Even as numerous economists questioned the benefits of ballpark construction, very few local leaders could resist the dual temptations of economic development and the fulfillment of boyhood dreams. Fear also became a great motivator, one that baseball would exploit with ruthless precision. As in Cleveland, teams would threaten to relocate if they were not given a new, publicly funded park. No politician wanted to be known as the one who allowed a team to move. This was especially true in Milwaukee, where the Brewers threatened to leave if a new stadium was not built. Such pressure, thought John Gard, the speaker of the Wisconsin House of Representatives, was particularly painful for two reasons. The first was that many Milwaukeeans still remembered that bitter day in 1965 when the Braves left for Atlanta. The second, Gard thought, was that baseball’s new strategy for extracting stadiums from local municipalities was almost entirely the brainchild of Bud Selig, the man responsible for bringing baseball back to Milwaukee in the first place. Selig’s mantra to cities, particularly small markets from Minneapolis to Oakland to Miami, was the same: Build us a stadium . . . or else.
But despite Selig’s strong-arm tactics, the dialogue about baseball grudgingly began to change. A public angry with the strike slowly embraced the quirky new ballparks with their brick facades and individualism. Once a naysayer, Charles Steinberg thought the new parks had done something remarkable. They had tapped into the game’s sense of nostalgia. Bridging the generations, thought Hall of Fame Orioles pitcher Jim Palmer, was what baseball did best. The most important element of Camden Yards was that it recognized the emotional connection between the fans and the history of the game. With that baseball found something it had sought seemingly forever: an advantage over football. It didn’t matter where a football game was played, but in baseball, the ballpark mattered. It mattered that the center field fence at the Polo Grounds stood 505 feet away from home plate, while the left field Green Monster at Fenway Park was a mere 310 feet away but 37 feet tall. It mattered that a home run at Ebbets Field was a lazy out in Yankee Stadium. Fans would come to the games now to see these new ballparks as much as the games themselves. What Lucchino had done with Camden Yards was, in its own sense, remarkable, for baseball had not retained its past well, even though a sense of continuity and the sanctity of its record book were the two elements that gave the sport its special power. Regardless of what the television numbers said, football couldn’t compete with baseball’s historical intangibles. Baseball had finally found a way to reach back into its past.
The ripple effects of this sudden, unprecedented era of ballpark construction would be felt for years and in far-flung locales. By the time Seattle defeated the Yankees in a captivating 1995 Division Series, the Mariners and the Washington state legislature had resurrected a push for a new ballpark. The Mariners lost the battle on the field, falling short of the World Series when Cleveland handled them in a six-game Championship Series, but they won the war. The Mariners’ 1995 season had been the catalyst for a stadium drive that resulted in the 1999 opening of Safeco Field, a $517-million ballpark, complete with a retractable roof, natural grass, and $10 sushi. The irony was that Safeco Field not only saved the Mariners but turned them into a financial powerhouse, even though Seattle voters originally rejected paying for a stadium. It helped, however, to have baseball fans in the machinery of government. Only intervention by a friendly state legislature gave the Seattle story, at least for baseball fans, a happy ending, with the public paying the bill.
The success of the Mariners was not lost on the people of Montreal. Rondell White, a young player with the Expos in 1994, would reflect back on the chain of events that would ultimately lead to the Expos’ leaving Montreal after the 2004 season to become the Washington Nationals. For him, it all came back to the 1994 strike. Had the Expos been given the same postseason opportunity as Seattle, perhaps history would have changed. “We would have won it that year,” White said. “We had the team to do it, but we never got the chance. You look around, and you see all these new parks going up and a lot of us were thinking, even after we left and played in other places, ‘That should have been us. That should have been Montreal.’”
For Tony Gwynn, the successes of Camden Yards and the other new parks was tempered by the reality that the strike inflicted fatal damage on several great baseball cities. In the first five years of SkyDome, Toronto averaged 47,775 fans per game. In the five years that followed 1994, the number dropped to 31,094, a 35 percent decrease. Attendance fell in all but one of the years between 1994 and 2000. When SkyDome was built, it cost $550 million Canadian. In 1994, it was sold to a private consortium for $151 million and its value declined into bankruptcy. Sportsco International won the stadium from bankruptcy court for $80 million in 1999, and five years later it was purchased by Rogers Communications for $25 million. The fall of the Canadian dollar and the wildly changing economics and mores of baseball conspired to completely transform one of the powerhouse teams in baseball into a team searching for itself in the middle of the financial pack.
The same would be true in Pittsburgh, an example that many baseball insiders considered even more disappointing. In 2001, the Pirates unveiled a gorgeous new facility, PNC Park, but after a small opening-year spike, the team’s attendance remained near the bottom of the league. After the Boston Red Sox played an interleague series there in 2003, Nomar Garciaparra said Pittsburgh owned the nicest park in baseball. “But,” he said, “this town hasn’t come back to baseball yet, and I don’t know if it ever will.”
But to Gwynn, Montreal was the most tragic case.
“Montreal, that’s who I think about the most,” Gwynn said. “They had Grissom and Walker and Alou and oh my God. And you know, I think Atlanta’s run would have ended that year. And maybe we’d still have baseball in Montreal. Maybe they would have gotten what they wanted.”
IT WAS at Camden Yards on the night of September 6, 1995, that Cal Ripken played in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking Lou Gehrig’s record, which had stood for more than forty-five years as one of the seemingly insurmountable Everests of the game. To Tony Gwynn, whose own assault on history was lost to the strike, Ripken became the most significant figure in the rejuvenation of baseball.
“I know that if Lou Gehrig is looking down on tonight’s activities,” Ripken said that night, “he isn’t concerned about someone playing one more consecutive game than he did. Instead, he’s viewing tonight as just another example of what is good and right about the great American game.”
After the bitterness that had turned so many fans away from the game, Ripken provided the feel-good moment that baseball desperately craved. More important, thought Yankees executive Brian Cashman, baseball was celebrating itself through the perfect player, whose style resonated with the overwhelming majority of the country. It was not lost on baseball that the record Ripken surpassed was not a flashy one, but a mark that required a grueling consistency that spoke to most fans’ appreciation for hard work. Ripken didn’t enjoy that magical season that young boys dream of, but rather went about the tedium of his job, in some stretches playing every inning of every game for years on end. The streak began when Ripken hit eighth and played third in a game against Toronto on May 30, 1982. For the next five years, Ripken would play every inning of every game. From 1982 until he ended his streak on September 20, 1998, there were no sick days for Cal Ripken.
When the streak ended, he had played in 2,632 consecutive games over sixteen seasons, but his true historical significance, thought Peter Schmuck, the dean of Baltimore sportswriters, was in being the signature figure that pulled baseball out of the abyss. To Schmuck, the streak was impressive, but it was Ripken’s attitude following the end of the strike that transformed him from a gifted, future Hall of Fame player to a legend of his generation.
“Personally, I think it’s his greatest achievement. I don’t think anyone disputes him as the single most influential figure during that first year following the strike. It’s not an accident. I believe he always knew
the value of the record. Clearly he realized how important it could be for the game at that time. I truly believe he knew what it meant,” Schmuck said.
“From day one in ’95, he stood at the corner of the dugout after games and signed autographs. The line snaked out from the dugout and out into right field. He really tried to bring the fans back to the game one autograph at a time. As a group, the union did advise the players to be as fan friendly as possible. I don’t know if Don Fehr and Gene Orza tapped him and said, ‘You’re the guy, and we need you to do this.’ I think he took it upon himself. He was making the transition from local hero to national hero.”
Cal Ripken Jr. was baseball royalty. A local from nearby Aberdeen, he played his entire career with his hometown Orioles, at one point beside his brother in the infield, and continued the tradition of “the Oriole Way” inherited from his manager father and Baltimore greats Jim Palmer and Brooks Robinson. As his stature grew, he began to embrace his special standing in the game outside Baltimore. Ripken’s image was spotless in an era when professional athletes often cracked under the temptations of enormous wealth, the intense scrutiny of media coverage, and seemingly endless scandal that resulted from the combination. If after the strike even the most popular players found themselves under siege by an embittered public, Ripken’s image would remain intact.
To Dave Sheinin, who covered him during his final three seasons, Ripken had a natural curiosity that separated him from most players. Periodically, Ripken would ask Sheinin about the intricacies of the newspaper business. Why do the editors write the headlines when the reporters write the stories? To Ripken, that was a recipe for disaster. A player would bristle at a headline, and jump the reporter. “How many players even took the time to understand the process?” Sheinin later said. “You might think that the players would care about these things, since so much of what the public knows comes from the newspapers, but Cal actually was interested in the whole thing. The other players, I guess they were beyond it all.”
Understanding Ripken was not easy, and as his legend grew, even the writers covering him felt a certain distance, a wariness that, Sheinin believed, underscored Ripken’s desire to protect a carefully cultivated image. For a beat writer new to the Orioles, a first responsibility was to attempt to forge some form of relationship with Ripken, and failing to do so meant being at a severe disadvantage. During the final years of his career, as the Orioles sank to near the bottom of the standings, it was Ripken who alone gave the team any import whatsoever. He made the news and had more influence than any of his managers. For the writers, covering such a dreary team meant the only story, the announcement of Ripken’s retirement, would be the biggest story in town. Sheinin was the one who broke it, both because of his hard work in building a bond with Ripken, and because days earlier, Ripken was confronted about his retirement by a reporter of whom he was not particularly fond. He told the reporter he had no plans to retire. It was an unnerving moment for the writers, but it underscored Ripken’s power.
“You always knew he was the man, and you had to develop something with him,” Sheinin recalled. “He was bigger than the organization itself. I remember a spring training game in Fort Myers, against the Twins. The Orioles trained in Fort Lauderdale, so we didn’t make a lot of trips to the other side. It was two hours after the game, and the bus had already left, and Cal was still signing autographs. He took that responsibility seriously.
“I was always blown away by how much he mattered to people. When you’re on the inside sometimes it’s tough to step back and see it, but to say he was beloved is a woeful understatement.”
Publicly, Ripken was untouchable. Privately, however, he could be a divisive figure. Ripken was so powerful on the Orioles that he actually called pitches from shortstop. To Ken Rosenthal, who covered Ripken for the better part of the late 1980s and 1990s for the Baltimore Sun, Ripken’s reach had transcended the limits of even the greatest players. “One day, Brady Anderson comes up to me and says, ‘How can you criticize Cal?’ And I told him that the president gets criticized. The pope gets criticized, everybody gets criticized. And he said, ‘Yeah, but this is different.’ My point was that he wasn’t God. But it got to the point where you - couldn’t mention anything about him. He was so . . . so Cal.”
What one Baltimore official found so amazing about Ripken was the reach of his power. “I mean, here’s a guy who is a great player. But he’s still a player. Babe Ruth wasn’t as untouchable as this guy. You couldn’t go anywhere or do anything in that organization if Cal disapproved.”
Ripken was often criticized for not being a vocal leader, and when it became clear that his play had declined, he was at times accused of allowing the streak to take precedence over the team. On the road, he did not stay in the same hotel as the rest of the club. To Rosenthal, Ripken was a perfect example of the hero game at work in American sports. “It was his team. He was from Baltimore and he could do no wrong. I don’t know if the streak polarized the team, but when they had a lot of stars, I’m talking 1996-1997, I think it burned Roberto Alomar and Rafael Palmeiro that Cal was Cal and they were superstar players, but they weren’t Cal.
“At the same time, he was mostly revered. They respected him, but I just think they thought it was a little out of hand. The record, the adulation, everything. You were either a Cal guy or you weren’t. But the fact also remained that when you think about the two or three things that made fans forget about the strike even for a minute, the streak was a big part of that, no question,” Rosenthal said.
As was typical in a major league clubhouse, the lines were drawn along racial lines. White veterans such as B. J. Surhoff, Brady Anderson, and Chris Hoiles were the “Cal guys,” while a group of established Latino players led by Roberto Alomar and Armando Benitez formed on the other side of the clubhouse. As the team declined and the streak grew in importance, Ripken, some teammates thought, did not do much to discourage the distance between himself and the other Orioles.
“The thing about Cal,” said Rosenthal, “was that it didn’t matter what anyone thought about him. It didn’t matter what cliques were created in the clubhouse because of him, or what problems he caused his manager or the chemistry on the team. He was a giant. He was the legend.”
Harold Baines, a Ripken teammate who played nearly two decades, thought Ripken was not a complex figure. “His rules were pretty simple. He went out and played every day. That’s what he expected of the rest of his teammates. I didn’t find anything difficult about him at all. What he did every day spoke for itself.”
To the more political players of color in baseball, Ripken represented how differently white and minority players were treated. It wasn’t that anyone in baseball particularly doubted Ripken’s skill. Indeed, at six-four and 220 pounds, Ripken represented a new kind of shortstop, the shortstop as offensive threat. Yet to the blacks and Latino players, only a white player would have been allowed the opportunity to break Gehrig’s record. A black or Latino player, went the thinking, would have been benched at the first sign of struggle, such as when Ripken suffered through an 0-for- 29 slump in 1988. Most big league managers sought players in their own image, which left many black and Latin players with a strike against them. The opportunity to automatically remain in the lineup day in and out, to even have a shot at a streak of any sort, was a luxury most minority players believed was denied them. It was an attitude long held, but rarely articulated publicly, for minority players understood better than anyone that such a complaint would either be ignored or used against the player who spoke up against the baseball culture.
Still, Ripken cut a towering figure, one who commanded the respect of his peers. For Tony Gwynn, Ripken’s breaking Lou Gehrig’s record was exactly what baseball needed. More important, the right player had been the one to set such a hallowed record, pulling baseball back into a positive light. For a sport that found so many ways to hurt itself, the fact that it was Ripken in the spotlight was a sign of good luck, according to Gwynn.
/>
“I think Ripken really set the example for all of us. There were many nights he was sitting here signing autographs two hours before games,” Gwynn said. “Players recognized that was his way of doing it and a lot of guys didn’t want to do it and I think some players took it upon themselves to spread the word to their teammates that this might be the right way to do it.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The realproblem, thought Andy MacPhail, wasn’t the strike itself, but the structural problems within baseball that labor strife highlighted so publicly. The strike brought to the surface realities the game’s leadership was reluctant to face. Years of ownership’s trying to destroy Marvin Miller, and by extension, the players’ union, left such enmity between the game’s two towers that a common dialogue seemed virtually impossible. Eight work stoppages in thirty years was proof that the two sides truly did not see themselves as partners in a larger business venture. How could they when the owners never even saw themselves as having common interests with one another? The acrimony between the owners and players ran so deep that it permeated how the game was sold to the public. The owners didn’t know how to market the players, because they had spent so much time trying to step on their necks.
Now, in the mid-1990s, the sport was in fierce competition for the public’s entertainment dollar, not only with the other major professional sports—football, basketball, and hockey—but also with music and movies.
Yet, compared to the other professional sports, MacPhail noticed baseball to be ill-equipped on the marketing side of the game. That was another reason Bud Selig so admired the NFL and Pete Rozelle. The NFL got it. It knew how to market itself and always seemed to be ahead of the curve in its recognition of the power of television and media. Baseball had a century-old advantage over every other sport, a historical hold on the public that gave the sport an emotional, nostalgic, even familial connection to the fans that the other sports lacked, yet it was woefully inept at promoting itself. Facing a public relations crisis in the wake of the longest work stoppage in the game’s history, baseball’s leadership was again at a loss for a strategy to reach a public it had always been in danger of losing.
Juicing the Game Page 9