The Streak Read online

  Ripken abhorred accusations of selfishness both when he played and long after, believing the Orioles always benefited from his presence in a game, regardless if he hit two home runs or struck out four times. He quarterbacked the defense, altered how other Orioles were pitched to, provided a foundation on which the team was built. There were always ways for him to put his experience and knowledge to work. When playing with inexperienced pitchers and catchers late in his career, he occasionally called the pitches for them from his perch in the middle infield.

  If he truly were selfish, Ripken said later, he would have asked out of the lineup when the Orioles faced dominant pitchers such as Randy Johnson or Roger Clemens, who frustrated many batters and caused their averages to drop. “I would argue that the real selfish guys were the ones ducking Roger or Nolan Ryan, coming up with an injury or something so they didn’t have to play that day. I saw that multiple times in my career, guys thinking about themselves, not the team. My brother always went out there, even on tough days for him, because he thought he could help the team,” said Bill Ripken, Cal’s younger brother, who played for four teams, including the Orioles, during a 12-year major league career.

  Ripken’s teammates and managers supported his contention that he should play every game. Even though he was 35 years old in 1995, he batted .262 that season and drove in 88 runs, and his manager never doubted whether he belonged on the field. “Cal was still outstanding, on top of his game. It was a pleasure to play him every day,” Phil Regan recalled. “He was enthusiastic. He wasn’t tired. His arm was still good. And the biggest thing was, he knew the American League so well. You didn’t have to position him. He knew every player by heart. He directed the whole infield. The team accepted what he was doing as something very special.”

  As Ripken approached Gehrig’s record in 1995, the criticism of him dwindled to a murmur, then was extinguished entirely. Controversy gave way to a nearly unanimous appreciation of his achievement. Ripken had stayed healthy enough and played well enough to keep his place in the lineup for what seemed an eternity. The odds against this were astronomical; even the best players usually were relegated to the bench now and then. How could you not be awed by Ripken’s strength, consistency, and determination?

  When he passed Gehrig and established a new consecutive-game record of 2,131 games on September 6, 1995, Ripken received baseball’s version of a royal coronation. President Bill Clinton came from Washington to watch, as did Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore. The evening compared with other historic baseball moments, such as the night in 1974 when Hank Aaron became the game’s all-time home run leader, or the night in 1985 when the Cincinnati Reds’ Pete Rose became the all-time leader in base hits. The home fans cheered until they grew hoarse. Millions watched ESPN’s broadcast.

  Arguably, Ripken engineered even more adulation than Rose or Aaron. His was truly the common man’s record, one to which the public could relate. Fans could not bash home runs like Aaron or bang out hits like Rose, but they went to work every day, as Ripken did. “That’s how he saw himself, through a blue-collar lens,” said Richie Bancells, a trainer for the Orioles who worked with Ripken for a quarter century. “He equated playing shortstop every day to being a welder who went to work every day, or a guy punching a clock at a factory.”

  It was Ripken’s populist ethos that drew the president and vice president to Camden Yards to see him pass Gehrig. And Ripken, as always, just had to play that night. Still, it was important that he somehow make the occasion memorable. Baseball desperately needed the positive message his record generated.

  A year earlier, the game had experienced one of its darkest moments when the major league season was halted in August because of a labor impasse. When team owners and the players’ union could not agree on a collective bargaining agreement, the rest of the 1994 regular season and the playoffs were canceled. For the first time in 92 years, there was no World Series matching the American League and National League winners. Millions of fans reacted furiously, claiming they would never again support such selfish players and owners. Major league attendance declined after the dispute ended in time for the 1995 season to proceed.

  Although Ripken was a loyal union member and one of the sport’s highest-paid players, he was widely viewed—correctly, according to his agent—as an outlier among his peers, a throwback to a time when men played baseball because they loved it, not because it made them rich. “I’m not going to say he didn’t want to make the good money, but that never impacted his approach to the game. He loved it as much as anyone I have known,” said Ron Shapiro, a Baltimore attorney who represented many major leaguers, including Ripken, beginning in the 1970s.

  As Ripken passed Gehrig, his achievement amounted to a gift from baseball to its angry fans, a peace offering reaffirming the game’s ability to excite and amaze. It was no exaggeration to suggest, as some commentators would, that Ripken carried his sport’s good name on his broad shoulders as he began circling the field and celebrating with fans in the middle of the fifth inning that night in Baltimore.

  There was no plan, no script. Ripken had no idea how long he would be out there, or what he would do. Whatever happened, he hoped it would eventually quell the ovation.

  He jogged toward the tiered bank of field-level seats down the right-field line. The eyes of the fans in the front rows widened. They were excited just to be at Camden Yards to see history being made, but now Ripken was coming toward them. Was this really happening?

  Ripken stopped at the railing with his right hand extended. A fan grabbed it for a shake. Ripken moved down the line, jogging lightly, almost skipping, shaking more hands and slapping palms. His white home uniform glinted in the stadium lights, as did his spikes of close-cropped gray hair. Fans from the higher rows rushed to the railing, hoping to shake his hand. It was as if he were a politician at a rally, or the pope after his Wednesday service at the Vatican.

  Fred Roussey, a sergeant with the Baltimore police, was among a cordon of officers within feet of Ripken, standing by the foul line. Roussey had worked hundreds of Orioles games and would work hundreds more in the coming years. “Normally when you have a rush of fans to the railing like that, there’s trouble, but the crowd that night was unlike any other,” Roussey recalled. “No one was going to fight. Everyone was so ecstatic just to be there, so happy for Cal. When he started going down the line, the atmosphere was pure excitement.”

  Ripken had the same thought. Two decades later, recalling what would become known as his “victory lap” around Camden Yards, he said he was staggered by the emotional wallop of celebrating with the fans as the noise in the park swirled. “My initial reaction was, ‘OK, I’m trying this to see if I can get the game started again,’” he recalled. “But once I began making my way around the field, I didn’t care if the game started again or not.”

  Now that he was close to the fans, actually with the fans, he could sense their connection to him and his achievement. Ripken was one of them, a native of Aberdeen, Maryland, just north of Baltimore. Like many reaching for his hand, he had grown up supporting the Orioles, his father’s employer, and also followed the Colts, Baltimore’s National Football League team for many years. His hometown was a workingman’s city without the sniffy airs of nearby Washington, D.C., a city where professors from Johns Hopkins University sat at games alongside bus drivers and steelworkers. Ripken fit right in. His father had raised him to be a baseball foot soldier, not a king.

  At one point, Baltimore had brimmed over with sports successes, its teams winning titles and developing ardent followings, the Colts’ crowds so enthusiastic a sportswriter referred to their games as “the world’s largest outdoor insane asylum.” But a pro basketball team, the Bullets, left for Washington in the 1970s, and the Colts’ owner, Robert Irsay, an alcoholic air-conditioning magnate described by his own mother as a “devil on earth,” failed to obtain funding for a new stadium and moved the team to Indianapolis in 1984, devastating fans and leaving them with ju
st one team to root for, the Orioles, who then exacerbated the city’s hurt by entering a steep decline soon after the Colts left.

  Ripken had come along in these turbulent years, debuting with the Orioles in 1981 and catching the last out of their World Series victory in 1983, then playing through a long, dismal run of losing seasons, in the process becoming just about all Baltimore had to cheer for. On the night he passed Gehrig, the city’s pride was palpable. Its teams had not won anything in a while, but its native son was making history, and he was an athlete to be proud of, not cocky or boastful, his priorities seemingly in order. Before embarking on his victory lap, he took off his jersey and game cap and presented them to his wife, Kelly, and their two young children, five-year-old Rachel and two-year-old Ryan, who were seated in the front row by the Orioles’ dugout. Underneath his jersey, he wore a black T-shirt with the inscription 2,130 + HUGS AND KISSES FOR DADDY.

  “He could have been elected mayor of Baltimore, governor of Maryland, really anything he wanted,” recalled Al Clark, a veteran American League umpire who was on the field that night.

  The Orioles had spent weeks preparing for the home games when he would tie and break the record, hoping to stage events that lived up to an occasion fans had waited years to see. The night before, when Ripken tied Gehrig’s record, hitting a home run in an Orioles victory, there had been a postgame ceremony on the field during which he received gifts and testimonials from sports and entertainment celebrities such as Tom Selleck, a baseball-loving actor; David Robinson, a basketball star from northern Virginia; and Bonnie Blair, an Olympic speed skater who had won gold medals.

  Now, a night later, the game was official in the middle of the fifth inning, Ripken owned the record, and he had hit another home run, delighting the crowd. There would be another ceremony later, more speeches, more gifts, more testimony, all culminating in a speech by Ripken.

  But nothing planned in advance could match what unfolded on his impromptu lap around the field. “It turned out to be the best ‘human moment’ of my career,” Ripken recalled. “Catching the last out of the World Series was my best baseball moment, because that’s what every kid dreams of, and I experienced it. But the victory lap was my best human moment.”

  Having started in a counterclockwise direction around the edge of Camden Yards’ natural-grass field, he quickly reached the right-field corner, where the stands were situated well above him. He jumped up to slap hands with fans, then continued across the outfield warning track toward center field, acknowledging the cheers with waves and shaking hands with several members of the grounds crew, who had emerged from the shed where they sat during games and stood on the grass, applauding. Several policemen watching the crowd also slapped hands with Ripken as he passed by.

  Seated in the second row of an outfield section, Al Fultz, a 37-year-old federal disability claims examiner from Catonsville, a Baltimore suburb, reached out to touch Ripken. “There was quite a rush of fans to the front row, people trying to shake his hand. Obviously no one expected him to come so close to where we sat, in the bleachers,” Fultz recalled.

  Fultz had bought five tickets to the game six months earlier and resisted offers from potential buyers as the big night neared. His wife, two of their three young daughters, and his brother-in-law were with him, and already, by the middle of the fifth, they knew it would be an unforgettable night. Fultz and his wife and daughters had made up white T-shirts with single numbers on the front spelling out 2,131 when they stood together. “Total strangers had been taking our picture all night,” Fultz said. Then, in the second inning, his brother-in-law had caught a Palmeiro home run, breaking a finger in the process.

  Shaking Ripken’s hand on the victory lap would have provided Fultz, a lifelong Orioles fan, with the ultimate memory. “But where we were, Cal was just too far down,” Fultz said. “But everyone there experienced something special. As he was on his lap, I reflected on how it must feel to know you’re making so many people happy.”

  There was bedlam in the ballpark as Ripken jogged through deep center field. One fan leaned too far forward and tumbled out of the stands. Several others dangled on the outside of the outfield fence with their hands outstretched. Ripken jumped up, slapped their palms, and continued his trek along the fence, encountering teammates, the Orioles’ relief pitchers, who spent games in the bullpen beyond left-center field. Like the fans, they had lined up along the fence with their hands extended. Ripken reached over and gave each a shake, stopping to clasp hands in a special embrace with Elrod Hendricks, the Orioles’ jocular bullpen coach, a Baltimore fixture who had known him since he was a boy.

  Leaving Hendricks behind, Ripken entered deep left field, where the stands were within easy reach. A sea of arms reached for him. He slowed down, shook some hands, waved, jogged several feet, shook more hands. Noticing a small girl amid the human crush, he reached in and made sure she received a handshake. One fan accidentally dropped a pen onto the field. Ripken picked it up and tossed it back into the crowd. Other fans held up signs reading THE HOUSE THAT CAL BUILT and PRESIDENT CLINTON, CAN YOU HELP ME GET CAL’S AUTOGRAPH?

  After Ripken passed through the left-field corner, he turned toward home plate, now just walking as he continued to shake hands, point at some fans, and even speak to a few. It was as if he knew everyone. One man reached across the railing and touched his chest. Unafraid, Ripken grabbed the man’s hand and shook it, then stepped back and waved to the crowd, first with one arm, then both.

  As he came down the third-base side of the park and neared the Angels’ dugout, two of the four umpires working the game intercepted him—Larry Barnett, the crew chief, who was behind home plate that night, and Al Clark, the second-most-senior ump on the crew, who was working third base. Barnett shook Ripken’s hand and shouted congratulations. Ripken nodded. “Then I shook his hand,” Clark recalled, “and Cal bent over to me and said, ‘God, am I tired.’ He was practically leaning on me. I said to him, ‘Cal, you can stay here as long as you want.’”

  When the ovation for Ripken had started after the top of the fifth, Barnett and Clark briefly looked at each other with their eyebrows raised, wondering what to do. “Part of our job is to keep the game moving. We thought about reining him in,” Clark said. “Then we looked at each other and said, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ There was no way in the world we were going to stop what was going on.”

  As the victory lap unfolded, all four umpires joined the fans in cheering the Orioles shortstop.

  “It was the only time in my 26 years in the majors that I saw the umpires applaud the efforts of a player,” Clark said. “But we respected the hell out of what Cal did, playing in all those games. We don’t care who wins and loses, but we care about baseball, and with a strike canceling the World Series the year before, our game had been dealt a terrible blow. Everything was negative, and then here came Cal, and everything was positive—his work ethic, his approach, the way he interacted with fans. It all came together that night. I felt tremendous pride just being in the same sport with him. I remember thinking, ‘This is what’s going to bring our game back.’”

  Having circled most of the field, Ripken entered the visitors’ dugout on the third-base side. The Angels were lined up on the top step, anticipating his arrival. Ripken shook hands and exchanged words with every player and coach. He embraced Rod Carew, the team’s hitting coach, a brilliant contact hitter from the 1970s, now in the Hall of Fame. Rene Gonzales, a former teammate in Baltimore, grasped him in a hug.

  Years later, Ripken would single out his interactions with the Angels as an especially memorable aspect of his record-breaking evening. “How often are you ever going to see something like that in the middle of a game?” he said.

  The Angels’ catcher, Jorge Fabregas, had warmed up Boskie for the bottom of the fifth and then joined the line of Angels waiting to offer congratulations in the dugout. Dressed in his catching garb, right down to his mask, Fabregas shook hands with Ripken and jogged back to his
spot behind the plate.

  Rex Hudler, the Angels’ second baseman, watched the dugout scene enviously from the middle of the infield. Although he also was playing in the game, like Fabregas Hudler thought it would look strange for him to sprint to the dugout just to congratulate Ripken. “It was one time in my career when I wished I wasn’t playing. Man, I wanted to be in that dugout,” Hudler recalled.

  A 35-year-old journeyman, Hudler had briefly played with Ripken on the Orioles in the 1980s. “I was there when Cal’s dad managed. He was a rough old bird, man. On the team plane he’d come walking up the aisle and slap me right in the chest. I learned that meant he liked me!” Hudler said. “So I knew Junior, and to be on the field as this happened, I basically became a kid again—a young kid in a big league uniform.”

  Hudler had warmed up for the bottom of the fifth by taking some ground balls, then watched with astonishment as the cheering started and continued for so long that Ripken embarked on his journey around the field. “No one went, ‘Oh no, look what he’s doing.’ The reaction was, ‘He’s going to high-five everyone here! This is the coolest thing ever!’” Hudler recalled.

  As the lap ended, Hudler looked down and saw he was standing not by second base, but on the pitching rubber, some 40 or 50 feet from his position. “It was like I had been in a trance, just wandering around out there on the field,” he said. “It was like I was dreaming.”

  When Ripken finished with the Angels, he stepped out of the dugout and greeted several people behind home plate. “Not bad, huh?” he said as he hugged his agent, Ron Shapiro.