Hudler was disappointed. He had a memorabilia collection at his house in California, and a ball from this game would make a swell addition. He also had been asking Ripken all year for an inscribed bat, wanting to hang it on the wall next to another bat signed by Pete Rose. He had mentioned the bat to Ripken every time the Orioles and Angels had played that year, and Ripken had promised to sign one for him. But he had not done it, and now Ripken was swamped. Hudler was not optimistic about leaving town with a bat.
Once the game began, Hudler forced himself to focus on his job. He struck out in the second inning and handled several plays at second base without incident. But he kept wondering how he could get a ball. Barnett was right: his best chance was to record the third out of an inning in the field.
After the 22-minute interruption in the middle of the fifth—the break that included Ripken’s “victory lap”—the game resumed, with the Angels in the field for the bottom of the inning. Boskie walked the first hitter, then quickly recorded two outs. But the Orioles’ Rafael Palmeiro singled, and Bobby Bonilla reached on an error, loading the bases. Ripken stepped to the plate. It was hard to say who was more exhausted, Ripken or the fans, but the fans rose again, hoping to see a grand slam. Boskie fired a fastball. Ripken swung and made contact. The ball looped high into the air in shallow right-center field.
Hudler saw an opportunity. This was his chance to record a third out. He scrambled desperately after the pop-up. “I ran and ran and ran,” he recalled, “and the ball hung up there like my personal eight-carat diamond in the Baltimore sky.” As it plummeted to the ground, the fans shrieked, thinking Ripken was about to drive in more runs. But Hudler, on the dead run, swooped in and grabbed it for the third out.
As the fans groaned, Hudler raised his arms in triumph. “Everyone immediately started booing. They thought I was showing up Cal,” Hudler said. “They had no idea I had just caught the souvenir ball of a lifetime.”
He turned and headed for the dugout, still on the dead run. His teammates, anxious to congratulate him for the fine defensive play, waited for him on the top step. But Hudler sprinted past their outstretched hands and dashed into the tunnel leading to the clubhouse. “I ran straight to my locker, got out my briefcase, put the ball it in, and locked the briefcase,” he said. Then he returned to the dugout. “My teammates were like, ‘Hud, what the hell?’” he recalled. “I told them, ‘Hey, dude, I got my ball.’ I was just so happy.”
Years later, Fred Tyler, the visitors’ clubhouse manager that night at Camden Yards, still smiled about Hudler. “He just came bursting into the clubhouse like the biggest thing had happened,” Tyler recalled. “A few other guys on the Angels also got balls when they made a third out that night. Everyone wanted a keepsake.”
After the game, as Hudler recounted his ball story to a gaggle of reporters, a batboy approached him with a bat in hand. “Excuse me, Hud, this is for you. It’s from Cal,” the batboy said. It was the bat Hudler had been asking for, signed by Ripken.
“I said, ‘Oh, my God! He did it! He kept his word!’ I was so thrilled he remembered me on that special day,” Hudler said.
When the Angels flew back to California that night, Hudler carried his bat, opened his briefcase, took out his ball, and gripped both items. They were destined for his living room wall.
“That night was the highlight of my career,” he recalled, “and I went 0-for-4.”
The Orioles were off the next day. No one needed a break more than Ripken, but the celebration of his achievement continued with a parade in his honor in downtown Baltimore, put on by the city. Ripken, his wife, and their kids sat atop a float carpeted with 2,131 baseballs. Ripken wore his white home jersey, which glistened in the noonday sunshine. Thousands of fans lined the route and cheered as he rode by.
At the end of the parade, Ripken stepped onto an outdoor stage at the Inner Harbor, Baltimore’s iconic waterfront development. Reprising the postgame ceremonies of the previous two nights, he listened patiently to praise from team officials, local politicians, and business leaders. Then it was his turn. With his son asleep in his wife’s lap, Ripken spoke for nearly 20 minutes.
“Somebody just said I should run around the harbor; I barely had enough energy to make it around that little ballpark last night,” he said, drawing laughs.
He continued: “This has been one of the most overwhelming experiences of my life, so much it’s hard for me to put in my words some of my feelings about the sentiments you all have expressed to me. All I ever wanted to do was be a baseball player and all I ever wanted to do is be a baseball player in this city.”
Toward the end of his remarks, he admitted there had been times over the years when he had wondered if he needed a day off.
“What would Baltimore want me to do?” he asked.
The crowd answered as one: “Play!”
Before the Orioles’ next game, the opener of a weekend series in Cleveland, Ripken took the lineup card out to the umpires, and Eddie Murray, now playing for the Indians, brought out their lineup card. Fans gave the close friends a standing ovation.
Ripken continued to receive cheers and ovations for the rest of the season. He had become baseball’s feel-good ambassador. The commissioner asked him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the opening game of the World Series, a moment rich in symbolism after the strike the year before. Before Game 1 between the Atlanta Braves and New York Yankees on October 25, 1995, Ripken emerged from the home dugout in Atlanta, strode to the mound, and threw a strike. The fans roared. It was almost as if the holder of baseball’s Ironman record was the game.
20
Ironmen
THE TRUE BELIEVER
Steve Garvey watched ESPN’s broadcast of Ripken’s record-breaking game with a mixture of admiration and frustration. Now 46 years old, the retired All-Star first baseman for the Dodgers and San Diego Padres had once played in 1,207 straight games, setting the National League consecutive-game record. Unlike Ripken, who insisted he was not pursuing Gehrig’s record, Garvey had readily admitted he wanted to break it. But an injury ended his chance, and now someone else had passed Gehrig.
“I had no intention of stopping,” Garvey said for this book years later. “When my streak was long enough that the press started asking me about Gehrig, I said it was the ultimate record in sports as far as individual performance, the ultimate commitment by a team sport player. I said I would be honored if, over a long period of time, I could catch Lou Gehrig and go by him.”
Garvey was a true believer in the Ironman principle, the importance of playing every day. When his 19-year major league career ended in 1988, he owned a league record and two franchise records for consecutive games played. There was no doubt where he stood on the question of whether it was a good idea to play every day year after year. “You want to be a good teammate, be productive, be a leader, set an example,” Garvey said. “That culminates with the feeling of, ‘Do you want to be the person who is always there for your teammates?’”
Growing up in Florida in the 1950s, Garvey was around the Dodgers. His father drove their team bus during spring training in Vero Beach, and Garvey served as a batboy, picking up balls and bantering with the players, including his favorite, first baseman Gil Hodges. Slightly more than a decade later, the Dodgers made him their first-round draft pick in 1968. Though he stood just five feet ten, he had a thick trunk and huge forearms—he had played football at Michigan State—and could turn on a pitch.
In a quick rise through the Dodgers’ minor league system, Garvey clouted 50 home runs. But once he made the big league club, the Dodgers could not find a position for him. He lacked the speed to play in the outfield, and the Dodgers’ infield was set, with Bill Buckner playing first base, Davey Lopes at second, Bill Russell at shortstop, and Ron Cey at third.
Walter Alston, the Dodgers’ manager, an avuncular former high school science teacher, wanted Garvey’s bat in the lineup and gave him extended looks at second base and third base in 1971
and 1972, but Garvey’s defense was too shaky. Finally, between games of a doubleheader in Cincinnati on June 23, 1973, the manager asked Garvey a question a Little League coach might ask of a 12-year-old: “Son, you ever play first base?”
Von Joshua, the Dodgers’ left fielder, was out with a broken hand, and Alston wanted to replace him with Buckner, who was athletic enough to play the outfield. Could Garvey step in for Buckner at first? “Sure,” Garvey replied. In truth, as far as he could remember, he had played only one game in Little League and another in Triple A at the position. But his positive reply encouraged Alston to give him a shot. In the second game of the doubleheader, he singled, doubled, and dug a couple of throws out of the dirt, and the Dodgers won. Alston kept him at first base in the coming days, and pretty soon the arrangement was no longer an experiment. Garvey was the Dodgers’ first baseman.
In 1974, Garvey was so productive at the plate, dependable in the clutch, and solid in the field that he made the National League All-Star team as a write-in candidate with more than a million votes. Then he won the league’s Most Valuable Player award after hitting .312 for the season and driving in 111 runs. His story was almost too hokey for Hollywood—a team’s former batboy becoming a star at his hero’s position—but it was real.
The Dodgers had been in a rut; they had not won 90 games in a season or made the postseason since the mid-1960s. Garvey’s emergence changed their fortunes. In 1974, they won the National League West and defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates in the league championship series. After Alston retired, they won two more pennants, in 1977 and 1978, under their new manager, Tommy Lasorda, a talkative showman who entertained movie stars in the clubhouse. Although they lost to the Oakland A’s in the 1974 World Series and also lost to the Yankees in the 1977 and 1978 Series, the Dodgers ruled Southern California’s sports scene. Their attendance jumped from 1.8 million in 1972 to 3.3 million in 1978.
Garvey was a vital piece of their renaissance, hitting .319 in 1975, clouting 33 home runs in 1977, and leading the league in hits in 1978. He almost seemed a fictional creation, so perfect he could not be real. Aside from his strong play, he had magazine-cover looks—with coiffed dark hair, a square jaw, and a bright smile—and a beautiful wife and two young daughters. Media members who asked for his time received a firm handshake and thoughtful responses. Fans loved him. Advertisers loved him more. A Southern California suburb even named a junior high school after him. Columnists speculated he might have a future in politics.
Once he had a starting spot, Garvey never wanted to take a day off. Though he had come of age in the turbulent sixties and shaggy-haired seventies, he was a child of the fifties, old-fashioned about his work responsibilities. He believed the Dodgers paid him to lead the team and perform for the noisy crowds that filled their ballpark. In 1974, his MVP season, he sat out six games. The next year, he missed two, in early September, with the flu. His replacement struck out three times, and Garvey was back in the lineup on September 3, 1975, the starting date for his endurance streak. He completed a full schedule of games for the first time in 1976, Alston’s final season, and Lasorda handled him the same way in 1977, starting him in 160 games and twice using him as a pinch hitter.
In 1978, Garvey started every game, surpassing 500 in a row late that season. “It kind of crept up on you,” he recalled. “You win the first-base job in 1973, have a good year in 1974, and start playing every game. After a while, you notice you have a streak. Alston or Lasorda would say, ‘Why don’t you sit one out?’ Or ‘You’re struggling, why not sit and watch?’ I had no interest in that. Are you kidding? How am I going to make adjustments sitting on the bench? I make adjustments in the context of one at-bat to the next. You can’t do that from the bench.”
In 1980, he played in every game for the fifth straight season, starting all but one. In the second game of a doubleheader on May 26, he pinch-hit in the ninth inning to keep his streak going. By the end of the season, he had played in 835 straight games.
“It takes over your life. You dream about it,” he recalled. “In my dream, I would be on the freeway at 3:30 in the afternoon, turn on the radio, and the Dodger game was on. It was the bottom of the eighth, and I’d go, ‘My God, it’s a day game today!’ I’d rush to the stadium and get dressed just in time to see the last out, a pop-up, and that was it, the streak was over.”
But that only happened in his dreams. In his waking hours, his endurance was part of what seemed a perfect baseball life. Then cracks formed. Some teammates soured on his wholesome act, believing it was calculated. One day in the clubhouse, when pitcher Don Sutton insulted his wife, Garvey grabbed him and they wrestled. In 1981, Garvey’s wife left him, claiming he had cheated on her. He played on through the turmoil, never missing a game.
“I had migraines, the flu, hairline fractures, hamstrings. I was still able to go out and perform,” he recalled. “Maybe I was slowed down a rung or didn’t quite have the same bat speed as usual. But I could do the job defensively, get the runner over offensively, do the things a teammate needs to do. I was not going to be the guy who sat out because of an upset stomach or a little headache.”
When his production declined, some commentators and fans suggested he should start taking more days off.
“I tried not to think too much about the critics,” he recalled. “Unless you played the game, you can’t comprehend it. To criticize someone who wants to play every inning of every game, you’re doing what your contract says, what your franchise wants, what your responsibility to the fans is. The critics know not of what they speak. There’s always going to be adversity. You just play through it.”
Several hours before the Dodgers played the Atlanta Braves on June 8, 1982, Garvey entered the home clubhouse at Dodger Stadium and checked the lineup. His name had been scratched out. Rick Monday was playing first. Garvey blinked. “For a second, I really wondered what was going on,” he said later. Then he realized it was a joke. His consecutive-game streak was due to reach 1,000 games that night. Lasorda was not about to sit him.
That night, 44,714 fans gave him an ovation when his achievement was announced. Only four other players in major league history had extended playing streaks this long: Gehrig, Everett Scott, Joe Sewell, and Billy Williams. “It’s a source of pride, the ability to produce every day of my contract, almost every inning,” he told reporters.
Garvey was 33 years old, hitting .250, his bat lukewarm enough that Lasorda had ended his streak of almost 300 straight starts earlier in the season. (Lasorda did make sure to get him into the game as a pinch hitter to keep his playing streak going.) Garvey’s contract was up at the end of the 1982 season, and there were whispers he might not return. The Dodgers had a top prospect, Greg Brock, ready to play first base. Although they offered Garvey a long-term deal in July, he sensed tepid interest and turned it down. In the final game of the season—his final game with the Dodgers, it turned out—he collected three hits while running his streak to 1,107 straight games.
When he hit the open market as a free agent that winter, the San Diego Padres, Chicago Cubs, and San Francisco Giants all pursued him. He ended up signing a five-year deal with the Padres worth $8.56 million. Having experienced just one winning season since their birth as an expansion team in 1969, the Padres hoped he could help them change their fortunes.
When he joined the Padres, Garvey was just 10 games short of Billy Williams’s National League consecutive-game record. Dick Williams, the Padres’ manager, was going to make sure he passed that threshold. But around the batting cage one day in spring training, Williams told reporters he might rest Garvey “now and then” after Garvey set the National League record.
Garvey overheard the comment. “Please don’t do that, Dick. Gehrig’s record is only six years away,” Garvey said.
Dave Anderson, a New York Times columnist, was standing nearby and asked Garvey if he really thought about Gehrig’s record. “It’s a long way away,” Garvey replied with a smile. “God would have to visit
me and say, ‘Steve, I’m going to keep you healthy.’ But it’s in the back of my mind.”
He was familiar enough with the numbers to quickly calculate the math. “At 1,107, I need another 1,024 to break it,” he told Anderson. “With 162 games in a season, that’s six more and part of a seventh.”
Garvey believed he had a chance. Although he was 34 years old, he stayed in terrific shape and had batted .292 with 86 runs batted in the year before. The Dodgers might not have tolerated his desire to play every day for much longer, but the Padres surely would. Garvey gave them an identity. Their season ticket sales were up. The marketing staff could not believe how helpful he was.
His move to San Diego set up a theatrical scene early in the 1983 season. He would tie and pass Billy Williams’s record during a series in, of all places, Los Angeles, on his first trip to Dodger Stadium as an opponent.
He conceded he felt “very strange” as he drove to the stadium on April 15, 1983, before he tied the record that night. He had to remind himself to go to the visitors’ clubhouse rather than the one he had inhabited for so long. A small mountain of flowers, balloons, and gifts awaited him at his locker, along with a chocolate fudge cake from Dodgers pitcher Jerry Reuss and his wife, which came in a box inscribed SLUGGO, AT LEAST 1,117 CALORIES IN EVERY BITE, BECAUSE WE LOVE YOU.
During batting practice, Garvey exchanged strained greetings with Lasorda and crossed paths with Brock, his replacement. Fans behind the visitors’ dugout unfurled a banner reading THE DODGERS BLUE IT. WE LOVE YOU, STEVE.
When he batted in the top of the first, the sold-out crowd stood and cheered for more than a minute. Standing outside the batter’s box, Garvey hoisted his bat aloft and slowly turned in a circle while blowing kisses and waving, making sure he directed his affection to every corner of the park. The next night, he became the National League’s all-time Ironman, and in a sporting gesture, the Dodgers commemorated the feat, holding a “night” for their estranged star. Garvey was presented with plaques, scrolls, and gifts after the game. He gave an emotional speech and thanked the fans. “I consider you the tenth player,” he said. “There aren’t many words to describe how I feel, but there are three, and ‘I love you.’”
The Streak Page 29
