Ripken’s house suffers from no shortage of television sets of all shapes and sizes. He takes busman’s holidays, watching the competition. And he has lodged in his capacious memory another episode involving Gaetti, another that proves the point about the advantage of a third baseman with good range to his left. The Tigers were playing the Twins. Alan Trammell was the Tigers’ shortstop, as he has been since he was 19 in 1977. Tom Brookens was playing third. Frank Tanana, a left-hander, was pitching for the Tigers. Gaetti was up and Trammell was not playing him to pull, “because Brookens has good range,” explains Ripken, with the wistfulness of someone who has played next to 28 third basemen (and 16 second basemen) since 1982. “Outfield range is just as important. If you have a center fielder like Gary Pettis [of the Rangers] or Devon White [of the Angels] who can catch the ball from bull pen to bull pen, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense, if you were the right fielder or left fielder, to play in the area where he can catch the ball.” A swift center fielder takes away some of the other team’s extra-base speed because he allows his fellow outfielders to play close to the foul lines, where doubles often fall. This, says Ripken, is especially important in an outfield configured like that of Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. The left- and right-field foul lines are 309 feet. But the fence curves quickly out to 360 feet and is 385 in the power alleys. Most teams visiting Memorial Stadium squeeze those alleys—that is, they play their left and right fielders a lot more toward center than they do in other parks, assuming that hits down the line will be doubles and that squeezing the alleys can prevent triples. “But,” says Ripken, “teams that have great center fielders put their right and left fielders on the lines and the center fielder runs rampant and they cover all the territory and catch everything.”
Watch outfielders in the outfield when their team is taking pregame batting and infield practice. Most do not do what Tony Gwynn does. He, like Ripken, believes that the way to prepare to play baseball is to play baseball. So during Padres pregame sessions, when Gwynn’s group is not hitting, he will be in the outfield taking fly balls “off the bat,” meaning flies hit off batting practice pitches rather than off fungo bats. He will play one ball as though there is a man on second base, another as though there is nobody on, a third he will play “do-or-die”—a potential winning run on second. He will even practice climbing the fence on batting practice home runs that barely make it over the fence. Tony La Russa requires the Athletics’ outfielders to take balls off the bats of hitters taking batting practice 20 minutes a day in Spring Training, 5 minutes before each game during the season. “You can take 1,000 fungoes a day and it won’t be as good as 10 minutes pretending you are in a game, taking balls off the bat during batting practice.” “Pete Rose says that everyone practices their strengths,” says Ripken. “You like to do what you are good at. But Pete also said he practiced what he believed to be his weaknesses. That is what I do. That is why you may see me practicing my backhand.” There is another reason for practicing his backhand, particularly on the road. The visiting team takes infield practice after the home team has practiced. When an infield has been chewed up—or when an infield is simply bad, as Cleveland’s was when Ripken first came to the major leagues—practicing your backhand is safer than fielding balls coming directly at you. If they take bad bounces they are apt to bounce off you. Ripken has not missed infield practice before even one game while in the major leagues. There is, he says, a big difference between being in shape and being “in baseball shape.” The latter means, for example, being able to throw repeatedly across an infield.
Repetition is inseparable from craftsmanship, but it also is the source of the strain of baseball’s everydayness. It takes a special toll on infielders who are especially in the grip of the game’s one-pitch-at-a-time rhythm. At one point in his career, Mickey Mantle was moved from center field to first base to rest his constantly aching legs for a few games. Soon he wanted to return to the outfield, where he could relax. When Rod Carew moved from second to first he discovered that a first baseman, far from being immobile, must always be doing something. Watch an excellent first baseman such as Don Mattingly, hold runners on first base. The instant the pitcher is committed to deliver the ball to the plate, the first baseman should make a strenuous move, one comparable to that made by a base runner when stealing or participating in a hit-and-run play. “It’s like stealing a base,” says Keith Hernandez. “Take two explosive steps at the last possible moment. The point is to get into position to cover the hole. You get hurt more in the hole than down the line. Nowadays there are so few dead-pull left-handed hitters. There used to be Willie McCovey or John Milner. But there aren’t any more. Still, you’ll see so many first basemen sitting on the line. Because they’re lazy. It gets boring over the season to come off the bag. You’re tired and don’t feel like getting out there.” That is a true test of professionalism, this ability to do the small and boring and cumulatively stressful and draining things that must be done during the half of the game when you are at your defensive position.
Mark Belanger used to say there is no such thing as a fielding slump. Ripken disagrees. “There are slumps in fielding as well as in hitting. In hitting your timing gets off, and you get out front of pitches—too soon, or behind. Similarly, you become anxious as shortstop, you are leaning too far—so far ahead of the pitch that it is impossible to correct” if the ball is pitched somewhere it is not supposed to go and is hit in an unanticipated direction. Assuming an average of 130 pitches per game over a 162-game season, Ripken tenses, rocks forward on the balls of his feet and begins to lean or move in toward the infield grass, or to one side or the other, 21,000 times each season. Ripken has rocked forward on the balls of his feet more often than any other player since May 30, 1982—the day his consecutive-game streak began. Barring injury, in June, 1990, he will move into second place on the consecutive-games list, passing Everett Scott’s 1,307. And if Ripken’s career goes as it has gone since 1982, the eyes of the baseball world will be on him in June, 1995. One day that month he will, if playing at home, trot out to take his position in the infield prior to the top of the first inning. Or if playing on the road he may come to bat, perhaps still hitting third, in the top of the first inning. When he does, another of baseball’s “unbreakable” records will be broken. Ripken will have surpassed Lou Gehrig’s streak of 2,130 consecutive games played.
The authors of The Elias Baseball Analyst are sparkling diamonds in the diadem of American letters. But on one subject they are grumps, and are mistaken. They dismiss a streak such as Ripken’s as “a record of will, not skill.” But that misses a subtle and profoundly important point about the relationship of baseball skill to intense discipline of will. The Elias authors said in their 1988 edition that there is one baseball question they can not answer: “Lou Gehrig played in 2,130 consecutive games. Why?” They can not answer it because their distinction between records that reflect skill and records that “merely” reflect will is too stark. Natural gifts, however great, and skills, however sharply honed, still must be summoned to application by strength of will. The summoning is not easy on a muggy August mid-week night in Cleveland when neither team is in the hunt for a pennant. Skills must be willed into action by an intensity that does not well up spontaneously. Such intensity must be cultivated. For some players, such as Ripken, playing every day is part of an ongoing mental preparation not only for the long season and a long career, but also for tonight’s game.
To the argument that “everyone needs a day off,” Ripken says, placidly, that he gets lots of days off, between October and April. He insists, reasonably, that his is not a 1,000-game streak, it is a series of 162-game streaks. Were anyone to ask, Is 162 consecutive games too many for a large, young, healthy, well-conditioned athlete?, the obvious answer would be, of course not. Also, there is that positive argument for continuing the streak. Ripken’s streak is his way of maintaining the mixture of relaxation and intensity necessary for high performance over a long season. Barring i
njury, Ripken will break Lou Gehrig’s record when he is 35, in the 71st game of the 1995 season. And he will play in the 72nd game, and the 73rd, and…
Playing every day is something Ripken learned by osmosis, early. The boy is indeed father to the man, and Ripken’s baseball boyhood bred in him a respect for the game’s relentlessness. When Ripken was younger his game face was not always, as it is now, calm and almost blank. “I used to throw bats and things until I saw myself do it on TV.” He has a soft, almost high voice and shy half-smile that seems a halfway measure to prevent unseemly mirth from making it to the surface. He is a difficult man to see depths in, but they are there. His passions are submerged beneath his public self, which is steadiness personified. But with Ripken it is possible, as Duncan (not Dave the pitching coach, but the fellow in Macbeth, Act I, Scene IV) said, “to find the mind’s construction in the face.” His is a deceptively bland countenance. The blandness is actually a quiet force, a kind of confidence that comes only to athletes and other performers, and only to a few of them. It is confidence in being able to do it.
Ripken is one of 14 players who have won both Rookie of the Year and MVP awards, and he is the only player to have won them in consecutive years. (Fred Lynn won both in the same year, 1975.) He is the only shortstop other than Ernie Banks to hit 20 or more home runs in 8 consecutive seasons. Through 1989 Ripken had led all major league shortstops in home runs and RBIs for 6 of the last 7 seasons. He had hit 196 home runs as a shortstop, third behind Ernie Banks (293) and Vern Stephens (213). He was one of only 4 major leaguers with 20 or more home runs in each of the last 8 seasons. His total of 204 home runs ranked him eighth in the major leagues during those 8 years. Through the 1989 season Ripken was the only active American League player who had hit 20 or more home runs in each of his first 8 seasons. Dale Murphy was the only other player to hit 20 or more in those 8 seasons. Entering 1990 Ripken was second only to Boston’s Dwight Evans in the number of extra-base hits by an American Leaguer over the previous 8 seasons. (Ripken had 494, Evans 500. Dale Murphy led the major leagues over that span with 508.) Through 1989 his career slugging average was .461, comparable to the averages of such Hall of Fame shortstops as Honus Wagner (.469), Joe Cronin (.468) and Arky Vaughan (.453). But when asked which gives him greatest satisfaction, hitting or defense, Ripken does not hesitate:
“When you do things right defensively you feel the greatest gratification. When I had all those chances [906, while setting an American League record for assists, 583] in 1984 and the pitching was tremendous, you could rely on them, there was no better feeling than to know that the guy was going to throw this pitch, he was going to throw it where he said he was going to throw it, and the hitter was going to hit it—if he hit it—at this place. Having guessed—no, having figured it out—and done it, and moved the right way, and taken a ball up the middle, and having somebody scream in the dugout back at you, ‘How can you play me there?’ Say he’s a right-handed pull hitter and so the shortstop normally would play a right-handed pull hitter in the hole. But then the sequence of the count, and the pitcher on the mound who has a 90-mile-per-hour fastball, and the fact that he’s got two strikes on him, told me that I can actually know that this guy’s not going to pull this pitch, so I can run up the middle and he’ll hit a line drive or a one-hopper right by the pitcher’s glove and I can catch it up the middle and make the play. Then you hear somebody screaming in the dugout ‘How can you play me there?’—to me, that’s more gratifying than getting a bases-loaded hit. That’s the game within the game.”
The game within the game, in the mind, is elegant. But the game itself, on the field, has a rough side. It is sometimes said that baseball is not a contact sport. This idea is encouraged by baseball’s gentle terminology of “touching” a base or “tagging” a runner. But baseball has a constant undercurrent of dust-raising episodes—episodes that certainly seem to the participants to amount to contact. For example, try telling Tim McCarver that there was not serious contact involved on the two occasions when runners slid into him at home plate hard enough to lodge their spikes in his shin guards. Professional baseball is, as Heywood Broun wrote, “agreeably free of chivalry.” No chivalry, but there is a code of acceptable behavior. At home plate the code is, as we have seen, a subject of constant and semi-violent negotiations among batters, pitchers and umpires. The code is clearer at second base, where the first outs of most double plays are made while arriving runners are trying to prevent the ball from being fired to first in time to make the second out.
“Everybody understands the extent of the contact and even if you get hit hard, if it’s within certain guidelines, you think it’s all right,” says Ripken. Middle infielders making double plays usually receive the ball from the other middle infielder who has fielded it. He touches second and flings the ball on its way to first base while avoiding, or absorbing the impact of, the runner who is sliding, or even rolling, in from first. Many middle infielders, when receiving the throw as pivotman in a double play, throw the relay to first sidearm because the low trajectory of the throw forces the incoming runner to get down into his slide a stride or so earlier. This gives the pivotman some protection from collision. One reason for this practice is that middle infielders generally have been smaller than many of the base runners who come barreling into second. Ripken often sidearms the ball to first even when not turning the double play, even from fairly deep short, because the release is quicker that way than it is when throwing fully overhand. His arm is so powerful he can gun the ball without the whipping motion of an overhand throw. Furthermore, when making the pivot, Ripken has a big man’s confidence about collisions. He remembers Darrell Miller, a 200-pounder playing for the Angels, attempting to take him out with a hard slide at second and then lying on the ground holding his side and gasping up at Ripken, “Are… you… all… right?”
Fear of collisions is the principal reason for the “phantom tag,” whereby the pivotman glides past the bag a split second before getting the ball. But Ripken wants to earn the reputation with umpires of always touching second base, so that in a situation in which he may have to miss the bag—for example, when a flip from the second baseman pulls him away from the bag—the umpire may give him the benefit of the doubt. Commenting on the way Walt Weiss of the Athletics turns a double play—rocketing right across the bag, directly at the on-charging runner, while throwing to first—Ripken explains, “You want to catch the ball and continue your momentum toward first without regard for the guy coming in. Your luxury, as a shortstop, is that you can see where he is. You can be the aggressor.”
When asked if he was glad that Kirk Gibson, the former tight end from Michigan State University, had left the American League, going from the Tigers to the Dodgers, Ripken replies with a flash of the competitiveness that sleeps, when it sleeps, lightly within him: “He never got me.” And he adds, “I always thought I had the advantage because he was in front of me. If I was a second baseman I’d be a little more concerned, because you can’t see him, you don’t know when he’s going to hit you. Don Baylor, who had the speed and power combined, used to slide in and say, ‘I could have really got you.’ I’d say, ‘I bet you could’ve.’” Ripken laughs. “Baylor ended someone’s career in a collision at second. He always said—I’ve known him since I was eleven—‘I’m not going to get you. But I’ll let you know when I could’ve.’”
Bo Jackson of the Royals is one of the biggest men in baseball and may be the fastest in a 90-foot sprint. His blend of hard bulk and explosive speed has brought to baseball a kind of kinetic energy not seen before, not even in the man to whom he is frequently compared, Mickey Mantle. Tony Kubek, broadcasting for the Blue Jays, saw Jackson early in 1989 and knew he had seen something so remarkable it might rewrite whole chapters of “The Book,” that compilation of baseball’s received wisdom. In the Royals’ opening game against the Blue Jays, Jackson hit a solid single up the middle, directly across the carpet to Toronto’s center fielder, Lloyd Moseby, who f
ielded the ball cleanly and fired it back to the infield—but not before Jackson had slid into second. In another game in that series Jackson went from second to third on a grounder hit to the Blue Jays’ shortstop, Tony Fernandez. “The Book” decrees that you do not try to advance on a ball hit to the left side, least of all when your team is behind, as the Royals were at the time. But Jackson was almost at third by the time the ball got to Fernandez. Then, with Jackson on third, Frank White bunted. The ball trickled foul. But before the Blue Jays’ catcher, Ernie Whitt, had fully risen from his crouch to pounce on the ball, Jackson ran across the plate. “There are,” says Kubek, “different kinds of fears. I know darn well there was fear when Jackson was running the bases yesterday. Tony Fernandez taking the throw from Moseby, knowing that Bo’s coming, missed the ball. There was fear on Ernie Whitt’s part when Frank White bunted.”
Many baseball players saw—and those who didn’t see it have heard about it—the NFL game in which the Seattle Seahawks’ linebacker, Brian Bosworth, was the only obstacle between Bo Jackson and the end zone. Bosworth was not, it turned out, much of an obstacle. Jackson ran right over him. Most baseball players have seen the tape of Jackson smashing into Rick Dempsey, then the Indians’ catcher, hitting him so hard that Dempsey was knocked far from the plate and all the way on to the disabled list. Tony Gwynn certainly remembers it: “Jackson just jumped up. Didn’t faze him.” Ripken has seen many strong, fast players. And standing at shortstop he has seen Jackson taking a lead off first. Ripken knows Jackson and likes him, but Ripken will worry more about him when he has learned more about baseball.
Men at Work Page 40
