The Streak

by John Eisenberg

  The Padres had flown his parents in from Tampa for the occasion. Billy Williams also was present. “Only he and I know what you have to go through, playing hurt, staying lucky,” Williams told the crowd. “I don’t think he has a chance to catch Gehrig. But then, Garvey’s kind of special.”

  More than 40 years had passed since Gehrig’s streak ended. It was thought to be among the safest of records. Gehrig had played when teams did not travel as far, seasons were shorter, the media was more complicit. It was hard to imagine a current player not missing a game for 13 years. Between cross-country flights, weird start times, and a critical media braying in your ear, there was more to overcome. Billy Williams’s streak had been the longest since Gehrig’s, and Williams had barely made it halfway to the record. Now Garvey was slightly more than halfway there, but unlike Williams, he wanted to keep going.

  Dick Williams heeded Garvey’s directive to continue playing him every day after he set the record. On July 29, 1983, he ran his streak to 1,206 straight games as the Padres lost in Pittsburgh. Garvey was hitting .292, and the Padres were in the middle of the pack in the National League West.

  Back in San Diego, on July 31, they took on Atlanta in a doubleheader. Garvey singled in the bottom of the first of the opening game, then took third on a subsequent single. The Braves’ starting pitcher, Pascual Perez, an erratic right-hander, hurled a wild fastball over the next batter’s head. It sailed past the Braves’ catcher, Bruce Benedict, and Garvey dashed for home as Benedict scrambled to retrieve the ball and Perez raced in to cover home plate.

  It appeared Garvey was going to score easily, until the ball caromed sharply off the backstop directly to Benedict, who turned and flipped it to Perez. The pitcher grabbed the throw and bent to tag Garvey with his feet straddling the plate.

  As he came down the line, Garvey saw the sharp carom and knew his only hope was to avoid Perez’s tag and touch the plate. But Perez’s position forced him to make a decision. “They never teach you to straddle the plate like he did on that play,” Garvey recalled. “My split-second decision was whether to go into his knee and maybe hurt him, or go around and try to tag the plate. I went around.”

  As he dove headfirst and reached out for the plate, his hand hit Perez’s heel, bending his thumb awkwardly. Perez tagged him out, ending the inning. Garvey rose to his knees, holding his thumb with his other hand. He knew something was wrong; his thumb was numb. But he held out hope as the Padres’ trainer came out to take a look. “My thought was, ‘Maybe I can ice it, tape it, pinch-hit in the second game [of the doubleheader],’ and we would get it ready for tomorrow,” Garvey recalled.

  But when Garvey took his other hand away, his thumb drooped like a strand of cooked spaghetti. The trainer gasped. Garvey knew what it meant. He stood and walked slowly to the dugout. “I stepped inside the tunnel [to the clubhouse], and it hit me: this is it. I started to sweat, went to my knees. It almost felt like something had left your body. Seven and a half years of total commitment, and it was over,” he recalled.

  A teammate, Kurt Bevacqua, passed him in the tunnel. “He was squatting. I couldn’t see the extent of the injury, but I didn’t have to ask how bad it was. There was disappointment on his face,” Bevacqua said. As the game continued, Garvey went to the nearby Scripps Clinic for X-rays, which revealed the thumb was dislocated. Leaving the emergency room wearing an elbow-length cast, he told reporters, “It’s as low as I’ve felt in many, many years.”

  He returned to the ballpark and sat on the bench during the second game of the doubleheader. His streak, the fourth longest in history, ended at 1,207 straight games.

  “As long as he was healthy, he was doing the job, day in and day out,” said one of his former Dodgers teammates, shortstop Bill Russell, upon hearing the news. “What more can you ask? I hate to see a streak like his come to an end. He did a lot during that streak.”

  Lasorda also expressed disappointment. “It’s a shame, too bad,” the Dodgers’ manager said. “But I didn’t think he had a chance at Gehrig’s record.”

  The next day, Garvey learned he had torn ligaments in the thumb and needed surgery. “We’ll put a pin in. You’ll be ready in three months,” a surgeon said.

  “There’s no way I can play through it?” Garvey asked.

  “Not unless you want to bunt every time,” the surgeon said.

  He dove into his rehab program and was ready the next year. Although he could not muster much power and hit just eight home runs, his career low, he played in every game except one, led the Padres in runs batted in, and did not commit an error. The Padres suddenly had a potent blend of experience and youth with Garvey; a pair of former Yankees, closer Rich “Goose” Gossage and third baseman Graig Nettles; and second baseman Alan Wiggins, shortstop Garry Templeton, and outfielder Tony Gwynn. The franchise’s first division title resulted.

  Taking on the Cubs in the league championship series, they dropped the first two games in Chicago, but the rest of the best-of-five series was in California, giving them hope. They won Game 3 and were tied, 5–5, going into the bottom of the ninth of Game 4. Facing Lee Smith, the Cubs’ star closer, Gwynn singled, bringing Garvey to the plate. He had already driven in three runs, and with the crowd cheering, he launched a drive to right-center that cleared the fence, winning the game. The Padres completed the comeback the next day, winning Game 5 to take the pennant. Garvey was named the Most Valuable Player in the series. Although the Padres lost to Detroit in the World Series, it had been a season unlike any other in San Diego.

  Though now in his late 30s, Garvey played two more full seasons and part of a third for the Padres before injuries ended his career. From September 23, 1984, until September 6, 1986, he played in 305 straight games, the longest streak in Padres history. His record stood for more than two decades, until another first baseman, Adrian Gonzalez, surpassed it in 2009. Garvey’s Dodgers franchise record of 1,107 straight games remains unchallenged. The second-longest streak in that franchise’s history belongs to Matt Kemp, an outfielder who played in 399 straight games.

  No one has come within 400 games of Garvey’s National League record in the three decades since he set it.

  “One person out of 20 would look at your career and say that [streak] was Steve’s high point, but it’s my favorite subject to talk about,” Garvey said for this book. “Wanting to play every inning of every game, you realize, as you start to get deeper, there’s tremendous stress physically, mentally, and spiritually. To play every day, you have to do a lot of things to get to the starting line, play a game, and be ready for the next day. One thing leads to another, it consumes you, and it ends up defining who you are, your philosophy about the game. You can’t have a better legacy, as far as I’m concerned.”

  21

  Ripken

  A DAY OFF, AT LAST

  Although Ripken’s historic games ranked among the Orioles’ proudest occasions, their owner was not happy about the rest of the 1995 season. Peter Angelos had not paid $193 million for a team to watch it finish 15 games out of first place. Intent on engineering a quick reversal, he spent freely during the off-season, hiring a new manager, Davey Johnson, and signing several premier free agents, including an All-Star second baseman, Roberto Alomar; a top closer, Randy Myers; and a versatile veteran, B. J. Surhoff. Johnson was a popular hire, having played second base on the Orioles’ World Series–winning team in 1966 before becoming a manager and guiding the New York Mets to a World Series triumph in 1986.

  But Angelos’s most important hire was a new general manager, Pat Gillick, the former Orioles pitching prospect who had played with Senior in the minors in the 1960s. Gillick’s playing career had fizzled, but he had become a respected roster architect and talent evaluator, building a Toronto team that had won back-to-back World Series titles a few years earlier.

  With Gillick and Johnson in charge of a reinvigorated roster, Baltimore fans hoped the Orioles would become contenders again and maybe even make the playoffs for the fir
st time in 13 years.

  Amid the many changes, Ripken’s role initially seemed unchanged. He had been the Orioles’ shortstop since 1982 and was still the shortstop in 1996. Gillick had no issue with seeing Ripken’s name in the lineup every day. “He was still a good player,” Gillick said for this book. “He could hit. His range in the field wasn’t as good as it had been, but his positioning was good. He had been in the league so long that he knew where to play and got to balls.”

  But Gillick had always believed Ripken was a more natural third baseman. “Because of his size,” Gillick said. “Even when he was a kid, I viewed him as more suited to third. He wasn’t a prototypical shortstop like Luis Aparicio and those guys who were like little ballerinas. Junior did it in a little different fashion. For me, he just profiled better at third.”

  Now that Gillick ran the Orioles, he had a say in where Ripken played. He mentioned to Johnson the idea of moving Ripken to third, clearing the way for Manny Alexander to play shortstop. A 25-year-old from the Dominican Republic, Alexander was a slick fielder who had hit .300 in spring training and added speed to the Orioles’ lumbering lineup.

  “I thought it might take a little pressure off Junior,” Gillick recalled. “Playing third, you’re not quite as active as you are at shortstop. You’re not involved in as many plays.”

  When Ripken slumped at the plate early in the season, Johnson publicly floated the idea, telling reporters it was possible Ripken would change positions. Johnson knew Ripken would not like it, but after managing in New York, with its tumultuous tabloid culture swirling at the ballparks, he was accustomed to controversy and unafraid of clubhouse tension.

  On May 1, Johnson sent Alexander in to pinch-run for Ripken in the bottom of the eighth with the Orioles down by a run to the Yankees before a packed house at Camden Yards. Ripken was shocked; he had not been pulled from a game in doubt since 1981. A few weeks later, the manager pulled Ripken from another game, then briefly dropped him to seventh in the batting order. Fans wondered if Johnson was signaling that the streak might end soon.

  As if challenged, Ripken responded in his typical fashion, with actions rather than words. In a 12–8 win on May 28 in Seattle, he clouted three home runs and drove in eight runs. In early June, he hit balls over the fence in three straight games.

  But while he continued to play every day, his younger brother Bill, back with the Orioles in a reserve role after playing for Texas and Cleveland, noticed a subtle change in Junior’s routine. “He had always taken batting practice every day when I was on the team before, but when I came back, he would take a BP off now and then,” Bill recalled. “We also weren’t taking infield every day, so there were days when he showed up later. It was his way of taking a mental break to clear his head when he wasn’t faring well at the plate.”

  The idea of taking a real break, a day or two off, never crossed Ripken’s mind. If he ended the streak now, so soon after passing Gehrig, he believed it would indicate that he had played every day just to set a record, which, in his mind, was not the case.

  Baseball fans in America assumed Ripken was the game’s greatest Ironman, but a Japanese major leaguer, Sachio Kinugasa, actually had a longer streak, having played in 2,215 straight games for the Hiroshima Carp between 1970 and 1987. His “world record” streak was 85 games longer than Gehrig’s. Ripken was due to tie and pass it during a series in Kansas City in mid-June 1996.

  There was little buzz as Ripken neared the record. The focus in Baltimore was back on the Orioles’ playoff prospects rather than Ripken’s endurance. Everyone, including Ripken, was “streaked out.” But when the time came, Kinugasa flew into Kansas City, ate lunch with Ripken, and met up with him at the Orioles’ hotel bar after a game. Though an interpreter had to sit with them to keep their conversation going, they hit it off.

  Balding and diminutive, Kinugasa was older than Ripken by more than a decade. Talking to him, Ripken was transported to another time. “It was how I perceived talking to Lou Gehrig would be like,” Ripken recalled. “I thoroughly enjoyed it. There’s just a small club of people who know what it is like to have played in so many games in a row.”

  Kinugasa, who had played third base and first base for Hiroshima, had a lot in common with Ripken as a player. Both were adept in the field and powerful at the plate. Kinugasa hit more than 500 home runs. Ripken was closing in on 400. Kinugasa’s .270 career average was almost identical to Ripken’s .267 figure at that point.

  Kinugasa’s story was familiar to Japanese fans. His father was a black American serviceman who had been stationed in Okinawa after World War II and abandoned the family after fathering a child. Kinugasa had dark features and endured taunts as a youngster because he was not 100 percent Japanese. Neither of his authorized biographies mentioned his parentage, a painful subject. Kinugasa learned English in hopes of being able to communicate if his father ever returned, but he never needed it.

  His ethnicity impacted his playing style. In a country where short, compact batting strokes were the norm, he favored a long, American-style swing, taking such aggressive cuts that he gave himself whiplash. His coaches tolerated it because, as one said, Kinugasa “was not Japanese so it could not be helped.”

  As a young man, he liked fast cars and late nights on the town. He spent his signing bonus on a Ford Galaxy. But he also spent hours in front of a mirror with a bat in his hands, practicing his swing. He started out as a catcher, but at five feet nine and 180 pounds, he took such a pounding that the Carp switched him to the infield. Kinugasa would go on to play in 13 All-Star Games.

  His consecutive-game streak began in 1970, at the end of his third season as a regular. He was 23 years old and would play until he was 40 without missing a game. The Japanese season consisted of 130 games, 32 fewer than the American season in Ripken’s era. But spring training began in January in Japan, and players endured rigorous pregame and off-day physical training, ratcheting up the physical demands.

  Kinugasa’s streak survived several close calls. Known for crowding the plate, he led the league in getting hit by pitches and suffered five broken bones over the years. In August 1978, he was hit in the back, diagnosed with a shoulder blade fracture, and told not to play. He had appeared in more than 1,100 straight games. The next day, he showed up at the park and swung his bat as hard as ever in the cage before the game. The manager let him play. “If I swung the bat, the pain in my shoulder would last only an instant. If I had to stay home and watch the game on TV, I would hurt all over for three hours,” Kinugasa explained.

  It took him 18 years to accomplish what Gehrig did in 13. When he passed Gehrig on June 13, 1987, Japan celebrated wildly, much as it did when slugger Sadaharu Oh passed the home run totals of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron. Hiroshima’s ballpark was packed, and the game was halted for a long ceremony that included a parade and a confetti shower.

  Clyde Haberman, the New York Times’ Tokyo bureau chief, explained Kinugasa’s appeal: “He is a rock of consistency, and, as such, the salariman’s hero. The salariman [a Japanese word for ‘salary man’] is Japan’s average Joe. He is the guy who puts on a blue suit every morning, rides the train to work for an hour and a half, puts in 10–12 hours, drinks late into the night with his colleagues, then heads home for a few hours’ sleep so that he can start all over again the next day. Like the salariman, Kinugasa is there as promised every day.”

  After playing in every game for the rest of the 1987 season, Kinugasa retired. Now, nine years later, as Ripken and Kinugasa became acquainted in Kansas City, Ripken was surprised to discover that his own approach borrowed heavily from the guiding philosophy of Japanese baseball, where the team comes first. “There, it is seen as an honor to play every day. It is seen as your obligation and responsibility. That’s exactly how I felt,” Ripken said. Having felt compelled to defend his motivation for so long, he was excited to come across a kindred spirit. He felt he would be understood in Japan, as Kinugasa was, and not face accusations of selfishness.

&n
bsp; “You’re a baseball player, doing something everyone else in the country would love to do. Your obligation is to come and play. It’s the manager’s job to make out the lineup. The manager created that thing called the streak by putting you in there. You responded,” Ripken said.

  He broke Kinugasa’s record in Kansas City on June 14, 1996. On the surface, it did not compare with 2,131 as an occasion. There were thousands of empty seats at Kauffman Stadium. No banners dropped, no soaring music played, and Ripken did not take a victory lap. But it was moving in its own way. Ripken and Kinugasa exchanged gifts on the field before the game and shared the commemorative first-pitch honors. Kinugasa took a ball to the mound, raised his arms in triumph over his head, unbuttoned his jacket, and threw a strike to Ripken as the fans cheered.

  After the top of the fifth, the game was official. The crowd stood and cheered, and Ripken came out of the dugout and waved his cap. He retreated to the dugout, emerged again, waved his cap again, and sought out Kinugasa, who was applauding in a seat by the Baltimore dugout. Ripken walked to the railing, and Kinugasa shuffled past several fans to meet him. They shook hands.

  After the game, they met with reporters. A large Japanese media contingent was covering the event.

  “Was there any way this night could have compared to the night you passed Gehrig last September?” Ripken was asked.

  He chuckled. He knew no one else thought it compared. But he looked over at Kinugasa and smiled.