The Streak Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Ripken

  Gehrig

  Ironmen

  Ripken

  Ironmen

  Ironmen

  Ripken

  Gehrig

  Gehrig

  Ripken

  Gehrig

  Ironmen

  Photos

  Ripken

  Gehrig

  Ironmen

  Ripken

  Gehrig

  Ironmen

  Ripken

  Ironmen

  Ripken

  Ironmen

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Source Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by John Eisenberg

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-544-10767-0

  Cover design by Brian Moore

  Cover photographs © Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images (Lou Gehrig); Rick Stewart/Getty Images (Cal Ripken Jr.)

  eISBN 978-0-544-10397-9

  v1.0617

  A consecutive game playing streak shall be extended if the player plays one half inning on defense, or if he completes a time at bat by reaching base or being put out. A pinch running appearance only shall not extend the streak. If a player is ejected from a game by an umpire before he can comply with the requirements of this rule, his streak shall continue.

  —Major League Baseball rule

  Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.

  —Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead

  Introduction

  Several hours before the first pitch at Baltimore’s Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Adam Jones strides through the spacious home clubhouse, brimming with upbeat energy. He jokes with teammates, banters with reporters, flashes an incandescent smile. The Orioles are contending for a playoff berth, and Jones, their star center fielder, is having another big year.

  Wearing shower slippers, white baseball pants, and a tight black T-shirt that emphasizes his muscular torso, he drops into a recliner in front of his locker. Batting practice begins in 30 minutes; he has a few minutes to talk. “Whatcha got?” he asks. I tell him I want to know about his desire to play in every game. He nods and, before I ask a question, sprays a thought in rat-a-tat fashion.

  “I’m never going to say to the manager, ‘Hey, I need a day off.’ I’m just never going to go into his office and utter those words,” Jones says. “For me to not play, he’s going to have to decide to leave me out of the lineup.”

  A first-round draft choice as an 18-year-old from Southern California and a major leaguer by 22, Jones, now in his early 30s, is the brightest of baseball lights. Every year he hits almost 30 home runs, plays defense worthy of a Gold Glove, and piles up runs batted in—and he does it all with a glib lightheartedness, romping through interviews, interacting with fans on social media, chomping gum and blowing bubbles as he plays. For many years, when teammates conducted television interviews on the field after a Baltimore victory, Jones snuck up and slammed them in the face with a pie from the clubhouse kitchen.

  But he also is the rare modern player who respects baseball traditions that go back decades. He plays with the bottoms of his uniform pant legs cut near his knees, revealing more than a foot of his black-and-white stirrup socks—a fashion long out of style. He swings his bat ferociously, seemingly giving little thought to the statistical metrics that now guide how the game is played. He runs so hard on the bases, even on routine ground balls, that his cap flies off.

  And he never wants to miss a game. Not one.

  “There are days when I wake up sore and think, ‘Oh, it would be a great day to not play, or to DH.’ But once I get myself up and ready and I’m on my way to the ballpark, I want to play,” Jones says. “If I’m not injured or not dealing with something that would bar me from playing, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be in the lineup.”

  The topic of playing every day is holy terrain in Baltimore, where Cal Ripken Jr., a shortstop for the Orioles, went more than 16 years without missing a game, setting the major league record for consecutive games played—2,632. “The streak,” as it is known, made Ripken a sports star of the highest eminence and resonated far beyond baseball’s typical boundaries of renown. The president and vice president of the United States both saw him set the record in Baltimore on September 6, 1995. Political commentators suggested his work ethic symbolized all that was right and good about America.

  Before Ripken, the consecutive-game record belonged to Lou Gehrig, the New York Yankees’ powerful, ill-fated slugger, whose streak of 2,130 straight games was stopped by the onset of a fatal disease in 1939. Before Gehrig, Everett Scott, a slender shortstop for the Yankees and Boston Red Sox during and after World War I, held the record, and others such as the St. Louis Cardinals’ Stan Musial, the Chicago Cubs’ Billy Williams, and the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Steve Garvey also compiled long streaks, stacking season after season of perfect attendance.

  It is a complex achievement, widely admired yet also subjected to criticism at times. Gehrig’s teammate Babe Ruth mocked Gehrig for playing so long without a day off, sneering that the Yankees did not pay him to do that. Miller Huggins, Scott’s manager in New York, was annoyed that he had to keep playing the light-hitting shortstop simply because of a record. While in the process of setting the National League consecutive-game record in the 1960s, Billy Williams wondered aloud why he was bothering to do it. When Ripken went through slumps at the plate, newspaper columnists and radio talk-show callers practically screeched that he was being selfish for refusing to sit out a game and recharge.

  They all played on despite injuries, illnesses, and fatigue to complete full seasons of 162 games (154 until the early 1960s); played with bruises, headaches, pulled muscles, even broken bones; played when they did not feel like it; yet always played well enough to keep their place in the lineup.

  More recently, higher salaries, guaranteed contracts, advanced statistical analysis, and more sophisticated sports medicine have helped change baseball’s philosophy on feats of endurance. Unlike in the eras of Scott, Gehrig, and even Ripken, few current players even attempt to play entire seasons without taking a break.

  “I don’t know that we’ll ever see another guy get to a thousand games in a row, much less to how far Gehrig and Cal went,” Garvey said in an interview for this book in 2015.

  But endurance has remained a tradition and a priority in Baltimore since Ripken’s retirement in 2001. Another Baltimore shortstop, Miguel Tejada, compiled the major leagues’ longest consecutive-game streak of the twenty-first century. Nick Markakis, a taciturn right fielder, missed just 11 games over a five-year span beginning in 2007. Jones, who played alongside Markakis in the outfield starting in 2009, vowed to follow his teammate’s lead. “I was like, ‘Markakis is out there every day. Man, I want to be out there with him,’” Jones says.

  From 2012 through 2014, Jones missed just 5 of 486 regular-season games, achieving perfect attendance in 2012 by playing in all 162. “I was exhausted,” Jones admits. Injuries forced him out of several dozen games in 2015 and 2016, but Manny Machado, the team’s young third baseman, caught the bug from Mar
kakis and Jones. He was the only major leaguer to play a full season in 2015.

  “We’ve got a bunch of guys on this team who want to play every day. It’s a consensus around here,” Jones says. “Maybe there are times when a day off can help you clear your head, but the competitor in me wants to get back out there because I think that day I might go 4-for-4. Every day when I go to the park I think I’m going to do something positive to impact the game, and that’s why I want to play.”

  In 2012, the Orioles signed Jones to an $85.5 million contract extension, and he effectively became the face of the franchise, as Ripken was—and, in a way, still is. The two see each other around Baltimore, where Ripken still resides.

  “Every time I see Cal, I ask him about playing every day for all of those years,” Jones said. “I say it all the time to him. I go, ‘Cal, how did you do that? Honestly, how in the hell did you do that?’”

  Jones shakes his head.

  “All Cal says is, ‘I wanted to play.’ He breaks it down as simply as that. ‘I wanted to play.’”

  Again, Jones shakes his head.

  “I played in 162 once, and that’s impressive, but to do it for 16 straight years, that’s . . . that’s . . . that’s . . .”

  For once, the loquacious Jones is at a loss for words.

  1

  Ripken

  A VICTORY LAP

  The fans sent wave after wave of cheers into a warm, late-summer night by the Chesapeake Bay, their ovation lasting three minutes, five, eight . . . so long that the umpires finally decided not to try to restart the game until the noise subsided. The Baltimore Orioles and California Angels had only played 4½ in Baltimore on September 6, 1995. Their game was just half over. And the longer the fans cheered, the more Cal Ripken Jr., the Orioles’ shortstop, whose historic feat was being celebrated, was becoming embarrassed about the length of the delay.

  The Orioles were out of the American League playoff race, but the Angels had a shot at winning their division, so it mattered that they trailed Baltimore by two runs at the brick-and-wrought-iron ballpark known as Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Their pitcher, Shawn Boskie, had warmed up for the bottom of the fifth inning. He was ready to go. His teammates were at their defensive positions, also ready. But the cheering for Ripken was so persistent that the game could not possibly resume, and now Boskie was cooling down, seemingly a disadvantage.

  Trying to quell the ovation, Ripken had twice emerged from the Orioles’ dugout, waving his arms and patting his heart to acknowledge the cheers and indicate his appreciation. He was deeply touched. But he hoped his gesture would bring the celebration to a close, much like an actor’s curtain call on a Broadway stage. He owed that to the Angels, he thought. But the fans just kept cheering. If anything, they were getting louder.

  Ripken’s teammates had convinced him to take the second curtain call, thinking that would end the ovation and enable the game to resume. But it did not, and now Ripken was back on the dugout bench, shaking his head, smiling, and wondering what he could do to stop the noise raining down from the stands.

  “Hey, why don’t you go run around the field or something?” shouted Rafael Palmeiro, Baltimore’s first baseman, who stood in front of Ripken.

  Ripken looked at him with a quizzical expression. Run around the field?

  Palmeiro shrugged. “I don’t know. Go out there and shake their hands,” he continued. “Maybe that will get them to stop.”

  As Ripken pondered the idea, Palmeiro quickly repeated it, adding with a shout, “You need to go out there!”

  Another veteran teammate, Bobby Bonilla, picked up on the suggestion. Seated next to Ripken on the bench, Bonilla leaned over and shouted in his teammate’s ear, “Junior, if you don’t go out there, we may never finish this game!”

  Ripken gave a halfhearted smile, clearly unconvinced. Spontaneous gestures made him uncomfortable. He was a planner, a pragmatist. Whatever endeavor he undertook, on or off the baseball diamond, he researched it, reflected on it, devised an approach, and saw it through. “He wore a watch in batting practice to make sure everything ran on time. That’s how organized and precise he was in everything he did,” recalled Phil Regan, the Orioles’ manager in 1995. And running around the field in the middle of this historic game was not in Ripken’s plans.

  Honestly, he thought it sounded ridiculous. Who had ever heard of such a thing? The game was his day at the office, a sacred time reserved for focusing on his job, his craft, his teammates and opponents. Interacting with fans was the last thing he should do, even on a night history was being made. Ripken’s father, a crusty baseball lifer, had taught him the sport’s sober code of conduct. Respect the game. Let your performance do your talking. The game matters more than you. Running around the field and shaking hands with fans in the fifth inning was antithetical to everything Ripken believed. But Palmeiro was not interested in debating philosophy. He just wanted to get the game going again.

  He grabbed Ripken by the shoulders and pulled the six-foot-four, 230-pound shortstop up the dugout steps. Bonilla joined in, holding Ripken’s left arm. They pulled him onto the field, dragged him a few steps, and playfully shoved him down the right-field foul line. Ripken, laughing, offered no resistance.

  “Pushing him out of the dugout wasn’t planned. We didn’t talk about it beforehand or anything,” Palmeiro recalled. “The fans were just so incredibly into the situation. It was a nonstop ovation. As long as Cal sat in the dugout, we might still be sitting there. When we said, ‘Go run around the field or something,’ he wouldn’t do it. So we pushed him out there.”

  The fans roared at the sight of Ripken back on the field. He took several wandering steps, hugged one of the Orioles’ coaches, and waved. Palmeiro’s idea echoed in his mind. Run around. Shake hands with them.

  “OK,” Ripken thought. “I’ll try it.”

  It was the strangest of baseball celebrations when you thought about it—not the product of an awe-inducing home run barrage, prodigious career hit record, or any of the kinds of spectacular achievements that usually generated acclaim. Ripken was in the spotlight for the simplest of baseball acts: Just being on the field. Playing. As opposed to not playing.

  His repertoire of talents included much more than just his enduring presence, of course. A sure-handed fielder and reliably productive hitter, he would earn two American League Most Valuable Player awards and make 15 All-Star Game appearances by the end of his 21-year major league career. The first shortstop to accumulate 3,000 hits and 400 home runs, he would alter basic notions about his position. Once he came along, a shortstop could hit for power and anchor a lineup as well as solidify his team’s infield defense. When Ripken was eligible for induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in 2007, an overwhelming 98.6 percent of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America’s voters said he belonged.

  Yet the most outstanding aspect of his career was the fact that he played in 2,632 straight games, all for the Orioles.

  For more than 16 years, from May 30, 1982, through September 19, 1998, he was ever present in Baltimore’s lineup. The Orioles’ fortunes careened through soaring highs, such as a World Series triumph, and appalling lows, such as a season-opening 21-game losing streak. Ripken never rested. They made seven managerial changes, including the hiring and firing of Ripken’s father. He continued to play. The United States went through four presidential election seasons, electing Ronald Reagan in 1984, George H. W. Bush in 1988, Bill Clinton in 1992, and Clinton again in 1996. Ripken never missed a game.

  Along the way, he badly sprained an ankle, twisted a knee in a brawl, bowled over catchers in home-plate collisions, was hit by dozens of pitches, fought the flu, developed a serious back ailment, and grew from a callow youngster to a middle-aged father of two. But he never suffered an injury that forced him to stop playing, and he never said he was so tired that he needed to take a game off.

  No major leaguer had ever played so continuously without interruption,
and his consecutive-game streak eventually earned a place on baseball’s list of iconic feats, alongside such achievements as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, the home run records of Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, and the accomplishments of such legends as Cy Young and Ty Cobb. But unlike the others, Ripken did not have to hit a home run, reach base, or perform extraordinarily in any way in a game to further his record. In fact, he could strike out four times, boot ground balls, and draw boos. As long as he fulfilled the requirements for being credited with playing, he added another game to his streak and perpetuated his reputation for earnest dependability.

  He just had to play.

  Why pursue this unusual challenge, something of a crazy uncle in the family of baseball feats? Ripken steadfastly denied he was purposefully pursuing anything, especially the major league record for consecutive games played, held by Lou Gehrig, the slugging first baseman who played in 2,130 straight games for the New York Yankees, stopping only when he was diagnosed with a fatal illness in 1939. No, Ripken said, he was not doing this just to pass Gehrig and polish his own star of individual glory. He contended it was his job to be available and his Baltimore managers actually created the streak by continually putting him in the lineup. His part in the streak’s complex calculus, he said, was simply wanting to play.

  Some found that explanation simplistic at best and disingenuous at worst. At times, his hitting slumped to the point that it seemed logical for him to want to take a break, miss a game or two, and collect himself—a tactic many players use when trying to end slumps. When Ripken persisted, seeking to play his way out of his slumps, some fans and analysts accused him of valuing his streak more than his team’s best interests. In 2009, Buster Olney, an ESPN analyst who covered the Orioles for the Baltimore Sun in the 1990s, told journalism students at Bowdoin College in Maine that Ripken was “without a doubt the most selfish athlete I ever covered, and it’s not even close.” Within a few years of the end of Ripken’s streak, few major leaguers would attempt to play every game of even one season, much less many in a row. Baseball’s philosophy on endurance experienced a tectonic shift. It no longer seemed practical to play every day for so long.