Ripkens Teach Senior Class: Cal and Bill Spent Their Winter Preaching the Gospel of “The Ripken Way”

It is a couple of days after Christmas and Cal Ripken Jr. is - where else? - on a baseball diamond. While teammates are hitting the links or the beach, the 38-year-old son of a career baseball man is sweating in the Hawaii sun, instructing 100 kids from the United States and Japan on the finer points of the game.

Why?

Cal Ripken Sr. toiled in towns from Amarillo to Appleton to Aberdeen to provide for his six-person family. Junior’s family is quite well taken care of, and well-behaved grandkids probably shouldn’t want for much, either. But as a child, Cal Jr. relished the Saturday mornings he spent going to baseball clinics with his father, and he says that as an adult he’s just carrying on a family tradition of education.

“A lot of what I’ve learned came because I had a Baseball Encyclopedia as a dad,” says Cal, who co-headlined the camp with Hideo Nomo. “I listened to a lot of clinics and I had a chance to talk to baseball players who could give me any answer. I always thought about how lucky I was to get any kind of baseball answer from a professional. You look around and that is just not available to very many kids. The whole idea that my dad could do clinics and share that information, I always thought that was a good idea.”

Working alongside Cal at the camp is his brother, 34-year-old Bill. It is not at all surprising the two can be found on a ball field together in the dead of winter. Baseball has been the focus of their lives since their childhood days in the backyard, when their age difference necessitated that Cal get only one out per inning and play the field left-handed. Senior was to be an integral part of the camp but was unable to participate after being diagnosed with lung cancer in October. Though not there in person, his philosophies and quirky sayings (“You’ll be alright once it stops hurting”) were very much a part of the curriculum of the first Ripken-Nomo International Baseball School.

“Billy and I were instructing out there,” says Cal, “and a lot of times we’d say something and we’d actually catch ourselves saying it exactly the way our dad did. We’d look at each other and without a word know what it meant.”

“I think we hope it sounds like [our father],” counters Bill. “There are an awful lot of things that bring back memories. You could picture your dad when you were out there as a little guy listening to him do [a clinic]. It comes out verbatim - the way we would say it and the way he would say it are the same.”

The Ripken brothers, assisted by Orioles coach Sam Perlozzo, put the kids through an intense series of lectures and demonstrations. As boys, the Ripkens received tips from major leaguers, often on concepts they didn’t quite grasp at the time. Cal remembers things Mark Belanger told him as a 17-year-old that didn’t make sense for 10 years. So it is not surprising that the brothers did not baby the ballplayers under their tutelage. For instance, the two did a session for the 10- to 12-year-olds on specialized plays in the infield that included instruction on the pitcher covering first base, something rarely taught kids that age.

“We may have been advanced with them,” says Bill. “I remember listening to dad years and years ago, and he’d say something that went right over my head. I had no idea what was being said. It is amazing how much you can retain. Two or three years later something will happen during the course of a game, and it clicks. You remember back and think, ‘That’s what he was talking about.’ They’re not going to be little guys the whole time. They are going to grow up.”

In January, the Ripkens held a camp in Arizona that was radically different from the traditional fantasy camps featuring ex-major leaguers who are in about the same physical shape as the campers paying the big bucks for the privilege of stepping on the field or up to the bar with their heroes. Cal and Bill gave 55 men over 30-years-old a five-day taste of the big leagues. Teams were even managed by Jim Leyland, Buck Showalter and Tom Kelly.

“I always thought from the outside looking in, that the fantasy camp was a good idea,” says Cal, who broke his nose playing basketball this winter. “I always thought, ‘Why couldn’t you take that same kind of format into kind of a current standpoint, while people are actually still playing, and give them a more current major league experience?’ Expand the fantasy, so that you not only get to play and hang out and ask questions, but actually show them what the big leagues are all about in some way.”

Of course, in The Show players get ragged on incessantly for mental blunders and other gaffes. Enter Bill: “There is one of me, I guess, on every team in the big leagues.” In addition to the authentic hazing, the camp was realistic right down to the clubhouse spread and the Oakley’s. But one exception was made.

“Randy Johnson was supposed to throw an inning,” says Cal, “but at that time in January he was all over the place. I made a judgment as the commissioner that I didn’t want to put somebody at homeplate when Randy’s control was a little off. I’ve been in the box when Randy’s control has been off, and you don’t want to be there.”

But the campers did face major league pitching. Sort of.

“It was a little fantasy,” says Cal, who struck out 17 in a two-hit win in the Maryland Class-A championship game in his final high school game and took the mound at the Arizona camp. “I often wonder where my career path would have gone - if it would have gone anywhere at all - if I had remained a pitcher. So it gave me an opportunity to get back up on the hill and play around.”

Perhaps as a pitcher Ripken would have taken advantage of a clause in his first professional contract: If things didn’t pan out on the field, the Orioles would pay his tuition for four years at the college of his choice. Things did work out for the Ripkens on the field, however. Bill spent over 10 years in the majors. Cal’s Hall-of-Fame career has him poised to reach significant milestones this season. He needs 122 hits to reach 3,000 and 16 homers for 400. For the first time in 17 years, Bill Ripken is not reporting to spring training. Cal Ripken is entering the final guaranteed year of his contract. The two are making preliminary plans to hold camps for kids during the Orioles’ series in Oakland, Detroit and New York. Cal insists the camps are not an attempt to keep a connection to the game as his career enters its final phase.

“I don’t see it as an outlet,” says Cal. “It is an opportunity to share knowledge. I enjoy doing this sort of thing.”

Asked to sum up “The Ripken Way” the brothers are teaching, Bill says, “I think it kind of goes back to the way my dad taught everything. My pop’s always said, ‘If you do all the little things, you’ll never have a big thing to worry about.’”