The Streak

by John Eisenberg

  On August 29 at Ebbets Field, the Brooklyn Dodgers’ ace right-hander, Johnny Podres, tried to back him off the plate with an inside fastball. The pitch sailed up and in, and when Musial raised his right arm to protect his head, the ball struck his right hand at 90 mph, raising “a painful bruise,” the Sporting News reported, and prompting “fears” that Musial’s consecutive-game streak was over. But for the Cardinals’ next game, the opener of a series in Pittsburgh on August 30, their manager, Harry Walker, put Musial in the lineup, batting fifth—two slots below his usual perch. He played right field in the bottom of the first, enough to constitute an official appearance. When he was due to bat in the top of the second, a pinch hitter replaced him. He had barely played, but his streak continued.

  The next day, Musial’s bruised hand was still sore. According to a Sporting News article authored by St. Louis sportswriter Bob Broeg two years later, Walker approached the umpires several hours before the first pitch and asked if Musial could extend his streak simply by appearing on Walker’s lineup card. The umpires said yes, that would suffice. Walker returned to the visitors’ clubhouse at Forbes Field and proposed the idea to Musial, who “objected mildly in the presence of this writer, insisting he felt up to giving it a try,” Broeg later wrote. Undeterred by Musial’s misgivings, Walker proceeded with his plan, telling reporters later he feared Musial might “aggravate the injury” if he played.

  Musial was in the St. Louis lineup as the starting right fielder and No. 5 hitter. As the dismal matchup between the seventh- and eighth-place teams began before 6,379 fans, the Cardinals’ Ken Boyer led off the top of the first with a single. The next two batters made outs before Rip Repulski also singled. Musial was due to bat, but Pete Whisenant hit for him and flied out to end the inning. Musial was out of the game without having played, but the National League still credited him with an appearance, extending his streak.

  Walker had exploited a gray area produced by the lack of language in the major league rule book specifying what constituted an appearance. Although statisticians had used “accepted” criteria since 1907, the rule book would not contain specific language until 1973. Up to that time, league officials and umpires rendered ad hoc judgments. Musial’s situation was rare, perhaps unprecedented, but when pressed, the umpires and league ruled that a place in the starting lineup did constitute an appearance.

  With his hand improved, Musial played all nine innings the next night at Forbes Field, and by the end of the season, his streak stood at 618 straight games. But it was alive only because of a record-keeping loophole that Scott, Gehrig, and Suhr never exploited. Whenever they kept their streaks alive with “token” appearances, they always batted at least once or briefly played in the field. Either they did not know a “starting lineup” loophole existed or they found it unsporting.

  The absence of clarity seems impossible today, when so much scrutiny is paid to every statistical development, even the smallest detail. But Musial’s phantom appearance was a throwback to when inconsistencies were common in baseball. In the dead-ball era, a player with all zeros on his statistical line often was not listed in a box score and thus did not receive credit for playing in a game, even if he did. That could be why Gehrig always made sure he took an at-bat to keep his streak going.

  Musial’s misgivings about that night in Pittsburgh became more pronounced. As he neared Suhr’s record two years later, he said he was tempted to sit out a game “to show that while I appreciate the record, it didn’t mean enough for me to have tried to gain it unfairly.” But he persisted. In 1956, the Sporting News reported that “Iron Man Musial” had an “impressive” consecutive-game streak and was intent on breaking Suhr’s record. That he had used a loophole to keep it alive was not mentioned. At spring training in 1957, the Cardinals’ manager, Fred Hutchinson, referred to strategies he would use “after Musial set the record” later that year, as if there were no doubt he would.

  Musial’s run almost ended after he wrenched his back in the first game of the 1957 season, but the injury responded to treatment and he continued to play, reaching his goal of 823 games in a row on June 12, 1957. The Cardinals played the Phillies in Philadelphia. Musial hit a single and double and scored twice. After the Cardinals’ 4–0 win, his teammates presented him with a cake inscribed IRON MAN STAN 823.

  The Sporting News reported that Musial was “deluged” with telegrams, including one from Suhr, who had held the record for 22 years. “Congratulations on breaking the National League record for consecutive games played. Rooting for you to get 3,000 base hits,” wrote Suhr, now living in Millbrae, California.

  Contacted by reporters, Suhr suggested Musial should start taking days off. Looking back at his career, Suhr said, he believed he would have been more effective late in seasons if he had sat out games along the way. The Sporting News seconded the idea in an editorial, writing that Musial “would be wise to think about” Suhr’s advice. Musial agreed. Soon after he set the record, he said he would start sitting out the second games of doubleheaders. At 36, he was too old to play in absolutely every game.

  On July 21, he played in the first game of a doubleheader in Pittsburgh, then sat out the second game, expecting his streak would end. The Cardinals built an 11–2 lead without him, but the game was halted by a local curfew before the top of the ninth, so it did not go into the books just yet. The final inning would be played when the Cardinals returned to Pittsburgh the next month. Until then, it was not an official game.

  After his streak received that stay of execution, Musial changed his mind and wanted to keep going—not because of the record so much as the fact that the Cardinals needed him. They were in a pennant race, and Musial would end up hitting .351 for the season, earning his seventh batting title. He was so important to the club’s fortunes that he could not afford to take a game off. Four times between July 28 and August 20, he played both ends of a doubleheader.

  On August 22, he stepped into the batter’s box in the fifth inning in Philadelphia before 22,000 fans. Jack Sanford, a rookie right-hander, was pitching for the Phillies. With no outs, a runner on first, and the Cardinals up by two runs, Sanford threw a curveball high and away. Reaching for it, Musial swung hard and missed. Pain shot through his shoulder. He completed the at-bat, tapping a soft grounder that produced a force play at second, leaving him on first. He then scored on a double. But his shoulder ached so badly that he left the game.

  X-rays revealed a chipped bone. It was not an injury he could play through. His streak was over. As he watched from the dugout the next night, Joe Cunningham played first base for the Cardinals. Musial would not return to the lineup until mid-September, a major reason they failed to win the pennant.

  Four days after he injured his shoulder, he made a token appearance strictly for the sake of his just-concluded streak. The date was August 26, 1957. The Cardinals were back in Pittsburgh, set to play a scheduled game as well as the final inning of the game that had been halted by the local curfew a month earlier. Once concluded, the “curfew game” would go into the books as having been played on July 22. Musial had sat it out before, but now, as it was completed more than a month later, he entered as a pinch runner, ran the bases, and played the bottom of the ninth at first base, all with a chipped shoulder bone.

  By playing that inning, he added 33 games to the final accounting of his streak. If he had not taken advantage of the rare second chance to play in the curfew game, his streak would have ended at 862 games on July 22. But when he received credit for playing in that game, it meant he had played in every game until he injured his shoulder on August 22. His National League record went into the books at 895 straight games.

  The shenanigans of the mid-1950s did not continue. It was almost as if Yost’s gyrations and Musial’s remark about “unfairly” setting the record chilled the idea of extending streaks through extreme manipulations. From then on, the players who set streak records, including Billy Williams, Steve Garvey, and Cal Ripken Jr., started the vast majo
rity of their games (Ripken started every one), and when they did sit out, they always batted once or played a full inning of defense to keep their streak going.

  It helped when an official definition of an appearance finally graced the rule book in 1973, after the American League voted in the designated hitter and there was speculation that a “designated runner” rule might also soon be approved. Feeling compelled to define an appearance in a changing landscape, baseball authored Rule 10.24, labeling it “Guidelines for Cumulative Performance Records.” The new rule included this paragraph: “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.” (The rule number was later changed to 10.23, and more recently to 9.23.)

  The “starting lineup” loophole was addressed several years later with this clause in Rule 10.21: “When a player listed in the starting lineup for the visiting club is substituted for before he plays defensively, he shall not receive credit in the defensive statistics (fielding), unless he actually plays that position during a game. All such players, however, shall be credited with one game played (in ‘batting’ statistics) as long as they are announced into the game or listed on the official lineup card.” (The rule was later changed to 10.20, and more recently to 9.20.)

  The rules enacted in the 1970s made it official that a player could receive credit for an appearance just by making the starting lineup. But he could not use such an appearance to extend a consecutive-game streak. If those rules had existed in 1955, Musial’s streak would have ended on the night he did not play in Pittsburgh.

  16

  Ripken

  TOUGHING IT OUT

  Hard feelings brewed early when the Orioles and Seattle Mariners met at Camden Yards on June 6, 1993. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, the customary sellout crowd in place, the Orioles gunning for a three-game series sweep. When their first two batters, Harold Reynolds and Mark McLemore, tried to bunt in the bottom of the first, Seattle’s starter, Chris Bosio, threw inside on McLemore and behind Reynolds. Talk of retaliation circulated in the Baltimore dugout.

  The Orioles built a 5–1 lead behind their ace right-hander, Mike Mussina, with Seattle’s only run coming on a home run by catcher Bill Haselman. When Haselman stepped into the batter’s box in the top of the seventh, Mussina threw inside, trying to back him off the plate, and hit him. Haselman dropped his bat and charged the mound, ready to brawl. The Mariners and Orioles raced from their dugouts and met in the middle of the diamond, and a melee ensued.

  Ripken sprinted to the mound to keep Haselman from injuring Mussina, but the Orioles’ first baseman, Paul Carey, reached the mound first and grabbed Haselman, so Ripken turned to confront the Seattle players coming from their dugout. His cleats slipped as he turned, and he felt a pop in his right knee as several thousand pounds of Mariners bowled him over. He ended up on his back, on the bottom of the pile, suspecting he was injured.

  When the brawl ended, he tested his knee and, adrenaline pumping, was able to continue. It did not even hurt after the game. He iced the knee and headed home, thinking he had suffered no more than a minor sprain.

  But when he swung out of bed the next morning, he almost toppled over when he put his feet on the floor. His knee could not bear his weight. He had played in 1,790 straight games.

  “We’ll see, but I don’t think I can play tonight,” he told his wife, Kelly.

  “Can’t you pinch-hit?” she asked.

  Ripken smiled and asked, “You, too?” He had always said he would never resort to artifice to extend the streak.

  “I thought it was so important to you,” Kelly said.

  “If I can’t play, I can live with that,” Ripken said. “I’m not going to play just for that. If it ends because of this, I’ll be at peace with myself. I can accept it.”

  He understood Kelly simply was suggesting a way to keep the streak going, but he was not going down that road. If the injury limited him, he would sit out.

  He called Richie Bancells with the news that his knee had given out. “I knew something was up when he called that early,” recalled Bancells, who told Ripken to see the team doctor that morning and then come to Camden Yards for treatment. The Orioles were playing Oakland that night.

  An MRI revealed a sprained medial collateral ligament, which meant Ripken might have trouble moving from side to side. “I didn’t think there was any way he could play,” Bancells said. “But he came to the park, and we treated it all afternoon.”

  Word filtered out of the trainer’s room that the streak was in jeopardy. “Cal might not make it tonight. His knee is really stiff,” Johnny Oates, the manager, told Roland Hemond, the general manager, in a midafternoon phone call. Arriving for the game, players whispered to each other to keep from tipping off the media.

  After several hours of treatment, Bancells led Ripken to an indoor batting cage under the stands, where Ripken took some swings and Bancells rolled balls to him, making him move from side to side. He reported that the knee hurt but it was starting to feel better. When Bancells explained that Ripken could further damage the knee if he played, Ripken just shrugged. “I think I’ll play. Let’s wrap it up and deal with it after the game,” he said.

  As Hemond watched from an office overlooking the field, Ripken emerged from the dugout several hours before the game and ran wind sprints down the right-field line. Then he took infield practice. Hemond smiled. The streak would continue.

  Ripken was at shortstop when the game began, but he was worried about his knee holding up. Seldom, if ever, had he thought, “Don’t hit a ball to me,” but this once, he hoped to give his knee a couple of innings before it was tested. Naturally, Oakland’s first batter, Lance Blankenship, hit a scorching ground ball, heavy with topspin, sending Ripken scurrying to his right. Deep in the hole when he grabbed it, he planted his right foot, putting his weight on his injured knee, and hurled the ball on a taut line across the diamond. The throw had enough zip to beat Blankenship to first.

  The knee had passed its test.

  It was still sore two nights later when, expecting Oakland’s Bob Welch to throw a breaking ball away, Ripken leaned over the plate and was hit on the left wrist. He cursed under his breath as he jogged to first, thinking he had been hit in response to an inside fastball thrown at Oakland’s catcher, Terry Steinbach, in the top of the inning. After advancing to second on a ground out, Ripken tried to score on a single, rounding third and heading for the plate. As the throw from the outfield reached Steinbach, Ripken plowed violently into him, decking him with a forearm to the jaw. Steinbach held on to the ball to record the out, but he was so dazed by the collision that he had to leave the game.

  It was the kind of play that could easily produce hard feelings, but rather than hold it against Ripken, Steinbach saluted him. “A person like him, especially chasing that record, might be more reserved. Not him,” Steinbach said later. “He’s always very aggressive. He does what it takes to win.”

  If games 1,300 through 1,800 were the toughest period of the streak for Ripken, when everything was “all negative,” the nadir of that difficult stretch came early in the 1993 season.

  Ripken’s familial support system on the field was gone, having been eradicated in the off-season when the Orioles fired his father and released his brother. Senior had been the team’s third-base coach for four years, and though Oates, the manager, admired him, some in the organization believed he was still bitter about being fired as manager in 1988. He turned down the team’s offer of a job in the minor league system. Bill, whose playing time had dwindled, signed with the Texas Rangers.

  Now the only Ripken wearing an Orioles uniform, Junior was coming off a 1992 season in which he had batted a modest .251 and set career lows for home runs and runs batted in. Early
in 1993, he experienced more struggles. Through 47 games, he was batting .199 with four home runs. The rest of the Orioles floundered along with him. Expected to contend in the American League East, they lost 10 of their first 14 games and were 10 games out of first place by Memorial Day, disappointing the sellout crowds packing Camden Yards.

  Skepticism about Ripken’s streak echoed in Baltimore, on radio talk shows, in newspaper columns, and in the stands. There was no doubt he would continue to play every day, but was that really best for the team? The question was being asked throughout baseball, not just locally. Bobby Bonds, a former star outfielder, now a hitting coach for the San Francisco Giants, vented to a Bay Area newspaper, calling it “idiotic” for Ripken to play through such a slump. Bonds, the father of superstar Barry Bonds, added, “He’s doing it for a record, but I think he’s stupid for doing it. Is he helping the team or hurting the team? He’s probably hurting the team. He wants to break Gehrig’s record even if it costs Baltimore the pennant. If I were his manager, he would be out of there.”

  But Bonds was not his manager. Johnny Oates was, and Oates, ever supportive of Ripken’s Ironman status, kept playing him every day. “If the good Lord wants Cal to have a day off, He’ll make it rain,” Oates said. When reporters asked the manager why that made sense even with Ripken struggling, he explained that Ripken’s defense was as airtight as ever, and offensively, Oates said, Ripken almost always ended the season with at least 20 home runs and 80 runs batted in, no matter how badly he struggled at times.