By the time Ripken came along, baseball had experienced several rounds of expansion, altering its geography, and the nature of travel had changed. Ripken played on the West Coast and in Texas, the upper Midwest, and Canada. He traveled strictly by plane, taking commercial flights early in his career, then charters later. The living was good, especially on charters, which could feature gourmet meals and unlimited drinks, depending on a team’s rules.
Which travel era provided a better platform for playing in every game for more than a decade? Steve Garvey, an independent arbiter in the case of Ripken v. Gehrig, laughed at the idea of a comparison of any kind.
“To measure one streak against the other is complicated and, frankly, an exercise that’s never going to have a firm conclusion,” Garvey said for this book. “I mean, travel, facilities, surfaces, game times—everything is different. Gloves were a lot smaller when Gehrig played. You can go on and on. I prefer what you can say definitively, that both were the only ones to do it within their era. Whatever circumstances each faced, it was hard to play in that many games, a huge challenge, and no one else came anywhere close to doing it for as long as they did.”
Ripken’s streak reached 2,100 consecutive games on August 5, leaving him just 30 away from Gehrig. Angelos wanted to fire Regan after the Orioles’ disappointing season reached a nadir with four straight losses in Boston, but the owner held off, thinking a change would detract from the streak celebration soon to occur. Ripken’s record had become the team’s priority.
After playing 10 games on the West Coast in late August, the Orioles flew home for the nine-game homestand that would contain the record-tying and record-breaking games. The front office wrestled with how to commemorate the achievement on those nights, even asking Ripken, who admitted he was stumped. “I just go out and play a game. How do you celebrate that?” he said.
Several brainstorming sessions produced a plan. After the top of the fifth inning of every game of the homestand, a summary of the rule declaring the game official would appear on Camden Yards’ giant video board, accompanied by “Day One,” a soaring pop instrumental by composer John Tesh. When the music built to a crescendo, four 10-foot-high, orange-and-black banners, aligned on the B&O Warehouse overlooking the park, would unfurl, revealing the streak’s latest number now that the game was official.
The scene debuted during the first game of the homestand, on August 29. As Ripken took the field in the bottom of the fifth, “Day One” played and the “official game” rule appeared on the scoreboard, stating that “a game is official and all stats count when a) the trailing team has batted five times, or b) the score is tied after five innings.” The music built to a crescendo, and the banners on the warehouse unfurled, revealing the number “2,123.” That was how many consecutive games Ripken had now played in.
The fans had little reaction that night, but they caught on quickly. By the third game of the homestand, they were standing and cheering throughout the fifth-inning commemoration, sending a palpable emotional charge through the ballpark.
The streak reached 2,128 games on September 3, a sunny Sunday afternoon, with the Orioles playing the finale of a weekend series against the Seattle Mariners. As the game began, Ripken lightheartedly raced Brady Anderson onto the field, then made the first putout of the game, ranging back and to his right to catch a pop-up down the left-field line. In the bottom of the first, he batted with one out and runners on first and second, worked the count full, and fouled off three pitches. On the 10th pitch of the at-bat, he singled to right-center, driving in his 67th run of the season.
In the top of the second, he charged onto the infield grass for a slow roller, grabbed the ball, and flipped it to Rafael Palmeiro, the Orioles’ first baseman, in time to beat the runner. In the bottom of the inning, he grounded out with two runners in scoring position. As the game continued, Ripken grounded out to first, grabbed a hard-hit bouncer and started a double play, flied out to center, and singled in another run. Though it was just a typical day of ups and downs, everyone in the ballpark, including the players, knew they were witnessing history. The Mariners stood on the top step of their dugout and applauded along with the fans when the game became official in the middle of the fifth inning.
“There’s a lot of power in that moment,” Ripken said after the game. “I’m appreciative, but I don’t know what to do. I become lost on the field. You stand there and start reflecting on your career. It’s hard not to get teary-eyed.”
Though they would miss the record-tying and record-breaking games, the Mariners were excited they had participated in the final buildup. “I’m so glad we were here to see his. I get goose bumps during that ceremony,” Seattle infielder Rich Amaral said. “What Cal has done is amazing. We all have so much respect for him.”
At the end of the day, Ripken spoke to reporters before heading off to another photo shoot. His stat line: two singles, two runs batted in, two putouts, and six assists in a 9–6 loss.
“How are you holding up?” a reporter asked.
He had batted close to .400 over the past week and was averaging almost one run batted in per game over the past month.
“I think I’m doing OK,” he said with a smile.
Speaking to the media before the series finale against Seattle, Regan inadvertently caused a stir. During a discussion about what happens to players as they age, he noted that Alan Trammell, the Detroit Tigers’ All-Star shortstop, played less now that his career was winding down. Ripken, two years younger than Trammell, eventually would benefit from that, Regan said.
“I think as Cal goes on, it would help him to take a day off. Not before the sixth [of September], though,” Regan said.
Several media outlets reported that Regan had implied Ripken would get a day off soon, which prompted newspaper headlines, which set off the radio talk shows. Regan was eviscerated for daring to suggest he had any say in Ripken’s feat.
Exasperated, Regan explained the next day that he had meant Ripken would surely get a day off eventually, not now.
“I didn’t say I’m going to give Cal a day off,” he said. “I’m not going to sit him down unless, like Lou Gehrig, Cal decides he needs a day off.”
The lesson of the incident was that the streak belonged to Ripken. He alone would decide when it ended.
As Ripken pulled within one game of Gehrig’s record during an afternoon game against the California Angels before 42,149 fans on September 4, a propeller plane flew over Camden Yards pulling a banner that read GOD BLESS CAL. It was Labor Day, certainly the right holiday to celebrate, given the circumstances.
The crowd demanded a curtain call after Ripken hit a home run in the third, and the ovations continued for each of his at-bats. In the seventh, a rookie reliever for the Angels, Troy Percival, tossed a 95 mph fastball inside, sending Ripken sprawling to avoid getting hit. Ripken stood up and dusted himself off, his irritation evident as boos rained down. He swung hard at Percival’s next pitch and made contact, hoping to exact revenge, but the ball flew to left for a routine out.
His history-making moment arrived the next night. Scalpers were asking $1,500 for the best seats to consecutive-game No. 2,130. Supplemental box seats funding ALS research went for $5,000. Stores and kiosks around the ballpark sold Ripken memorabilia. In the home clubhouse, players filmed the pregame scene with camcorders and begged Regan for the chance to play and appear in a box score destined for the Hall of Fame.
Though Ripken spent the night on the field, playing shortstop, he was surrounded by family and friends. His parents watched from a private box overlooking the field. His wife and children were in front-row seats by the Orioles’ dugout, alongside his brother Bill, who now played for the Buffalo Bisons, the Cleveland Indians’ Triple A affiliate. The Bisons were letting Bill miss a playoff game so he could see his brother make history. “I asked some [Buffalo] teammates if they minded whether I went, and they all said, ‘You’re crazy not to be in Baltimore,’” Bill recalled. “It was weird to have
a ticket and walk through the front gate, but once I did, you knew something special was happening.”
Ben McDonald, Ripken’s Orioles teammate, also had needed special permission to witness the game in person. He had missed the past several months with a shoulder injury, and now that it was improved, the team wanted to send him on a rehab assignment to Rochester, New York, where the Orioles’ Triple A affiliate played. McDonald could pitch there as a prelude to returning to the Orioles, the thinking went. But he balked.
“When Phil Regan called me in and told me that was the plan, I said, ‘Are you serious? I’m going to miss the biggest record-breaking moment in the history of baseball? For a rehab assignment? When we’re 20 games out?’” McDonald recalled. “I told Phil, ‘I’m not going. You can kick me off the team, but I’m not going.’ He thought about it for a second and said, ‘OK, you can go next week.’ If we’d been one game out, I would’ve gone, no problem. But we were 20 out. So I got to stay and be there.”
The Orioles hoped to celebrate the occasion by putting on a show . . . and they did. Leading off the bottom of the second, catcher Chris Hoiles hit a home run. One out later, third baseman Jeff Manto also hit a ball over the fence. The two batters who followed Manto, Mark Smith and Brady Anderson, also hit homers, giving the Orioles three in a row and four in the inning.
One of the Orioles’ best pitchers, Scott Erickson, took a 7–0 lead into the top of the fifth. The fans stood in anticipation as Erickson retired the Angels in order. When a soft fly to center nestled in Anderson’s glove for the third out, the game was official, Ripken had tied Gehrig, and the fans loosed a roar.
Ripken jogged toward the dugout with a purposeful expression but smiled when his teammates swarmed him on the top step. A flurry of images of Ripken and Gehrig flashed on the video board. Emerging from the home dugout, Ripken waved his arms, mouthed the words “thank you,” and lifted his gaze to the private boxes overlooking the field. He located Senior, who was back at Camden Yards for the first time since the Orioles fired him three years earlier. Ripken acknowledged his father with a wave, and Senior waved back.
“Day One” built to a crescendo, and the banners on the warehouse dropped, leaving the number Gehrig had made famous—2,130—standing 10 feet high. The cheers continued, prompting Ripken to take a second curtain call, then a third. Al Clark, the home-plate umpire, tried to restart the game several times but gave up. This was an important moment for baseball, Clark thought, especially after the strike the year before. Rather than end the moment, he let it play out.
After a 10-minute delay, the game resumed. An inning later, Ripken led off the bottom of the sixth. He took a strike, then a ball. The Angels’ pitcher, Mark Holzemer, hurled a fastball over the plate. Ripken swung and connected, launching a drive that soared over the infield and the outfield, then cleared the left-field wall. As more roars echoed, Ripken practically sprinted around the bases. “I’m not in the business of screenwriting, but if I were, this would have been a pretty good one,” he said later.
Following the game, which the Orioles won, 8–0, there was a ceremony on the field. Ripken received gifts and testimonials from sports and entertainment figures such as Johnny Unitas, the Baltimore Colts’ legendary quarterback; Hank Aaron, baseball’s all-time home run king; Gary Williams, the men’s basketball coach at the University of Maryland; actor Tom Selleck; Bonnie Blair, an Olympic gold medalist in speed skating; pro basketball star David Robinson; and rock star Joan Jett, a Maryland native and avid Orioles fan.
One gift touched Ripken deeply. When his streak began on May 30, 1982, and the Orioles lost to the Angels, Jim Gott, a tall rookie right-hander for the Angels, recorded his first major league win. Gott kept a ball from that game, and now, more than 13 years later, Ripken was stunned when Gott walked onto the field at Camden Yards and gave Ripken the ball commemorating Gott’s first win but also the beginning of Ripken’s streak.
“You don’t have to do this,” Ripken told him, but Gott, still pitching in the majors at age 36, took the microphone and told the crowd it was an honor just to be part of the streak.
After the ceremony, Ripken met with the media and said he felt “a little easing of the pressure” now that he had equaled Gehrig. He did not leave for home until after 2 a.m. and was back up within hours to take his daughter to her first day of first grade. It had been a joke in their family that Rachel and her father both had important events planned for September 6.
That morning, a proclamation honoring Ripken was read on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Secret Service agents swarmed Camden Yards when Ripken arrived in the afternoon. President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore both were coming to watch the game. If Ripken had never grasped how much his achievement meant to the public, he surely did now.
Clinton and Gore went to the Orioles’ clubhouse upon their arrival at the ballpark. Ripken visited with them, then headed out to the field for batting practice. As a sunny late afternoon became a clear-blue early evening, musicians Bruce Hornsby and Branford Marsalis performed a wordless national anthem that bordered on a jazz riff. The historic game began.
The Orioles trailed, 1–0, when Ripken batted for the first time in the bottom of the second. He acknowledged the fans’ ovation, stepped into the batter’s box against California’s starter, Shawn Boskie, and popped out. When he batted again two innings later, Bobby Bonilla had just hit a home run to give the Orioles a 2–1 lead. Boskie, seemingly rattled, threw Ripken three straight balls, then left a fastball over the plate. Ripken swung and connected. The ball soared above the infield. California’s left fielder, Garret Anderson, began to sprint back, then stopped chasing it. The ball cleared the wall and landed 10 rows into the outfield seats. For the second straight night, Ripken had cracked a home run on a history-making occasion.
Noise swirled as he circled the bases. Television cameras caught Clinton with a wry grin, as if he could not believe what he had just witnessed. “I nailed that pitch, and what a thrill that was. Going out in style, so to speak; that was extra sweet, no doubt about it,” Ripken later wrote.
After Boskie retired the next three batters to end the inning, the Orioles’ starter, Mike Mussina, took the mound for the top of the fifth. The first California batter, Rex Hudler, hit a soft line drive to left that was caught. The second batter, Jorge Fabregas, was out on a routine ground ball to second. That brought outfielder Damion Easley to the plate. On a 3-1 pitch, Easley swung at a breaking ball and lifted a pop to short right field. The Orioles’ second baseman, Manny Alexander, drifted under it, waited, and snagged it.
The game was official. Ripken owned the consecutive-game record.
As he jogged toward the dugout, the now-familiar mid-game ceremony began. “Day One” played. The appearance rule went up on the video board. The banners on the warehouse dropped, revealing the number “2,131.” Thousands of flashbulbs popped. An Orioles intern, Kristen Schultz, released hundreds of orange and black balloons, which flew into the night. Schultz would eventually become the team’s director of community relations and promotions, never forgetting her small role in the historic event.
The fans stood, cheered, and did not stop. Ripken emerged from the dugout, waved, walked over to his family in the front row, pulled off his jersey, and handed it to them. He kissed his daughter, picked up his son, and shook hands with his brother. Behind him, the Angels took the field for the bottom of the fifth, and Boskie threw his requisite warm-up pitches, thinking the game might soon resume. But it did not.
Ripken continued to wave and tap his chest, letting the fans know he was touched. When he returned to the dugout, the crowd continued to roar. Ripken came back out on the field for a curtain call, and still the noise continued. A few minutes later, Bonilla and Palmeiro pulled him out of the dugout and pushed him down the right-field line. His lap around the ballpark began.
The entire sport had stopped to cheer Ripken. ESPN’s broadcast from Baltimore was intermittently shown on video boards in o
ther major league ballparks. In Arlington, Texas, where the Texas Rangers played the Chicago White Sox, “they would cut in, and when he had the record and went on the lap, everyone kind of stopped to watch and appreciate what they were witnessing,” recalled Mickey Tettleton, who played for the Rangers.
Johnny Oates, who had been hired as the Rangers’ manager within weeks of being fired by the Orioles, found himself on the verge of tears as he watched the scene in Baltimore on a video board halfway across the country. “I had played catch with Junior when he was a six-year-old with a runny nose and Senior was my manager in the Instructional League,” Oates later recalled. “I probably never would have made it to the major leagues as a player without that family. Watching Junior on the video board that night, I got very emotional. But then, I think a lot of people did.”
Rex Hudler could barely believe he was on the field for this historic game. Mussina was a right-hander, and Hudler, a 35-year-old journeyman, only played against left-handed pitching. Yet he was in California’s lineup and, in fact, had also played the night before when Ripken had tied the record and Erickson, another right-hander, had pitched for the Orioles. “My manager did me a favor on those nights, pure and simple,” Hudler said years later in an interview for this book.
Hudler had told Marcel Lachemann, the Angels’ manager, that he and Ripken had been friends since they were teammates on the Orioles in the 1980s. Lachemann knew Hudler would be touched by the chance to play in Ripken’s historic games. “I still thank [Lachemann] every time I see him,” Hudler said.
Hudler was, indeed, thrilled. In fact, he was so excited before the September 6 game that he approached Larry Barnett, the home-plate umpire, and asked if he could have one of the game balls.
Barnett turned him down. The balls would become valuable commodities; several were destined for the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. “If you want a ball from this game, you’re going to have to catch a third out,” the umpire said.
The Streak Page 28