departure made him nervous. “It’s very unsettling,” he said later. “I was disturbed that I might be traded.”

  As stress built inside him, he idly picked up a wad of tape and squeezed it one day while Richie Bancells taped his ankles before a game at the Metrodome in Minneapolis. An idea came to him. When he and his siblings had spent their summers around Senior’s minor league teams years earlier, they had played baseball for hours inside clubhouses and under concession stands, using balls made of tape. Why not re-create that now? A game of “tape ball” might make for a lighthearted break from the Orioles’ grim season.

  Ripken approached the gangly teenagers who worked in the visitors’ clubhouse in Minnesota. “I suggested that we could go down to the field later that night, after the game, and play tape ball,” Ripken recalled. “Needless to say, they were pretty excited.”

  That night, long after the last pitch of the game between the Orioles and Minnesota Twins, Junior, Bill, a few teammates, and the clubhouse boys made their way to the field. The empty Metrodome was dimly lit. “It was 2 a.m., maybe 3 a.m.,” Ripken recalled. “We picked sides and played. Home plate was out in the infield, near second. We ran around, styled when we hit home runs. It was so healing to go back and be in touch with how you started to love this game.”

  Tape ball games became routine when the Orioles played in Minnesota. “We’d be running, diving, sliding. There were big collisions at first base. The clubhouse kids had all these burns. There were potential injury risks all over the place. But boy, we had fun,” Ripken recalled.

  His Orioles teammates smiled and shook their heads when they heard about it. They were not surprised. Junior was reserved in public, but they knew a side of him the media and fans never glimpsed. “He’s the biggest kid ever, basically,” Bill said. Ripken was mischievous, constantly inventing games and dares to help break up the monotony of the long season.

  “People would never know that about him because he’s so diplomatic in public. But there was always something going on,” recalled Brady Anderson, an outfielder who joined the Orioles in 1988. “Looking back, it was a coping mechanism. Somehow, play was his way of releasing stress. It was nonstop with him . . . not resting, annoying someone in the training room, joking around, competing at something stupid.”

  Ripken enlivened batting practice with games of “500,” in which players accrued points while shagging flies. At the Metrodome, he and teammates competed to see who could use the fewest steps to traverse a steep concrete stairway connecting the clubhouse and dugout. “Wearing metal cleats, probably not the smartest idea,” Ripken said. During a rain delay in Baltimore one night, while their teammates dozed or watched television, Ripken and Anderson competed to see who could jump the highest from a standstill. “We did that for over an hour,” Anderson said.

  When pitcher Ben McDonald, a Louisiana Cajun with a fun-loving spirit, joined the Orioles several years later, he was surprised to discover their well-mannered shortstop was so like-minded. “Junior and I had a lot of wrestling matches,” McDonald recalled, chuckling at the memory.

  One of the group’s favorite contests centered on, of all things, pain tolerance. Players would form coalitions and plot sneak attacks on an unsuspecting teammate, hoping to inflict enough pain that he would relent and cry uncle. Ripken was a frequent attacker, but when others ganged up on him and drove their knuckles into his chest, he stubbornly refused to submit.

  “We went at it all the time,” McDonald said. “Cal was a big, strong guy. People didn’t realize that. One time he grabbed [pitcher] Rick Sutcliffe, another big guy, and we couldn’t pry Sut loose from him. I’m a big guy myself. It got pretty intense.”

  The school-yard behavior theoretically jeopardized Ripken’s consecutive-game streak, but he did not care.

  “I never saw an ounce of caution in him,” McDonald said. “I mean, I wasn’t going to be the stupid guy who broke his finger wrestling in the clubhouse and ended the streak. But oh, man, we did so much stuff. We were like little kids let loose. With the streak going on, we’d go to water parks on the road and come flying down these crazy rides. We played tape ball in the Metrodome in the middle of the night. If we had said we were going to go parasailing or jump out of an airplane, I’m talking right in the middle of the streak, Junior would have been the first one out of the plane.”

  Several years later, when he was in sight of Gehrig’s record, Ripken smiled when reporters speculated that he exercised caution to avoid an injury that might end his streak. “It blew me away that people thought I had to live a careful life,” Ripken said. “Shoot, I played basketball through the off-season, got stitches, a broken nose, blew out my ankle. But reporters would ask [my wife] Kelly, ‘Do you cut up his food so he doesn’t have to use a knife?’ She was funny, she’d say, ‘Yeah, I do all that stuff. We have soap on a rope in the shower. We don’t want him slipping on a bar of soap, so he wears it around his neck.’ She was joking.”

  Instead of trading Ripken in 1988, the Orioles traded Mike Boddicker to the Red Sox for Anderson, then a 24-year-old on the cusp of a major league career. A breezy, chatty Southern Californian, Anderson struck up a friendship with Ripken as the Orioles wobbled to the end of a miserable season.

  One day in batting practice, Ripken took his cuts before a game and then went to the outfield and shagged flies alone. “He clearly needed to be by himself,” Anderson recalled. “I didn’t know any better, so I went up to talk to him.”

  Ripken shook his head. “Not now,” he said.

  Anderson asked what was wrong, straining to imagine what could possibly be bothering his highly decorated teammate. “He already had a World Series ring, an MVP award. I was just getting to the majors,” Anderson recalled. “But now he’s standing there in the outfield and starts talking about it, his consecutive-game streak. It was on his mind.”

  Ripken asked Anderson whether he thought it was important, and if so, why? Anderson had an opinion; he had studied baseball history and knew about Gehrig’s streak. “I had a sense for it,” Anderson recalled. “Mostly, I talked and he just kind of listened. I said it’s an amazing record that reflects so many great qualities. Even then, I thought, ‘You know, he’s probably going to make a run at it.’ I talked that day like it was a foregone conclusion. We talked about his potential legacy.”

  After that first outfield conversation, Anderson and Ripken did not discuss the subject again for years. “It wasn’t like he was sitting around thinking about it,” Anderson said. “Maybe he didn’t even know why he brought it up that day. He was still seven years away. But it was out there.”

  Indeed, Gehrig’s record was not a forgotten milestone stashed in baseball’s attic. Though more than a half century old, it was part of the modern conversation. Just a few years earlier, Steve Garvey, a first baseman for the Los Angeles Dodgers, had established the National League consecutive-game record by playing in 1,207 games in a row. Until a broken finger ended his run, Garvey had spoken unabashedly about wanting to keep going until he passed Gehrig. Ripken said that was never his motivation, but by 1988 it was evident he was, if anything, a viable candidate to catch Gehrig because he possessed some important qualities.

  Ph
ysical Strength

  “Cal was probably the strongest guy I ever played with, from a physical standpoint. I think that got lost a little bit as his streak grew,” Ken Singleton said. “I played basketball with him in the off-season, and if you found yourself alongside him underneath the basket and tried to move him out, you couldn’t budge him. I mean, I couldn’t, and I’m not small myself. Cal was just a tough dude. He played a dangerous position and was in a lot of collisions, but in the years I played with him, most of the guys who collided with Cal came out second best.”

  Mickey Tettleton vouched for that. The catcher eventually departed Baltimore in a trade and played seven more years for other teams. What was it like sliding into Ripken at second base?

  “Like sliding into a tree,” Tettleton said. “You couldn’t budge him.”

  Smart Positioning

  “Shortstop can be dangerous with all the collisions at second base, but Cal handled himself so well around the bag, was always positioned well, with his legs under him, on plays at second as well as on backhand plays in the hole,” Richie Bancells said. “You get hurt when your body is vulnerable, and he minimized that. And it didn’t hurt that he was six-foot-four and 220 pounds, which was unheard-of, that size at that position.”

  General Good Health

  “The illness factor, never getting one that knocked him out, that’s probably more impressive than the injury factor,” Bancells said. “You can get into a whole lot of science. Some people just have good immune systems. There were days when Junior came to the park with a fever, but where it would knock other people down, he would go, ‘I can get through it; I’ll be all right. Let’s get through the game and we’ll deal with it afterward.’ When the bell rang, so to speak, it was time to play. And the ironic thing was, he was never a guy to take a pill. He never came looking for an Advil.”

  Toughness

  “Certain injuries and illnesses, you’re just not going to play through them, and he didn’t have any of those,” Anderson said. “But he had some that would have kept other guys out a few weeks, especially injuries—a knee, an ankle, a wrist—and he just grinded through them. He was a little bit superhuman in his ability to recuperate, recover, and get out there and play.”

  Off-Season Conditioning

  Ripken was ahead of a trend that developed as free agency pushed salaries higher. When his career began, many players worked jobs in the off-season and used spring training to get in shape for playing 162 games. Ripken worked out in the off-season.

  “The season itself was such a grind. Once it started, you just tried to hold on to what you had physically, as opposed to building yourself up,” he said. “The off-season, I thought, was for building yourself up to get ready for that. When I came to spring training, I was in the best shape I’d be in all year.”

  He drew up a regimen every off-season, relying on Bancells’s expertise. “He would ask questions: ‘Would this be beneficial? Would that be beneficial? Why does something function this way? How can I improve this?’” Bancells said. “It’s funny. A lot of guys play this game, but they don’t see the efficiency of their body as a tool that makes them money. Cal was ahead of his time. He thoroughly understood that for him to be on the field for all those games during the season, his body had to be in great shape when he came to camp.”

  The basketball games he orchestrated attained urban-legend status around Baltimore. Ripken invited teammates, other pro athletes, and former college basketball players to join him for full-court games that became intensely competitive. Playing near the basket because of his size, Ripken battled for rebounds, drove hard to the basket, and exchanged elbows.

  “I loved how ‘basketball legs’ made you feel in baseball. It was great training. And it was fun,” Ripken recalled. “You could keep your weight down if you did it regularly. I always believed it was a necessary part of building your strength up during the off-season.”

  Bancells said, “His thought was, ‘If you’re going to stay in shape in the off-season, let’s make it fun.’ He understood from asking about his body that basketball could help make him quicker, help him move laterally, help hand-eye coordination. It was also a big cardiovascular workout and an anaerobic workout.”

  Though Bancells had not played basketball since high school, he was a regular at Ripken’s games, which were played in a high school gym until Ripken built a suburban home with an indoor basketball court. “They were intense, physical, competitive games,” Bancells said. “The next day, you knew you had played.”

  Mindset

  Junior was always quick to credit Senior and Eddie Murray with helping him understand the importance of being available every day, but Ron Shapiro and Bill Ripken believe Junior deserved the credit.

  Shapiro, who also represented Murray, said, “Eddie may have refined Cal’s approach, but he didn’t impact it, because Eddie’s approach embodied Senior’s. Eddie was a great reinforcement but not an originator of the Cal Ripken approach to baseball and hard work.”

  As for Senior’s influence, Bill Ripken said, “Sure, Dad was the way he was, and Junior got whatever he got from that. But Junior took what Dad was all about and magnified it tenfold. I don’t think Dad possibly could have imagined what Junior was able to pull off because of what was instilled in him. Junior took it and ran with it to a vastly higher level.”

  Around the All-Star break in 1988, Ripken made a decision, authorizing Shapiro to negotiate a long-term contract for him with the Orioles. “I don’t believe his father was going to let him get upset enough that he left,” Shapiro recalled. On July 28, he signed a three-year contract worth more than $6 million. “Cal is the rock on which we’re rebuilding our club,” said Larry Lucchino, the team’s president.

  That rebuilding effort was going to be a major construction job. The Orioles ended 1988 with 107 defeats, the most for them in any season since they began playing in Baltimore in 1954. Ripken was on the field for just about all of it, starting every game and finishing all but two. Although his .262 average, 23 home runs, and 81 runs batted in did not match his output from earlier in his career, his determination to be available every day had been tested like never before. When Robinson pulled him after the third inning of the season finale on October 2, letting him watch the rest of the game from the visitors’ dugout in Toronto, it was almost an act of mercy. The Blue Jays already had a seven-run lead. Ripken had experienced enough dismal baseball for one year, the manager thought. Maybe he did not want a break, but he had earned one.

  11

  Gehrig

  A FRIEND’S INFLUENCE

  As a young player, Lou Gehrig witnessed the last months of Everett Scott’s consecutive-game streak, planting in his head the idea that such an accomplishment existed. Then, in the early 1930s, Gehrig came in contact with another consecutive-game stalwart—Joe Sewell, a diminutive infielder who was the only major leaguer other than Scott to have played in a thousand straight games.

  A vestige of baseball’s dead-ball past, Sewell was a 32-year-old contact hitter, renowned for not striking out, when he joined the Yankees in 1931 after a decade with the Cleveland Indians. With him batting in front of Ruth and Gehrig and a new manager, Joe McCarthy, running the club, the Yankees hoped to finally overcome the Philadelphia Athletics, who had captured the American League pennant in 1929 and 1930.

  The son of a horse-and-buggy country doctor, Sewell had grown up on the family farm in Titus, Alabama, in the early 1900s, spending countless hours tossing up rocks and hitting them with a broomstick. It was just his way to kill time, but the idle practice sharpened his batting eye and shaped his career, Sewell said later.

  When he enrolled at the University of Alabama, expecting to become a doctor himself, he took premed classes, joined a fraternity, and was elected class president, never entertaining the idea of a pro baseball career. Though he stood only five feet six, he excelled as a middle infielder for the Crimson Tide varsity, setting records on Southeastern Conference championship teams. A p
ro scout spotted him playing shortstop in a semipro summer circuit, the Tennessee Coal and Iron League, after his graduation in 1920. Impressed with Sewell’s quick hands and knack for making contact, the scout convinced Sewell to sign a contract with the New Orleans Pelicans of the Southern Association. Within months, he received a surprising call-up to the major leagues when the Indians purchased his contract. Locked in a pennant race with the Yankees and White Sox, they suddenly needed a shortstop. A chain of events set off by a horrific tragedy had left them shorthanded.

  On August 16, 1920, Carl Mays, a pitcher for the Yankees, threw a fastball at the Polo Grounds that sailed up and in on Ray Chapman, the Indians’ star shortstop. Chapman did not duck; he probably never saw the scuffed-up ball. It hit his skull with a thwack so loud that Mays thought it had hit his bat. The ball caromed into play, right to Mays, who picked it up and threw to first to record the out, while Chapman dropped to the dirt, blood oozing from his left ear. Instinctively, he tried to stand and run, but he lost consciousness and collapsed as players from both teams raced to the plate, alarmed. Chapman was carried from the field, his skull severely fractured. He died the next morning.

  The sport mourned the shocking death of a player who was popular with teammates and opponents alike. In an unprecedented gesture, other teams offered to loan the Indians a shortstop. Cleveland politely declined and gave the job to Harry Lunte, a light-hitting reserve, but then quickly determined he was not a suitable replacement. When Lunte pulled a thigh muscle in early September, the Indians turned to Sewell.