Cal Ripken: Junior Achievements

Destiny made Cal Ripken a major league baseball player.

Ripken made himself a great major league baseball player.

He was blessed with ideal bloodlines to play ball. His dad had all the physical attributes to pass on and had caught in the minor leagues for seven years. More significantly, Cal Ripken Sr. had the knowledge and sense about how to play baseball the right way. He also possessed the ability and desire to share that sense and knowledge with his offspring and with thousands of other aspiring young ballplayers. And his eldest son was his most ardent and enthusiastic pupil.

Rich Dauer, the Orioles second baseman from 1976 to 1985, remembers his own first day as a professional ballplayer. He reported in the summer of 1974 straight from campus at the University of Southern California to the Orioles' Double-A farm club in Asheville, North Carolina. His manager was Cal Ripken Sr. “He threw me up against the wall,” Dauer recalls, “and put his hands around my neck and said, 'I don't care who you think you are, what you think you are, where you went to school — this is my team and you'll play 110%, and you'll get along fine.'”

With that introduction to minor league baseball and the Ripken Way, Dauer was dispatched to the cage for his first professional round of batting practice. After he had taken his licks, Dauer wondered what the name of his teammate was who was serving that day as batting practice catcher. Turns out it wasn't a teammate, but the 13-year-old son of his new manager — Cal Ripken Jr. “I thought he was a player,” Dauer says, “because he was 6-feet tall at the time and was very coordinated and very athletic. I had no idea who he was. None. Zero.”

Ripken grew up on baseball fields and in baseball clubhouses. When he wasn't hanging around the teams of his dad — who joined the Orioles coaching staff in 1976, when Cal Jr. was 15, after 14 years managing in Baltimore's minor league system — he was being ferried to little league and school games by his mother. Baseball was in his veins, almost from the day he was born in Aberdeen, Maryland, half an hour north of Baltimore. As a schoolboy he once wrote a paper about what he wanted to do when he grew up — play baseball, naturally.

At Aberdeen High School he excelled as both a shortstop and pitcher (See page 20). Scouts flocked to watch him play. It was obvious he was heading to the big leagues. He even has the crisp, athletic name of a baseball ballplayer — Cal Ripken. It's a name Bernard Malamud aptly could have chosen for Roy Hobbs in The Natural, or John R. Tunis could have given to any of the players who filled the rich pages of his many baseball novels.

When Ripken signed with the Orioles in 1978, at the age of 17, he already was imbued in the fundamentals of the Orioles Way, whose primary advocate and practitioner, after all, had been his father. Besides, the son had grown up with Orioles minor league and major league players and knew the system as well as any of them.

“When Cal got here,” explains Dauer, “he wasn't around just the Baltimore Orioles, he was around a lot of his own family. And he fit in perfectly. He played the game exactly the way the Orioles played it, which is to give it all to the team, and don't even worry about what your stats or personal goals are. You play so the team will have the best chance to win every single time out on the field. He did that, and I think he's still doing it.”

But making it to the major leagues and excelling as a major league player are two different baseballs. There are plenty of players who had greater natural skills than Ripken. But there are few who parleyed their god-given talent into a Hall-of-Fame career more adroitly than Ripken. Simply put, no one worked harder than he did to get the most out of his skills.

Once again, though, the seeds of his work ethic were sown by his father. Cal Sr. was a taskmaster, and Cal Jr. never shirked from the task. He spent hours a day taking ground balls at third or short, a habit he never ceased. He spent hours a day in the batting cage, honing his hitting skills, tinkering with them — some thought too often — in an effort to find the best stance he could. Ripken always has been religious about his workouts — devoted to them in a way that would drive others to tedium, unwavering in his faith that practice makes perfect — or at least allows a ballplayer to approach perfection. That way of thinking came directly from the gospel of baseball as preached by his father and other practitioners and gurus in the Orioles system who helped make Ripken the ballplayer he became — men like Eddie Murray and Earl Weaver.

“He had unbelievable work habits,” former Orioles reliever Tippy Martinez says admiringly. “He was always trying to improve himself, always trying to be more consistent. Obviously he had the tools, but being a 6'4" shortstop was pretty much unheard of. People questioned whether he could do it every day. But he did, and still he was always working to better himself.” Martinez says Ripken was just as dogged during the winter as he was during the season.

“The most awesome thing about Cal Ripken were his work habits in the offseason,” Martinez says, “the way he'd physically prepare for the season. He probably did more work, strength-wise, than most people do in two years. That he could be that consistently durable at his height at shortstop, and maintain that level of play for all those games and all those inning, I can't find enough words to describe that. It's just awesome.”

Dauer is amazed that Ripken is working as hard today as he did the day he came up to the major leagues. “I see a lot of players today come up to the big leagues and think they've got it made,” he observes. “But you haven't got it made here until you're leaving. And Rip's leaving after this year, and he's still working as hard as anyone else.”

Ripken also came to the major leagues with certain personality traits that helped him reach the level of excellence that he did — and enabled him to accomplish his most famous feat, his streak of playing in 2,632 consecutive games.

“When I think of Cal Ripken, I think of energy,” says former teammate and friend Ben McDonald, who pitched for the Orioles from 1989 through 1995 — the year Ripken broke Lou Gehrig's previous consecutive-games streak of 2,131. “His energy was amazing to me.”

Another trait which seemed to fuel Ripken — and which other players still marvel at — is his sense of competitiveness.

“It didn't matter what it was,” says Dauer, “whether you were flipping quarters or hitting taped balls or wrestling in the outfield, he always wanted to win at it. He was just a great competitor to be around.”

McDonald and Ripken, whose lockers were close to one another's at Camden Yards, shared a passion for playfulness, and Ripken would devise various competitive games for them to play.

Sometimes, McDonald recalls, the two tall athletes would paint their fingers black and race through the weight room at old Memorial Stadium, leaping up to see which one could touch the highest point on a beam that hung from the ceiling.

After games, McDonald says, “Others would be out partying and drinking beer, and we'd be back in the clubhouse playing kids games.” It might be Wiffle Ball or challenging clubhouse boys in Minnesota at hitting wads of black tape. “It was always harmless,” says McDonald. “And what still stands out in my mind was his high level of energy.”

Ripken's intense competitive nature made winning his paramount goal — whether it was a mindless clubhouse game or a postseason contest against the Yankees or Phillies.

Perhaps the most disappointing facet of Ripken's career, in fact, was that the Orioles never made it to the World Series again after his second full season in the major leagues. He always says, when asked to name the highlight of his career, that it was beating the Phillies in the 1983 World Series. And his favorite game was not when he went 6-for-6 against Atlanta or slammed three homers against Seattle or hit for the cycle against the Rangers or broke Gehrig's record against the Angels — it was that game against the Phillies on October 16, 1983, when Ripken caught the final out to make the Orioles world champions.

“Cal plays hard-nosed, stick your nose-in-the-dirt-for-a-ground-ball baseball,“ Dauer says. ”If a guy was going to run over him, he wouldn't move, taking double plays, turning them, that sort of thing. Which is another amazing thing about the Streak — how Cal played the game as hard and as rough as any player can play and still not get hurt.”

Another advantage Ripken brought to the field was his baseball intelligence. He observed everything that happened on the diamond and funneled it into a place in his brain where it could be recalled when needed.

When Earl Weaver moved him to shortstop, Ripken was only 22, the youngest man in the Orioles infield. But it didn't take him long to assert himself and assume the role of field captain. “I think I gave the signs the first couple of hitters,” says Dauer, “and after that, he just said, 'OK, I'll take over.' And I'm glad he did, because the shortstop is the main guy on the fiel d, and it made things a lot easier for me. I didn't have to worry about taking care of some young freshman rookie kid. He was right there.“

When Ripken first played for the Orioles, he got off to a slow start at the bat. He was hitting under .200. In his first season, 1981, he hit only .128 in 23 games, and in April of his first full year, 1982, he batted just .117 in 18 games. “He learned from his experience, he learned from his mistakes,” says Dauer. “He didn't come in here and just set the world on fire. He struggled at the plate for a while. But when he was struggling, he learned that if you're going to play the game in the big leagues, you better be able to do one thing or the other. So if you're not hitting, you better be fielding. If you're not fielding, you better be hitting. You've got to do something to help the team win to stay on, and that's how I think he became such a good fielder.”

“He was like a regular computer,” says Martinez. “He took all the information he could and digested it. He knew what was going on and what needed to be done. His knowledge of the game was incredible. If a pitcher like me didn't have good stuff, he knew it and could cheat a little bit. He knew exactly how each pitcher was pitching on a particular night, how each batter might hit him. He was always thinking.”

When Ripken got older and lost a step or so in the field, he was asked whether he felt his defense had diminished. No, Ripken said, his years of experience and knowledge of how and where batters hit the ball off specific pitchers on specific nights allowed him to position himself in such a way that it compensated for his lack of range.

“He can still play,” says McDonald. “I don't care whether he's 40 or 45, if he's healthy, he can still play.”

Fans have heaped adulation on Ripken since he announced his retirement earlier this year. No player in recent baseball history — perhaps since the days of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig — has been so venerated by the public. But what's perhaps even more impressive is the way his fellow players, as well as coaches and managers, admire and respect Ripken and treat him as a hero. Young players are thrilled to walk on the same field. Veterans seek his autograph and talk in awe of his accomplishments, particularly the Streak.

“People will remember Cal for being the professional he always was,” says former teammate Rafael Palmeiro. “They admired him for that, not just for the Streak. He approached every game as though it were his last one. He came to play every day, but he also produced. He's been one of the greatest players of all time.”