The Streak Read online

  Watching from a private suite overlooking the field, Ripken’s 58-year-old father, Cal Ripken Sr., could scarcely believe what he had seen. Senior, as he was known, was out of baseball now after having worked for the Orioles from the 1950s through 1992. In all his years as a minor league player, minor league manager, scout, major league coach, and major league manager, he had never imagined he would see a player, especially his son, circle the field during a game.

  This ovation was a hell of a thing, though, Senior had to admit. Before the victory lap, his son had located him and waved while acknowledging the cheers, and Senior had waved back—a father-son moment Hollywood could have scripted.

  “I locked eyes with him. He was a man of few words when it came to how he felt about his son. But that look said a million words to me,” Junior recalled.

  Senior could scarcely believe his son had gone all the way around the field shaking hands and the fans still were applauding.

  Within a few years, the way the world celebrated important moments would change dramatically. But in 1995, none of the fans at Camden Yards held a smartphone aloft, enabling them to film the scene or pose for selfies; all the emotion was directed at Ripken. Smartphones would not come along until the new century, and neither would social media, so Ripken’s victory lap was not subjected to snarky comments on Facebook or Twitter.

  “No one was second-guessing whether Cal should have taken the lap,” wrote John Maroon, the Orioles’ director of media relations in 1995, in an essay published 20 years later. “Social media has been an amazing tool that has changed our world, but some things, I believe, are best left to our memories and allowed to unfold the way we see them and recall them, rather than the way they are interpreted by others.”

  When the lap ended and he had no hands left to shake, Ripken lumbered down the Orioles’ dugout steps, plopped on the bench, and blew out a breath, obviously winded. A trainer threw him a towel, and he wiped the sweat from his face. His teammates surrounded him, slapped him on the back. He exchanged wordless smiles with Palmeiro, who had suggested he take the lap.

  “When anyone remembers that night, that’s what they remember, that victory lap,” Palmeiro recalled. “It was Cal’s way of saying thank you to the fans. What a way to do it, man.”

  After a minute on the bench, Ripken abruptly jumped up, climbed the dugout steps, and stepped back onto the field to take yet another curtain call. The crowd continued to buzz. Ripken tapped his heart, mouthed the words “thank you,” and shook his head, seemingly in disbelief at the persistence of the cheers. ESPN showed a close-up of his wife, Kelly, dabbing a tear.

  Bill Ripken stood beside Kelly in a front-row seat behind home plate. A former Oriole, he knew his older brother was authoring an indelible sports moment. Baseball fans across the country would remember his one-of-a-kind victory lap. In Baltimore, it would rank with the exploits of Johnny Unitas, the famous Colts quarterback, who once threw at least one touchdown pass in 47 straight NFL games; and Brooks Robinson, the Orioles’ Hall of Fame third baseman, whose fielding was so slick that fans nicknamed him “the Human Vacuum Cleaner.”

  “Baltimore fans had always connected with guys like Johnny and Brooks because it’s a blue-collar town and they were so humble. If you saw them out somewhere, you could talk to them,” Bill Ripken said. “That night, with Junior, the connection was even more intense. Here was an actual native son getting cheered just for doing his job. During that victory lap, what you saw was true gratitude. It was perfect.”

  2

  Gehrig

  THE GHOST OF 2,131

  Soon after the last out in the top of the fifth, when it became official that Ripken had broken Lou Gehrig’s record, silence enveloped ESPN’s broadcast booth at Camden Yards. Chris Berman and Buck Martinez, the announcers calling the game, recognized that the images being captured by their network’s cameras were more powerful than any words. They just watched Ripken circle the field, leaving the crowd’s cheers as a soundtrack.

  Berman ordinarily dominated the air with his booming baritone and gregarious character, spewing a rat-a-tat litany of nicknames, puns, and historical references while fulfilling his play-by-play duties. To prepare for this broadcast, he had read a Gehrig biography, helping him understand the enormity of Ripken’s feat. But he said later he and Martinez, a former major league catcher, could not speak because they were shedding tears as Ripken hugged his wife and kids, waved to his father, and celebrated with the fans as he toured the field.

  It was an emotional scene with inescapable significance. Baseball had broken its promise to its public by ending its season prematurely the year before, but now Ripken was literally extending his hand to the fans, as if to try to right the wrong by himself.

  “People were mad, and they had a right to be,” Ripken recalled. “But people were in tune with the streak. It helped bring the game back. I think I played a part in that.”

  During the stoppage in the game, which lasted 22 minutes, ESPN’s producers occasionally cut away from the field to shots of Ripken’s family members and some of the famous baseball figures in the crowd, all of whom were standing and applauding. There was Earl Weaver, the feisty bantam who had managed the Orioles in their heyday, which included the first years of Ripken’s streak. There was Frank Robinson, an iconic Orioles outfielder from the 1960s, who also managed Ripken at one point. There was Carew, a Hall of Famer still in uniform.

  Then there was the handsome, white-haired man watching in a private suite, a vision of elegance in a dark suit, his hair practically shimmering. ESPN cut to him once, again, a third time, underscoring his importance. Who was he? Many viewers knew, even without an introduction from Berman. His face was familiar to older fans from his years as a baseball star. Younger generations knew him as a television commercial pitchman.

  It was Joe DiMaggio.

  The New York Yankees star from a bygone era was more than just a great ballplayer in the canon of American celebrity. Taciturn and dignified, he was an emblem of graceful manhood, a defining figure of his epoch. In the 1950s, millions of men fantasized about Marilyn Monroe, the sultry actress. DiMaggio married her. When she died, he brought flowers to her grave out of love and loyalty, even though they had divorced. Rock star Paul Simon’s 1968 hit song “Mrs. Robinson” contained the iconic lyric “Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? . . . / ‘Joltin Joe’ has left and gone away.” Simon was signaling that he believed genuine heroes no longer existed.

  In the mid-1930s, at the outset of his major league career, DiMaggio had played four full seasons and part of a fifth with Lou Gehrig. As Ripken’s record-setting night approached in 1995, the Orioles contacted him to see if he wanted to attend the game at Camden Yards and represent his late teammate. Peter Angelos, the Baltimore attorney who owned the Orioles, called DiMaggio himself and extended the offer. “At my age, he was my baseball hero,” Angelos explained.

  The Orioles had not expected DiMaggio to accept Angelos’s invitation. Now 80 years old, he was famously private, seldom socializing beyond a small circle of friends in Florida. But to the Orioles’ delight, he accepted. “I wanted to be there and see it because Gehrig was my teammate,” DiMaggio said later.

  The Orioles asked only that he attend; his presence alone elevated the occasion. But DiMaggio had shown up full of enthusiasm, attending a pregame party and asking if he could speak at the postgame ceremony the Orioles had carefully planned—a request the Orioles excitedly accepted.

  Later that night, during the ceremony that followed the game, the crowd greeted his introduction with a roar, an audible buzz ripping through the ballpark as he strode toward the dais that had been set up on the diamond: DiMaggio is here!

  “There’s a beautiful monument to Lou Gehrig at Yankee Stadium that says ‘A man, a gentleman, and a great ball player whose amazing record of 2130 consecutive games should stand for all time,’” DiMaggio told the crowd. “That goes to prove that even the greatest records are made to be broken. And wherever my fo
rmer teammate Lou Gehrig is today, I’m sure he’s tipping his cap to you, Cal Ripken.”

  It was more than just a nice touch. Ripken’s record-setting night would have been incomplete without Gehrig also being acknowledged. A combination of ingredients had helped make Ripken’s streak a larger-than-life achievement—fans could relate to it, Ripken seemed so deserving of acclaim, and it had taken him more than 13 years—but no ingredient was more important than the fact that it was Gehrig’s record he was breaking. Gehrig’s legend, like DiMaggio’s, extended well beyond baseball’s normal boundaries of renown.

  After growing up shy and clumsy, almost bumbling, as the only child of struggling German-immigrant parents in New York City in the early 1900s, Gehrig had matured into a slugging first baseman standing six feet one and weighing 230 pounds. With thick hands, a square jaw, a thick chest, and massive thighs stretching the fabric of his uniform, he joined the Yankees and became a fixture in their lineup, conveying the classic image of invulnerable strength in the years before weight training became fashionable and performance-enhancing drugs sculpted inhuman physiques. Like Ripken, he played through injuries, illnesses, and slumps for more than a decade, never succumbing to the temptation to rest, even for a day. Sportswriters dubbed him “the Iron Horse,” the perfect nickname for a seemingly indestructible human concrete block.

  Shortly before he debuted with the Yankees in 1923, their shortstop, Everett Scott, became the first major leaguer to play in a thousand straight games. Gehrig eventually went more than twice as far. In 1931, he reached a thousand. In 1933, he broke Scott’s major league record of 1,307 consecutive games. In 1935, he completed a full decade of continuous play.

  DiMaggio, who joined the Yankees as a rookie in 1936, was in center field on August 3, 1937, when the club celebrated “Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day” in honor of his pushing his streak to 1,900 consecutive games. Gehrig had always ceded the spotlight to more luminous players such as Babe Ruth and DiMaggio, but this was his day. When he strode to the plate in the bottom of the first before 66,000 fans, the crowd gave him an ovation. A pitcher for the Chicago White Sox hurled a fastball. Gehrig twisted his thick lower torso, unleashed a vicious swing, and made contact. The ball soared off his bat in a high arc, headed for right field. Gehrig tossed his bat and sprinted for first base, then eased up as the ball soared into the distant bleachers. With his first swing on Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day, he had pounded a long home run, leaving no doubt that he remained a force at the plate even though he was 34, with gray flecks dotting his dark scalp.

  Later, sportswriters crowded around him in the clubhouse and asked about his playing streak. Several New York columnists had suggested he should rest now that he was older. He disagreed, saying he wanted to reach 2,000 straight games and keep going. But soon after he reached that threshold, his life took a devastating turn. He played so wretchedly early in the 1939 season, failing to hit and botching routine fielding plays, that he took himself out of the lineup, ending his streak at 2,130 straight games. Seeking an explanation, he visited the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, where tests produced a stunning diagnosis: Gehrig had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), an obscure, debilitating neurological disease marked by rapidly developing weakness and muscle atrophy. His baseball career was over, and his prospects for a long life had dimmed.

  On July 4, 1939, the Yankees staged a second Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day, this one far more melancholy than the one in 1937. Ruth and others lauded the Iron Horse in a ceremony between games of a doubleheader before a teeming crowd at Yankee Stadium. Finally, Gehrig stepped to the microphone, his uniform belt cinched tight around his gaunt waist.

  “For the past two weeks, you’ve been reading about a bad break,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

  The crowd roared. Gehrig continued, explaining how fortunate he felt to have played on so many great Yankees teams. He thanked his teammates, the fans, even the men in the press box. His grace left many in the crowd in tears.

  Within two years, he was dead.

  To millions of Americans, it was almost as if Superman, the insurmountable comic-book hero, had succumbed.

  No matter how Gehrig’s career ended, he was assured of a prominent place in baseball’s annals. Although he paled next to Ruth as a charismatic star, he had played on six World Series–winning teams, compiled a .340 lifetime batting average, and bashed 493 home runs. Those numbers did not lie. Few players, if any, had accomplished more.

  But Gehrig’s career did not end typically—that is, with his skills simply ebbing until it became clear he needed to retire. To the contrary, Gehrig’s career ended in such a unique, heartbreaking fashion that in death he became far more than just another revered former ballplayer. As Cal Ripken bore down on Gehrig’s consecutive-game record in the 1990s, he chased one of the twentieth century’s most tragic figures. Even before Gehrig died in his sleep on June 2, 1941, a movie about his life was being filmed, destined to become a poignant classic. And the rare disease that claimed his life eventually bore his name because, though not the first person to succumb to it, he was by far its best-known victim.

  Ripken chased not only a famous number but also a famously doomed legend, literally the stuff of Hollywood, America’s mythmaking factory, where the movie about Gehrig, The Pride of the Yankees, was hatched as World War II began. Samuel Goldwyn, a producer famous for his bald scalp, temper, and knack for knowing the public’s tastes, concocted the idea.

  Born Schmuel Gelbfisz in Warsaw, Poland, in 1879, Goldwyn had fled anti-Semitism in his homeland as a teenager, arriving in the United States with a new name and palpable ambition. He first became a successful salesman of fine leather gloves, then married the sister of a New York theater producer and started a partnership that produced one of Hollywood’s first full-length movies. As the film industry soared in the 1920s and 1930s, Goldwyn ran studios and owned production companies.

  He needed a subject for a new film in 1939, when one of his house writers, Niven Busch, suggested Gehrig, who at that point had recently ended his playing streak. A decade earlier, while working as a magazine journalist, Busch had authored a profile of Gehrig for The New Yorker. The ballplayer’s rise-and-fall story was rich in cinematic potential, Busch believed.

  Goldwyn was unmoved at first. Now 60, he had been in America for more than four decades but did not follow baseball. “That game is box office poison,” he told Busch with a dismissive wave. “If a man wants to watch baseball, he goes to a ballpark, not a movie theater.”

  Busch persisted, ushering Goldwyn to a screening room, where a film of Gehrig’s retirement speech was shown. Now Goldwyn was moved. When Busch recounted Gehrig’s background, Goldwyn related to a son of European immigrants living modestly in New York before rising up and making a mark in the world.

  Goldwyn decided to make the movie. Even though he knew little about baseball, he recognized a compelling narrative.

  His first move was announcing a search for an actor to play Gehrig, knowing all along the job would go to lean, craggy-faced Gary Cooper, best known for portraying cowboys in Westerns. Cooper had doubts about depicting one of baseball’s greats; he batted and threw right-handed, unlike the left-handed Gehrig, and he was 40 years old. But a dash of movie-making magic could take care of all that. And Cooper was under contract to Goldwyn, so he had to take the role.

  Besides Cooper, Goldwyn hired a top director, Sam Wood, and an Oscar-nominated actress, Teresa Wright, a dark-haired beauty who would portray Gehrig’s wife, Eleanor, even though Teresa was much younger, just two years out of high school. (Wright would later marry and divorce Niven Busch.) Babe Ruth signed on for a speaking role because, of course, no one else could play Babe Ruth. Now 43 and recovering from a heart attack, he dieted so vigorously for the job that he wound up in the hospital, suffering from exhaustion. But he recovered in time to film his scenes.

  At Goldwyn’s urging, the screenwriters
(Busch was not one) focused on Gehrig’s relationships with his strong-willed mother and Eleanor more than on his baseball career. The idea was to attract female moviegoers to his emotional tale along with the millions of male baseball fans who admired Gehrig. The movie depicts his mother seeking to convince young Lou to become an engineer until his talent all but demands that he play baseball. He becomes a star, falls in love, and marries Eleanor shortly before his illness overtakes him, with his consecutive-game streak cited in numerous scenes.

  Gehrig died while the movie was being filmed, adding to the tragedy. When Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor months later and the United States went to war, Goldwyn saw Cooper’s portrayal of an unpretentious, determined, brave Gehrig as reflective of America’s war effort. Those similarities were noted in the text that rolled on-screen as the film opened. The Pride of the Yankees premiered on July 14, 1942, with an evening gala and Ruth in the audience at the Astor Theatre in New York. The next day, 100,000 people saw it in theaters across the country.

  Several important moments in Gehrig’s life were altered for cinematic effect, making it difficult for filmgoers to distinguish what was real from what was enhanced. Did Gehrig really hit two home runs in a World Series game? (Yes.) Did Eleanor really try to talk him into ending his streak at 1,999 straight games? (Yes.) Did he really strike out three times in his 2,000th straight game? (No.) Did he really end his streak by telling his manager on the field, “I can’t go anymore”? (No.)

  But the public did not mind that license had been taken. The film packed an emotional wallop, ending with a rendering of the Yankee Stadium speech that brought audiences to tears. “In a simple, tender, meticulous, and explicitly narrative film, Mr. Goldwyn and his associates have told the story of Buster Lou with sincere and lingering affection,” the New York Times wrote in a glowing review. “It is, without being pretentious, a real saga of American life.”