The Streak

by John Eisenberg

  “In some ways,” he said, “this was more fulfilling.”

  Shortly after the All-Star break in 1996, the Orioles lost five straight games and dropped 10 games behind the first-place Yankees. Gillick and Johnson made the move they had discussed, announcing that Ripken would move to third base so Manny Alexander could play shortstop.

  Ripken was not happy. He did not believe the Orioles were better with Alexander at shortstop. But Gillick and Johnson were adamant, so on July 15, 1996, after playing in 2,216 straight games at shortstop, he played third base against Toronto at Camden Yards.

  The Blue Jays’ first two batters tried to bunt, blatantly challenging him. Ripken smiled and gestured to Toronto manager Cito Gaston. “I said, ‘Take off the bunt sign, would you?’” Ripken recalled. The first ball that came his way was a sharp grounder down the line, hit by Toronto catcher Charlie O’Brien in the top of the third. Ripken dove, speared the ball, rose to one knee, and threw across the diamond, beating O’Brien. As cheers echoed, Ripken stared ahead with a drop-dead expression, looking as if he wanted to give the world the middle finger.

  The Alexander experiment failed. Paralyzed by the prospect of replacing his famous teammate, Alexander went hitless for a week and returned to the bench. Ripken moved back to shortstop and ended the season with a .278 average, 26 home runs, and 102 runs batted in—his best numbers in five years.

  The Yankees won the division, but the Orioles also qualified for the playoffs with a late surge, making it as a wild card, the second-place finisher with the best record. After upsetting the favored Cleveland Indians in a first-round playoff series, they lost to the Yankees in the league championship series. No one suggested Ripken was tired. In his first playoff appearance in 13 years, he batted .342.

  After Ripken finally ended his consecutive-game streak near the end of the 1998 season, the New York Times’ Buster Olney, formerly the Orioles beat writer for the Baltimore Sun, wrote that the Ironman record had become “an albatross” for the team since Ripken passed Gehrig. Ripken had resisted change, Olney wrote, and challenged suggestions that his skills were declining, making life difficult for his superiors.

  It certainly was true that the Orioles’ managers had to play him in 1996, 1997, and 1998. Even though Ripken steadfastly claimed otherwise, his Ironman record was so popular and important that neither the manager nor the front office had any say in when the streak ended. “You knew it wasn’t a decision you were going to make. He was going to make it. I don’t think there was anything we could have said to influence him,” Gillick recalled.

  But Gillick did not recall the streak as being horrendously damaging to the team’s fortunes. “The fact that he was so committed to being out there every day was wonderful,” Gillick said. Advanced statistics, calculated years later in some cases, indicated that he continued to perform at his customary levels at least through 1996. His WAR (wins above replacement) figure, reflecting how many wins he was worth compared to a statistically average player, was higher in 1996 than in 1993.

  Seeking to control as much about the situation as he could, Gillick finally achieved his goal of moving Ripken to third base in 1997. He signed Mike Bordick, a veteran free-agent shortstop known as a dependable fielder. Ripken had not wanted to move to third to make way for Manny Alexander, but it was hard to quibble with making way for Bordick, who was five years younger.

  “Ripken and Bordick could have been brothers. They had the same approach to the game—just put your head down and grind it out,” Gillick said. “I’m not sure Junior was crazy about moving, but he liked Bordick, and that made it easy.”

  Changing positions did not change Ripken’s approach to playing every day. The Orioles led their division all season in 1997 and finished with 98 wins. Ripken, after playing on so many losing teams, relished contributing to a winner.

  As the season unfolded, though, playing every day became harder. Ripken experienced back stiffness and soreness, which he initially dismissed as the by-products of playing a new position that required him to crouch and lunge more. He steeled himself and kept going, but when he woke with a dull ache in his left hip on July 14, he knew his position was not the issue. Although he played that night, collecting three hits, he could not sleep after the game and wound up seeing the sunrise from the hot tub on his deck. He called Richie Bancells, who consulted with the team’s doctors. They all met at Johns Hopkins Hospital a few hours later. X-rays and an MRI identified a herniated disc in Ripken’s back.

  The good news, Ripken was told, was if he took an anti-inflammatory injection and rested for six weeks, he probably would be fine in September and could play in the postseason.

  But there also was bad news: “You can’t play with this,” one doctor said. “You’re going to have to sit out the six weeks after taking the injection.”

  Ron Shapiro was present for the meeting. “There was a whole group of doctors,” Shapiro recalled, “and the conclusion was, Cal couldn’t play.”

  The conversation’s significance was not lost on anyone in the room. It seemed Ripken’s famous streak was about to end. But Ripken was dubious. “Why can’t I play?” he asked.

  “It’s too painful,” one doctor said.

  The Orioles were playing Toronto that night at Camden Yards. Shapiro and Ripken spoke with John Maroon, the Orioles’ director of public relations, about holding a press conference before the game to announce the streak was over. “I can’t remember who called who, but there was definitely a conversation about that,” Shapiro recalled.

  As Ripken took the anti-inflammatory injection, his mind whirred through his options. Before leaving Hopkins, he asked a doctor if he could further injure himself by playing. No, the doctor said, if you can stand the pain, you can play. Ripken mulled that over as he and Shapiro left the hospital and shared a ride to Camden Yards. “We were in his Tahoe,” Shapiro recalled. “He was sort of doubting the decision not to play. He already owned the consecutive-game record, but he was still the Ironman.”

  Maroon never called a press conference. “When we got to the stadium, he went straight into the batting cage and started to hit off a tee, and then he started to stretch,” Shapiro recalled. In the end, he played even though his leg ached, going 0-for-4 and making four plays in the field without an error as the Orioles built an 8–2 lead.

  Johnson knew what Ripken had experienced that afternoon and could tell he was struggling. “Is it hurting?” the manager asked.

  “A little bit,” Ripken replied.

  Knowing that was a major admission, Johnson took him out before the top of the eighth. “I was trying to preserve him,” Johnson said later. “I figured he’d had enough. He has said he’d let me know when that was the case. But I’ve come to know that, with him, he never lets you know.”

  Despite pain he later described as “a fire inside your leg,” Ripken continued to play every night. It was easily the toughest physical challenge he had faced during the streak. His back was stiff. His leg throbbed. One night, he lunged for a ground ball and his leg gave way, sending him tumbling. It was a discouraging moment; he could not even reach for a ball. “This really might be the end,” he thought. “There was a door behind home plate, and I visualized myself calling time out and walking straight through that door, and that was going to be how the streak ended,” Ripken recalled.

  But he did not leave the game. “I was leading off the next inning [after I tumbled], and I went, ‘Well, let me at least give it a try at bat,’” he said. He hit a line drive to left for a single, and as he ran to first, he thought, “Well, I guess it’s OK.”

  It was not. After a six-hour charter flight from Baltimore to Oakland at the end of July, his back was so stiff he could barely walk off the plane. Before playing against the A’s the next night, he underwent hours of therapy hooked up to an electronic stimulator, with node patches all over his back. He easily could have ended the streak then, but Johnson “practically begged me to play,” Ripken said later. The Orioles led the d
ivision, but with Alomar on the disabled list and outfielder Eric Davis taking chemotherapy treatments after a shocking cancer diagnosis, the team needed the stability Ripken provided, Johnson felt.

  The disruption to Ripken’s normal pattern of nerve signals was so severe that it caused his leg to atrophy. “I wound up losing an inch of size off my left thigh and an inch of size off my left calf,” he recalled. “Somehow, some way, I made it through.”

  It took some ingenuity. Instead of sitting on the bench between innings, he went into the clubhouse and draped himself over a chair, stretching his back. “Standing, it hurt. Sitting down, it hurt. Laying down, sleeping, it hurt. But I found that one position that didn’t hurt, against a chair. That was the one position that gave me some relief,” Ripken recalled.

  Brady Anderson just shook his head as his teammate pressed on. “There was no way most guys would play through anything like that. That was brutal to watch,” Anderson said. “So, yes, he was durable and all that, but he also was really tough.”

  In early August, Ripken’s back was so sore one day that he contemplated sitting out. “You have to try,” Anderson told him. “If it hurts too badly, you can come out in the third inning.”

  Ripken elected to give it a shot, “but I’m only doing that once,” he told Anderson. “If it keeps hurting, I’m not going to keep going out there for the sake of the streak.”

  He played the whole game.

  His determination would impact several teammates. In July of that season, Anderson, wanting to play in every game, eschewed a doctor’s recommendation that he undergo an appendectomy. He wound up missing just two games. Several years later, Surhoff played back-to-back seasons without missing a game.

  Few outsiders knew the extent of Ripken’s struggle as he played through the pain in 1996, partly because he hit .320 in the six weeks after he took the injection. “Knowing you had an issue really increased your focus,” he recalled. After the pain abruptly vanished, as promised, around Labor Day, his bat cooled, and he hit just .156 in September. “I had used up so much energy to focus on getting through the pain. Maybe your guard is let down, and the urgency isn’t there as much,” he recalled.

  Predictably, his late-season slump promoted a flurry of second-guessing. “Ripken is hurt, and he’s hurting the Orioles. If he doesn’t rest his back before the postseason, he might even hurt them when it counts the most,” Baltimore Sun columnist Ken Rosenthal wrote, renewing a familiar talk-show debate.

  On the last day of the regular season, Ripken doubled in his first at-bat, walked in the top of the third, and came out of the game in the fourth. His season was over. For the 15th straight year, and the last time, he had played in every game.

  As the postseason began, some columnists wondered whether he should have ended the streak to rest up for the playoffs. But his back and leg felt fine now, and it showed. The Orioles played two series that October, defeating Seattle in the divisional round before losing to Cleveland in the league championship series, and Ripken was productive, collecting 15 hits, including four doubles and a home run. He had now played in 28 straight postseason games, hitting .336.

  Despite their back-to-back playoff seasons, the Orioles were in chaos. Angelos had strong opinions about who should be on the roster and what the manager and general manager should do. Weary of being overruled, Gillick could hardly wait until his contract expired after the 1998 season. Johnson departed even sooner. When he asked for an extension and Angelos balked, he resigned on the day he was elected 1997 American League Manager of the Year.

  Ray Miller, the pitching coach, took over as manager. The Orioles went 10-2 to start the 1998 season, then sank into a tailspin that included a nine-game losing streak. By Memorial Day, they were 15 games out. Ripken, now 37 years old, still played solid defense every day, but his offense tailed off. He would end the season with 14 homers, matching his lowest total in a non-strike season. His 67 runs batted in were his fewest in a full season. His streak reached 2,500 straight games on April 25, but he began to think about ending it. While he had never believed his managers were “trapped,” forced to play him, he could see Ray Miller did not need this.

  “You always felt you had support for playing every day, and then, all of a sudden, you felt like you didn’t; you were losing some support for that,” Ripken recalled. “My thought was, ‘If we fall out of the race, this would be a good time to end it.’”

  After the Orioles lost 10 straight games in August to end their playoff hopes, Ripken plotted the streak’s end. His initial idea was to do it in the Orioles’ season finale at Fenway Park in Boston. “The statement that would make is, ‘I could have played 162 if I wanted, but let’s put it to bed,’” Ripken recalled.

  Kelly talked him out of that. “You should do it at a home game, where everyone has followed you,” she said.

  Ripken saw that she was right. Only his wife, parents, and a few friends knew of his plan. He wanted to avoid the hoopla he knew would occur if he announced he would sit out a game.

  Before the game on September 17, Ripken approached Miller in the manager’s office and mentioned he was contemplating ending the streak before the season ended. But he did not indicate that he had a plan in mind. When the Baltimore Sun’s Joe Strauss asked him about the possibility, Ripken coyly replied, “You’ll have to watch and see.”

  On September 20, the Orioles played their final home game of the 1998 season. It was a Sunday night affair against the Yankees, televised nationally on ESPN. Several hours before the first pitch, Miller wrote out a lineup with Ripken batting sixth and playing third. But Ripken approached the manager after batting practice and said simply, “I think it’s time.”

  At first, Miller thought it was a joke. But he quickly realized Ripken was serious and reworked the lineup, replacing Ripken with Ryan Minor, one of the Orioles’ top infield prospects.

  Ripken called Angelos to give the owner the news personally. “He is an amazing athlete,” Angelos told the Baltimore Sun later that evening. “I don’t think there will ever be another Cal Ripken or anyone capable of accomplishing what he has accomplished.”

  Minor did not find out he was playing until 15 minutes before the game, when Miller gave him the news in the dugout. “So you’re in there at third base,” Miller said.

  “Does he know?” Minor said, eyes widening.

  Miller smiled. Yes, the Ironman knew his streak was ending.

  “The funny thing was, Ryan didn’t want to take the field because he thought it was a prank,” Ripken recalled. “He was a rookie, thinking he was going to go out there and everyone would laugh at him and then I would come out and play. I went, ‘Ryan, this is for real. Go play.’”

  The Orioles took the field with Minor stationed at third. There was no announcement. The game just began. The Orioles’ starting pitcher, Doug Johns, threw a pitch to Chuck Knoblauch, the Yankees’ leadoff hitter, who grounded out to shortstop. It seemed the 48,013 fans were unaware of what was happening. But the Yankees were well aware of it. After the first out, they gathered on the top step of their dugout and applauded. Then the crowd understood and began to applaud. A ballpark camera found Ripken sitting in the dugout. Seeing himself on the scoreboard, he acknowledged the cheers and motioned for Johns to get on with the game. He had played in 2,632 straight games, a number destined for the history books.

  “Doing it at home made it what it should have been, a celebration,” Ripken recalled. “What the Yankees did was very cool. And everyone relates to the discipline of playing every day, coming to work, what’s important to them. So it turned out to be more of a celebration of that value than anything. I was right to do it at home.”

  As the game proceeded, he signed some balls for teammates in the dugout and wandered around the ballpark, spending an inning in the clubhouse and several innings in the bullpen. Before the bottom of the sixth, he exchanged warm-up tosses with the outfielders.

  “I wanted to experience some things I had never experienced befo
re,” he recalled. “People asked me what it felt like. It felt like I was on the outside of the game looking in. You had always been on the inside, and now you weren’t. I didn’t care for that.”

  After the game, reporters asked why he had ended it now. “The emphasis should be on the team,” Ripken said. “There have been times during the streak when the emphasis was on the streak. I was never comfortable with that. It was time to move the focus back to the team.”

  Shortly after the streak ended, Senior was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died six months later, just before the start of the 1999 season.

  As his father declined, Ripken lost himself in his off-season routine, overdid it, injured his back, and went on the disabled list for the first time after trying to play on Opening Day. He rehabbed the injury and came back strong, batting .340 with 18 home runs in 86 games.

  The milestones rolled by. He clouted his 400th career home run and closed in on his 3,000th hit. But the back pain persisted. He was diagnosed with stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal column that caused chronic nerve irritation. He went back on the disabled list at one point, and then slipped while running the bases in Boston in early September and felt a stabbing pain. That night, he called Bancells at 3 a.m. and said he was flying to Cleveland to see his back specialist. Within days, he underwent a surgical procedure, a decompression, which relieved the inflammation.

  After rehabbing all off-season, Ripken was in the lineup on Opening Day 2000, batting sixth and playing third base. He collected his 3,000th hit on April 15, but back pain put him on the disabled list from late June through August. When he returned in September, he told himself he would base a retirement decision on how he hit that month. He hit .307 and drove in 13 runs in 20 games; he even batted cleanup once. That convinced him to play another season.

  On June 19, 2001, he announced he would retire at the end of the season. He was 40 years old, in his 21st season, hitting .210. A farewell tour commenced. In every city, fans stood in long lines for his autograph, and he received ovations during games. Opposing teams showered him with gifts. The Toronto Blue Jays gave him a painting of himself and Gehrig. The Boston Red Sox gave him a dark green No. 8 Fenway Park box seat. The New York Yankees gave him a framed enlargement of the commemorative ticket to his final game in the city, which featured pictures of Ripken and Gehrig. The Florida Marlins gave him a framed team picture of the 1979 Miami Orioles, his Class A team. The Texas Rangers retired his locker in the visitors’ clubhouse. Teams also contributed to the Cal Ripken, Sr. Foundation, a baseball-centric nonprofit Ripken had started to honor his father.