“I wanted him in there. I was always going to make sure Cal played. And I don’t think it ever hurt us in a single game,” Oates said later.
Ripken remained committed to playing every day, but he was increasingly frustrated by the attention and scrutiny. His streak had become such a huge story that everywhere he turned, it seemed, reporters wanted to talk to him and fans wanted his autograph. Ripken recoiled from the scene, taking measures to wall himself off.
In his perfect world, he could play every day without anyone making a fuss about it. Reporters would not corner him in the clubhouse and ask questions—sometimes questions he had already heard many times. Fans would not chase after him and ask for his signature when he had a game to prepare for. He did not mind obliging fans and, in fact, signed autographs until his hand hurt, but when he found it difficult to focus on what mattered most to him, preparing and playing, he became irritated.
Pete Rose had given daily press conferences both before and after games when he made his run at Joe DiMaggio’s consecutive-game hitting streak in 1978. “I loved the limelight,” Rose said. Two daily press conferences sounded like a nightmare to Ripken. Wanting to be left alone to do his job, he spent more and more time before and after games in the trainer’s room, where reporters were not allowed. He and Richie Bancells talked about their families, movies, the headlines, gossip, anything but the streak. “We never talked about it. I taped his ankles every day and we never discussed the streak,” Bancells said.
Actually, Bancells recalled, the subject came up once, when Ripken suddenly blurted, “What’s the big deal? It’s the manager who puts me in the lineup.” After Ripken said that, Bancells recalled, “he looked at me and said, ‘You come to work every day, too.’ He equated playing shortstop every day with being a welder going to work every day, or being an athletic trainer coming to work every day to tape ankles. He minimized the whole thing. No one believes that, but it was true. His mindset was more of a blue-collar-type thing, a working-class-type thing, where you worked every day, which came directly from his dad.”
But if Ripken really believed he was no different from a welder, he was the only person who thought that. The interest in him and his streak had grown so intense that on the road he stayed under an assumed name at the team hotel and was besieged for autographs in the lobby. Zealous fans even chased him on taxi rides to and from games, hoping to obtain his signature when he jumped out. One night when he returned to his hotel room after a game, he walked down the hall for ice, and two fans jumped out from behind the dispenser and asked for autographs.
Feeling overwhelmed, Ripken asked his teammates if they cared whether he stayed apart from them on the road, in a different hotel. They said they did not mind. Ripken then asked the front office if he could try that. The club acceded to his request, somewhat reluctantly. Ripken began staying in different hotels, still under an assumed name, and traveled to and from games in limousines with dark windows, protecting his identity.
He liked the new arrangement, finding that he had fewer distractions and could focus on playing. But the media had a field day when it uncovered his plan, suggesting it was the ultimate example of Ripken’s believing he was bigger and more important than the team. When he slumped at the plate early in the 1993 season, Washington Post columnist Tony Korn-heiser wrote of him, “What’s the excuse this year, the limo was late?”
On June 28, 1993, Sports Illustrated published a long feature on Ripken’s situation titled “Solitary Man: It’s a Long, Lonely Haul to Lou Gehrig’s Record for Besieged Oriole Shortstop Cal Ripken Jr.” Sportswriter Tom Verducci depicted a bristling Ripken avoiding the press and taking late-night rides down dark alleys to avoid fans. “Yes, I think Cal has withdrawn,” Ron Shapiro, Ripken’s agent, told Verducci. “There’s a tremendous burden created by the public and created within Cal.”
Ripken admitted to Verducci that he was frustrated that his streak was becoming so big that it was starting to overshadow everything else he had accomplished. “That’s become my identity; that’s what people see when they see me,” he said. He also was frustrated by the perception that he was selfish: “The worst part is you spend 11 years building a reputation as a team player, helping people out, and all of a sudden, because you stay at another hotel for other reasons, people take that away from you. Now you’re selfish and putting yourself apart from the team. All you want to do is to be able to walk freely, without problems.”
With characteristic bluntness, Rose boiled the situation down to its bare essence. “I think the streak is a good thing for baseball, but it’s a better thing for baseball if the player is productive,” he told Verducci. “If Cal Ripken plays like Cal Ripken should last year, the Orioles probably win the pennant. Unless he has a decent year, people will say he’s just trying for the record. If he hits .215, is the streak a good thing? Any pressure he’s getting is created by himself because of his low batting average and statistics.”
But just when Ripken felt the world was closing in on him—criticism swirling, his average dipping—he perked up. Although he hated the perception that he was intentionally pursuing Gehrig, he realized he was fighting a losing battle after he injured his knee in the brawl and his wife suggested he pinch-hit to keep the streak going. If his wife, who knew him best, thought he wanted the record that badly, he could not expect Bobby Bonds or anyone else to understand his philosophy. Once he realized that, he felt liberated.
There had been speculation that he might get booed at the 1993 All-Star Game in Baltimore, his hometown fans turning on him and his .215 average. Instead, his ears rang with thunderous cheers that night. That encouraged him, as did his teammates’ unyielding support.
“He was our shortstop, one of the best in history defensively and certainly one of the best offensively. Why would you want him out of the lineup?” Brady Anderson said for this book. “Who was going to replace him? That made it even more comical. It wasn’t like Ozzie Smith was on the bench. Come on, the criticism of him was a joke. We never thought he should take a day off.”
Ben McDonald agreed that support for Ripken never wavered inside the Orioles’ clubhouse, even if it did outside. “I never heard any of the players say anything,” McDonald said. “I heard the talk, we all did, when he was slumping, that the manager should think about giving him a day off. We didn’t talk about it much, but when we did, Cal was funny, he’d say, ‘What good would one day do?’ A week, maybe, could do something, but not one day. What was the point of that? But from a player’s standpoint, we had too much respect for him to question it. We knew how hard it was to go out and play every day. I never heard anyone say one word.”
McDonald, as part of the Orioles’ starting rotation, had a vested interest in Ripken’s staying on the field. “As a pitcher, I didn’t care what he hit. I wanted him behind me” in the field, McDonald said. “It was so reassuring to have him there. I don’t know that he was the fastest or quickest guy to play shortstop, but he was certainly the smartest. He knew every hitter like the back of his hand, knew how to get them out, what their tendencies were. I could turn to him for advice during a game, turn to him for anything. He made so many plays. I used to say to him, ‘Don’t ever take a day off.’ All of the pitchers felt the same way.”
After hitting bottom early in the season, Ripken finished 1993 on a roll, batting 63 points higher in the second half of the season. You could almost sense him fighting the perception that he only cared about the streak. He dove headlong to catch a pop-up, injuring his shoulder. He ran over his friend and former teammate Bob Melvin in a violent home-plate collision. But he never missed an inning.
Asked by an interviewer what he thought about Ripken’s pursuit of Gehrig, Jon Miller, the Orioles’ radio play-by-play man, posed a question of his own: “I’m amazed at the things that get attributed to Cal because of the streak. Every time there has been a brawl or near brawl, he has been one of the first guys out there. If the streak is so important to him, what’s he doing out there?
”
Even as the controversy continued, the majority of people inside the game respected him and his dedication to playing every day. “I was in the opposing clubhouse by then, and all I heard was respect,” said Mickey Tettleton, a former Orioles teammate. “Players knew how hard it was for him to do what he was doing. And they appreciated not just what he was doing, but how he was doing it. He really respected the people he played against. That was clear. He never showed anyone up, just played hard. The stuff Senior taught him. That garnered him a lot of support.”
On December 31, 1993, baseball’s collective bargaining agreement expired, with no new deal in sight. The owners wanted to implement a salary cap to ease what they claimed was a worsening financial situation. The players did not want the owners setting limits on their earning power. The sides continued to negotiate as the 1994 season opened, but after years of hostility and mistrust, they did not get far. In June, the owners failed to make a scheduled payment to the players’ pension and benefit fund. In July, the players set August 12 as a strike date.
While it lasted, the 1994 season was an eyepopper. The San Francisco Giants’ Matt Williams was challenging Roger Maris’s single-season home run record. The San Diego Padres’ Tony Gwynn was trying to become the first .400 hitter since Ted Williams, in 1941. The Montreal Expos, who had never played in a World Series, dominated the National League, and the Yankees, after a decade of mediocrity, were back on top, forging the American League’s best record. Fans ignored the gathering labor clouds as the average attendance at a major league game soared to a record 31,600.
In Baltimore, Peter Angelos had bought the team and green-lighted the signing of expensive free agents such as first baseman Rafael Palmeiro and closer Lee Smith. They blended with the existing core, led by Mussina and McDonald, and the Orioles, playing to sold-out houses at home, won often enough to stay close to the Yankees. Ripken, now 33, was the oldest player in the lineup, but a vital piece. Batting cleanup behind Palmeiro, he saw more juicy pitches, hit .340 in April, and slugged his 300th career home run in May.
On May 14, his playing streak reached 1,930 straight games, leaving him exactly 200 shy of the record. Catching Gehrig was no longer a distant reality, too far away to reckon. Ripken was getting close. The shrill public debate quieted. As Pete Rose had suggested, there was nothing to talk about when Ripken performed well. His average soared over .300 in June and stayed there. By early August, he had more than 70 runs batted in, putting him on pace to surpass 100 for the season.
He was originally scheduled to reach 2,000 straight games on a Saturday night in late July, at home—a perfect setting for a celebration. But several weeks before that, the last two games of a series in Seattle were postponed when acoustic tiles fell from the ceiling of the Kingdome. Now Ripken would reach 2,000 on the road, in Minnesota, on August 1.
The day before, the Orioles finished a homestand with an afternoon game against Toronto in front of 47,674 fans. There was unease in the stands because the Orioles were slipping farther behind the Yankees in the standings, but as they took the field in the top of the fifth, it was noted on the scoreboard that game 1,999 of Ripken’s streak was about to become official. The fans stood and cheered, sustaining the noise for so long that Ripken doffed his cap. “They really got into it,” Ripken wrote later.
The Blue Jays also applauded in the visitors’ dugout, but when Ripken batted in the bottom of the sixth, Toronto’s pitcher threw behind him and then hit him on the butt—payback for Ben McDonald throwing behind a Toronto batter in the fourth.
The next night, in a half-empty Metrodome, Ripken became the only major league player other than Gehrig to reach 2,000 straight games. On the day Gehrig hit that threshold, his wife, Eleanor, had suggested he sit out to give his streak a memorable end. Gehrig did not like the idea and played. Ripken’s wife did not offer such a suggestion, but she did fly in to commemorate the occasion. Surprising her husband, she sat behind the dugout.
As Ripken approached the plate in the top of the first, the public-address announcer noted that this was game number 2,000. The crowd stood and applauded. Ripken waved, stepped out of the batter’s box, and took off his helmet to acknowledge the appreciation. The reaction from another team’s fans surprised him—as did the long ovation the day before in Baltimore
“I was pleasantly surprised [by both],” he wrote later. “I never wanted whatever hoopla there was, but it was gratifying that everyone seemed to be behind me now. It’s true that I was hitting .315 and driving in runs, but I like to think that people finally understood what the streak was all about. For quite a few years I’d been thinking of it as a negative, mainly; I’d had to defend playing every day. Now it seemed like the streak had turned into a positive thing for me and for baseball.”
Ten days later, after the games of August 11, the players went on strike, halting the season. Negotiations continued without success. On September 14, Bud Selig, the sport’s commissioner, canceled the rest of the season and the postseason. There would be no World Series in 1994. It was one of baseball’s saddest days.
The dispute continued through the off-season, jeopardizing the start of the 1995 season. Ripken’s streak was swept into the issue. The owners devised a plan to use non-union “replacement” players. Though the product would be inferior, pro football’s owners had used the ploy in 1987 when their season was halted by a work stoppage, and it had caused cracks in the union. Now, if the Orioles fielded a replacement squad and played officially sanctioned games without Ripken, his streak would end at 2,009 straight games.
The owners knew fans would be furious if Ripken fell short for that reason. They hoped the union would be more likely to settle as a result. It was a situation without precedent. Several prominent players said they would support Ripken by crossing the picket line and playing just to keep his streak going; it was that important.
But Ripken, a long-standing union member, traveled to New York, met with the union’s leadership, and explained that he would not cross any picket line. “If they use replacement players, it’s not major league baseball and I won’t be playing,” he told reporters.
That meant Gene Budig, the president of the American League, would decide the fate of Ripken’s streak if replacement-player baseball became a reality. Would those games actually count? Budig gauged the feelings of several prominent figures in the game and discovered that Ripken had a lot of support. “I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that streak,” Oakland manager Tony La Russa said. “I’d rather not play [replacement] games and wait for the thing to get settled.”
In a further complication, Peter Angelos would not cooperate with the replacement-player scheme. The Orioles’ owner had made his fortune defending union members in class-action lawsuits against corporations, so unlike most of his fellow owners, he was pro-union. He would not field a team of replacement players, he said, and if other teams did, the Orioles would forfeit their games. So would a forfeit end Ripken’s streak?
On March 31, 1995, hours before Budig had to rule, a federal judge, Sonia Sotomayor, destined for the U.S. Supreme Court, effectively ended the dispute by granting an injunction sought by the National Labor Relations Board against the owners on a charge of unfair labor practices. The players voted to end the strike, and the owners reluctantly let them come back to work under the terms of the old collective bargaining agreement. Replacement-player baseball would not happen.
The American League announced a regular-season schedule beginning in late April, with each team playing 144 games. If Ripken did not sit any out, he would tie Gehrig’s record on September 5 and break it on September 6 when the Orioles played the California Angels at Camden Yards.
Suddenly, the prospect of his making history was real. The countdown began.
17
Gehrig
A TRAGIC TURN
After negotiating a $39,000 salary with the Yankees in 1938, Gehrig experienced a miserable spring training. He could not drive the ball. Hits eluded him.
One day, he swung so hard at strike three that he spun around and fell, drawing laughter. The Yankees were alarmed, and so was Gehrig. At one point, he sat out three straight games.
Once the season started, he fared little better. After a month, he was hitting under .200 with just two home runs. Manager Joe McCarthy dropped him to fifth in the batting order, then sixth. Some sportswriters suggested he had reached the inevitable point where his skills declined, perhaps exacerbated by his years of playing every day. No one imagined he was experiencing the stirrings of a fatal disease.
McCarthy never considered resting him. Gehrig was his captain. With DiMaggio replacing Ruth and Gehrig setting the tone, the Yankees had adopted a professional, businesslike approach. DiMaggio gracefully roamed the outfield and smacked home runs, but Gehrig was the heart of the squad. Even if he finally was showing his age, his struggles would not last for long, McCarthy figured. The manager recalled Gehrig slumping horribly early in 1937 and ending up with his usual terrific statistics.
Sure enough, Gehrig snapped out of his funk. When he drove in a run with a long double in Cleveland on May 22, he brought his average to .270. But his back tightened up as he legged out the hit. A trainer massaged his back on the field, enabling him to stay in the game and score on a subsequent hit, but he came out after that. The Yankees said it was just another flare-up of his lumbago. Gehrig disagreed, saying a cold had “settled” in his back.
The next day’s game was rained out, likely sparing him from extending his streak with another brief, early appearance. His back ached. But after the extra rest, he played all nine innings and hit a double in a loss to the Indians on May 24.
By playing both ends of a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium on May 30, he ran his streak to 1,999 games. The next morning, according to Jonathan Eig’s Gehrig biography, LUCKIEST MAN, Eleanor made a bold suggestion as the couple ate breakfast.
The Streak Page 23
