As it turned out, his season was over. The injection did not provide relief, and Fielder wound up undergoing surgery. With good cheer, he tweeted, “I’ll be back!”
When he returned to the Rangers in 2015, he hit .305 with 98 runs batted in and made the American League All-Star team. But he made sure he took occasional games off. His feelings about playing every day had changed, reflecting the shift in attitude throughout the sport that had occurred during his career.
“I’m feeling really refreshed,” Fielder said, smiling, in the middle of the 2015 season. “I’m proud of the streak I had, but looking back, I’m thinking a day off now and then would have done me good. That was just me being stubborn. A day off or two isn’t going to hurt me.”
In 2016, his neck issues resurfaced, prompting more surgery. He had played in 98.9 percent of his team’s games between 2006 and 2013 and achieved perfect attendance four times, but it was doubtful he would ever set foot on a major league diamond again.
Although Ripken’s record is widely regarded as unbreakable, Ripken himself has doubts about its permanence. “People say it’s an unbreakable record, but I did it, so somebody else can,” he said. “How you evaluate an everyday player now might have changed a bit, but still, there are plenty of guys who can play one season of 162. It’s a streak of consecutive seasons playing 162, so a lot of things have to go right, and you have to be worthy of being in the lineup, but I don’t look at it as an unbreakable record.”
If any player since Ripken has had a chance, it was Miguel Tejada, a muscular shortstop who compiled the fifth-longest streak in major league history while playing for the Oakland A’s and Orioles between 2001 and 2007.
“With him, more than anything, it was pure love of the game,” said Art Howe, who managed Tejada in Oakland. “He loved to play baseball. He couldn’t wait to get on the field and compete. If he was healthy, he was going to be in the lineup. I guess you have to be lucky not to get hit by a pitch or sprain an ankle. He left his feet a lot, dove for balls. Fortunately, he never came up lame and never had any really bad collisions.”
A native of Los Barrancones, a tiny village in the Dominican Republic, Tejada grew up in poverty, the youngest of 11 children in a home without electricity or running water. Rather than attend school, he helped provide for his family, at different times shining shoes, making garments in a factory, and working construction.
In the afternoons, he played baseball, a passion he shared with many Dominican boys. He played shortstop, a position rich in tradition on the island, but he was so thick through his chest and trunk that he lacked natural grace. Several of his friends glided after ground balls, made effortless throws across the diamond, and signed pro contracts before him. Finally, Juan Marichal, a Hall of Fame pitcher who scouted for the A’s, saw enough potential to sign Tejada.
He rose through Oakland’s minor league system, exhibiting surprising power, and made the majors in a few years. The A’s were not a large-market franchise, leaving their general manager, Billy Beane, with limited funds to pursue free agents. Beane had no choice but to construct a roster with homegrown talent, drafted and developed by the club. Fortunately for Beane, his system produced Jason Giambi, a powerful slugger, and pitchers Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, and Mark Mulder as well as Tejada—a group that would lead the A’s to four straight division titles beginning in 2000.
Once Tejada had the shortstop job, he gripped it tightly, playing with almost frightening fierceness. He swung hard at pitches and drove himself relentlessly, never wanting to rest. Howe occasionally asked Tejada if he wanted to take a day off. “He gave me a look like, ‘Are you kidding?’” Howe recalled.
The American League shortstop roster included Boston’s Nomar Garciaparra, Texas’s Alex Rodriguez, and New York’s Derek Jeter. Tejada elbowed his way into their starry company. Playing a full season of games for the first time in 2001, he batted .267 with 31 home runs and 113 runs batted in. The next year, he again played in every game and hit .308 with 34 home runs and 131 runs batted in. The A’s suffered a first-round playoff defeat for the third straight year, but Tejada was voted the league’s Most Valuable Player.
The playoff disappointments prompted Howe’s firing, but Oakland’s new manager, Ken Macha, continued to play Tejada every day. When he became a free agent after the 2003 season, which ended with another early playoff defeat for the A’s, Tejada had eye-popping offensive statistics for a shortstop and had played in 594 straight games. The Orioles signed him to a six-year, $72 million contract.
Baltimore fans hoped Tejada could lead their club back to glory. The Orioles had not finished over .500 since 1997. As a durable middle infielder with home run power, he was, in a way, a reincarnation of Ripken. His approach certainly was similar: Tejada did not even rest in the off-season, instead playing winter ball in the Dominican Republic. A day without a game was unfathomable to him.
“He didn’t even want a day off in spring training,” recalled Dave Trembley, a manager in the Orioles’ minor league system when Tejada joined the club. “Most veteran guys are always looking for that, a day off in the spring, especially when a long bus ride is involved. Tejada would hop on the bus and say, ‘Let’s go!’”
In 2004, he played in every game and batted .304 with 34 home runs and 150 runs batted in—a spectacular season. But the Orioles still languished, finishing 23 games out of first. Early in 2005, they surprisingly shot to the top of the division, with Tejada leading the way. In July, he hit a home run in the All-Star Game and was named the game’s MVP. The fans had elected him a starter over Jeter, Garciaparra, and Rodriguez.
But the Orioles crashed hard in the final months of 2005. Rafael Palmeiro, back with the club at age 40, tested positive for a banned steroid and claimed Tejada had provided it in a tainted vitamin B12 supplement. Tejada admitted giving Palmeiro a shot of B12, a legal vitamin, but denied it contained a performance-enhancing drug. A panel overseeing baseball’s drug-testing program exonerated Tejada, but the specter of steroids would haunt him for the rest of his career.
Early in 2006, he hyperextended his right knee, and fans criticized him for not hustling down the line on some ground balls. But he played on, never taking a day off. The Orioles’ manager, Sam Perlozzo, suggested he serve as the designated hitter on days when his knee hurt. Tejada liked the idea. He would DH more than a dozen times in the next two seasons, utilizing an option unavailable in Gehrig’s era to keep his playing streak going. He considered those “DH days” his days off, Tejada said later.
On July 1, 2006, in the midst of yet another last-place season for the Orioles, his playing streak reached 1,000 straight games. He could not suppress a smile as he spoke to reporters in the clubhouse. “It is not easy to play in a thousand games in a row. I know how Cal Ripken feels,” he said.
He had not missed a game since June 1, 2000. Asked how he was holding up, he said, “I feel fine. I am happy. For me, this streak is not important. I don’t worry about 1,000 games, 2,000 games. I just worry about one game at a time. I play every day because I like to play baseball.”
Perlozzo had no plans to rest him. “When I come to the ballpark, it’s the one given I have. His name is in the lineup and you don’t even think about it,” Perlozzo said, echoing a line several Orioles managers had voiced about Ripken.
By the middle of the 2007 season, Perlozzo had been fired, and Trembley was Baltimore’s manager on an interim basis. The Orioles were back in last place and contemplating trading Tejada to bolster a rebuilding effort. Although he was hitting .306, he was no longer an MVP candidate. The Orioles were ready to deal him if they could find a team willing to give up quality prospects in return.
On June 20, Tejada played shortstop and batted cleanup against the Padres in San Diego. He doubled in a run in the first, and the Orioles took a three-run lead into the eighth. Facing reliever Doug Brocail, Tejada took a first-pitch strike. Brocail then came inside with a pitch and hit Tejada on the left wrist. Tejada grimaced and rubbed his wri
st as he took first base. He came around to score as the Orioles put the game away with a big inning, but when he reached the dugout, he told Trembley he needed to come out. X-rays revealed a fractured radius at the juncture of his wrist and forearm.
“The doctor and I had to sit him down and tell him it was broken. His look was one of sheer disbelief,” said Richie Bancells, still working for the Orioles. “His response was, ‘No, I’ll be fine, it’s not that bad, I’ll be OK.’ You have to have a conversation with him at that point: ‘Miggy, it isn’t a matter of how tough you are. If you play through this, you could damage your hand for life.’ You have to have conversations with people like that. They have a different mental outlook, sort of a childlike disbelief that anything could be wrong with them, that something like this could happen.”
The Orioles played another game in San Diego the next night. Trem-bley was in a difficult position. He had taken over for Perlozzo just the day before, and this was his first major league managing job. Tejada told him during batting practice that swinging the bat did not hurt his wrist. Trembley knew Tejada was injured but gave him a shot out of respect, batting him fourth in an early version of the lineup before moving him to second so he could bat in the first inning.
After the Orioles’ Brian Roberts led off the game with a single, Tejada approached the plate. His wrist hurt when he took his practice cuts, so he squared around and bunted the first pitch from San Diego’s pitcher, David Wells. The ball rolled to Wells, who picked it up and threw to second to force Roberts. Tejada was safe at first on the fielder’s choice, and Trembley replaced him with a pinch runner.
“We were very much aware of his streak. He was very much aware of it. It was very important to him. He said he could play. He was cleared to play. But he really couldn’t swing the bat. He could in BP, but in the game, with the velocity of pitches, you could tell it was bothering him,” Trembley recalled. “He was crushed. His teammates, his coaches, everyone knew he had the streak. Everyone knew it was really important to him. The night he got hit, he was determined he was going to keep playing. He gave it a shot. It was an unfortunate thing.”
Wells criticized Trembley after the game for letting Tejada employ a gimmick to extend his streak to 1,152 straight games. It was similar to the gimmick Gehrig and the Yankees had employed to extend Gehrig’s streak in 1934.
Trembley explained his thinking. “It’s been a tough day, a real tough day,” he told reporters after the game. “We wanted to show Miguel we care about him, not only as a baseball player, but as a person. Now he needs to go get well.”
The streak was over. Tejada wore a soft cast on his wrist before the Orioles’ next game, against the Arizona Diamondbacks. Consigned to the disabled list, he appeared lost as he wandered through the clubhouse knowing he would not play.
“I’m really proud of myself to play so many games in a row,” he told reporters. “I don’t want to end it like this. What can I say? There’s nothing I can do. Right now, I can’t help the team. This is better for me and for the team to have somebody in there who can help the team.”
Given the respect he commanded and his approach to playing, he could have gone years without missing a game had he not suffered an injury. But even after compiling the fifth-longest streak in history, he was less than halfway to Ripken’s record. To get that far, Tejada would have needed to play 9 more full seasons consecutively, plus part of a 10th . . . almost another decade.
“It makes you realize how special Cal was,” Trembley told reporters in 2007, “and how no one will ever even come close to touching that.”
When Tejada returned to the Orioles’ lineup in 2007 after missing almost a month while his wrist healed, he played in every game for the rest of the season. In December, the Orioles traded him to the Houston Astros for five players.
“He plays every inning of every game,” Houston’s general manager, Ed Wade, told the local media in explaining why he made the deal.
Coincidentally, the Astros had recently signed Brocail, the reliever whose pitch injured him. They would play together for two seasons. It became a difficult time for Tejada. A day after he was traded, Major League Baseball released the Mitchell Report, a grim document resulting from a 21-month independent investigation—led by former U.S. senator George Mitchell—into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the major leagues. The report stated that in 2003, while in Oakland, Tejada had conversations about steroids with a teammate who also obtained the drugs for him. The report did not say Tejada used the drugs. But his name had appeared in two books on the subject, and although he denied using such drugs, many fans assumed he did.
The Mitchell Report was not his only problem. In 2008, ESPN discovered he had lied about his age when he first signed with Oakland and was, in fact, three years older. In 2009, he pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to congressional investigators about steroid use in baseball and received a year’s probation.
But while many fans believe his off-field problems sullied his accomplishments, those who played with him and managed him did not view him so negatively. His Latin teammates called him “La Gua Gua,” Dominican slang for “the Bus,” because he carried everyone with his play on the field.
“If you ask people who played with him, they’ll tell you he was the best teammate they ever had,” Trembley said. “He was absolutely loved by his teammates and coaches wherever he went.”
In 2014, Trembley was employed by the Astros as a bench coach. Square-jawed and broad-shouldered, he was a foot soldier with a general’s bearing, having worked in professional baseball for three decades, mostly as a minor league coach and minor league manager with the Cubs, Pirates, Padres, and Orioles. His only chance to manage in the majors had come in Baltimore and lasted less than three years. The Orioles fired him in 2010.
Trembley had watched Tejada from afar for many years before managing him in Baltimore in 2007. “I saw him as a kid in the California Instructional League. I managed against him in the Southern League. I saw him in Oakland. In every case, he exhibited an extreme exuberance for the game,” Trembley said. “When I came to the Astros in 2013, the trainer said he was the best teammate they ever had there. I think that’s the case in a lot of places. Tejada just loved to play. He took responsibility for how he played. He played with enthusiasm. He played hard. All the time, he played hard.”
Trembley said Tejada’s approach contrasted with those of many current players, helping explain why Ripken’s record might stand forever. “There’s a different culture now. I’m not sure a streak like that is significant to a lot of people. Just a handful of guys play 162. We don’t have many,” Trembley said. “To think someone might do it even for one year, and then for so many, it’s hard to fathom. I don’t see it happening. What Ripken did, what Gehrig did, what Tejada did, it’s rare now. The game has changed, and how players view the game has changed. There are a lot of people who like it, but not many who really, truly love it. Tejada really, truly loved baseball, like Ripken. He just got hurt, unlike Ripken.”
Epilogue
He rode his bicycle to a lunch meeting in Canton, a downtown Baltimore neighborhood east of the Inner Harbor. When the meeting ended, Cal Ripken Jr. jumped back on his bike and pedaled away. He had to get home, get ready, and get back downtown for the Orioles’ game that night. The team was commemorating the 20th anniversary of the night he passed Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-game record. Ripken, now 55, was scheduled to hold a press conference and throw out the first pitch.
The date was September 1, 2015. Though somewhat thicker than when he played, Ripken still had a broad, strong frame and got in his sporting kicks cycling around Maryland on everything from rural trails to city streets. Leaving his lunch in Canton, he estimated he had plenty of time to make the game, so there was no rush. But he misjudged a curb, struck it, and when his bike came to a sudden halt, Ripken flew over the handlebars and crashed to the sidewalk, landing hard on his right shoulder.
Embarrassed, he quickly stood up,
got back on his bike, and rode off. But as the afternoon progressed, he realized he could not lift his right arm above his shoulder without experiencing searing pain. Something was not right.
Having long ago transitioned from baseball to the business world, Ripken oversaw a thriving baseball empire that included a pair of minor league teams, a stadium in his hometown, youth baseball complexes in three states, camps and clinics, a nonprofit named for his father, and an annual worldwide tournament for 12-year-olds. It all went under the umbrella of an entity called Ripken Baseball, which he described as the “business of Cal.”
His divorce from Kelly the following year, ending a 29-year marriage, would reveal that his life was not without difficulties, but all in all, Ripken’s post-playing world was seemingly happy and prosperous. “The business of Cal is bustling,” Fortune magazine wrote in a 2014 profile.
After he fell off his bike, though, Ripken was abruptly taken back to a predicament from his playing days: could he overcome an injury, get on the field, and perform?
He drove to Oriole Park at Camden Yards, where he seldom ventured now. The “2,131” banners were back on the B&O Warehouse wall, and a video from his historic night played on the stadium video board during batting practice, conjuring up memories for Ripken, who admitted to feeling tearful when the camera focused on his late father. “We lost dad much too soon,” he told reporters.
During the press conference, he sheepishly admitted he had injured himself earlier that day, and before he headed to the field to throw out the first pitch, he explained the situation to his designated catcher, Brady Anderson, his former teammate, now a front office executive with the Orioles.
“Dude, I hurt myself real bad,” Ripken told Anderson.
Ever the planner, he told Anderson he would stop on the grass between the mound and home plate and throw a shorter first pitch. He feared he could not make the throw from the mound and did not want to bounce a feeble toss that ESPN’s anchors could, and surely would, mock.
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