masn-baseballs-orioles.jpgThe Orioles intend to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Cal Ripken Jr.’s record-breaking 2,131st consecutive game. Their promotional schedule includes the distribution of bobbleheads on Sept. 6, and other plans to honor him were under discussion prior to the shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The schedule was released in early February. So much has changed.
ESPN aired 2,131 last night and Ripken watched it for the first time from start to finish. He told me yesterday that he’d stumble…

The Orioles intend to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Cal Ripken Jr.’s record-breaking 2,131st consecutive game. Their promotional schedule includes the distribution of bobbleheads on Sept. 6, and other plans to honor him were under discussion prior to the shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The schedule was released in early February. So much has changed.

ESPN aired 2,131 last night and Ripken watched it for the first time from start to finish. He told me yesterday that he’d stumble upon the occasional rebroadcast and stay engaged for a little while before changing channels.

I’ve watched it multiple times and always forget that certain players were on that team.

(How many people remember that Steve Boros was the third base coach in his only season in the organization? I’m pleading ignorant here.)

Ripken has needed his memory jolted while television cameras captured images of his teammates.

“That’s my realization, too, when they have shots of the dugout and you go back in the dugout and come back out and then you see different people,” he said. “I can name virtually every one of them, but every once in a while there’s one I’m trying to think, ‘Man, I know him. He came up for a short period of time. What’s his name? What’s his name?’ And it will come to me a couple days later.”

Ripken has long been credited with saving baseball following the players strike in 1994 that forced the cancellation of the World Series. The stoppage lasted 232 days before an agreement was reached on April 2, 1995 and teams reported to spring training.

The start of the 1990 season was delayed a week after owners locked players out of their spring training camps and wiped out 32 days. The season was extended by three days.

Ripken knows all about interruptions to routines, though never based on a world-wide health crisis, and how to stay focused and ready to play baseball. He’s a good resource for his son, Ryan, who was re-signed to a minor league deal in November after batting a combined .276/.312/.409 in 78 games between Single-A Frederick and Double-A Bowie.

The major and minor league complexes have been closed and Ryan didn’t get a chance to play in any games.

“He went down to spring training early on,” Cal said. “He was down there like Feb. 15 or something. He was in the early camp on the minor league side. They were doing a lot of stuff, and he had done a lot of hard work during the winter, so he was pretty excited about that. So there is a downer when you don’t get to start your season, don’t get to play games. And the uncertainty of what’s happening can be a killer in some ways.

“Some of the restrictions prohibit you from doing things. Going out and getting on the field and working out and working out with other people. I think like anything else, you have to figure out ways to work out and not be at a gym. So what resources you have, what creativity you have where you can stay in shape and doing things that aren’t normal. I always think that’s healthy and productive.

“We’re talking about different ideas, different things you can do. Over the years, a lot of stuff that you pick up from Brady (Anderson). Brady goes off in the offseason, comes back and stands on a (exercise) ball. I don’t know if you remember that. Us trying to knock him off with a medicine ball and he’s lifting weights on top of the ball. That’s the extreme and Brady’s a unique guy in that respect. But that’s the concept. What can you do? What military-style exercise can you do? What leverage can you do with what you have right now? So keeping (Ryan) motivated, keeping him hopeful, is probably the challenge of all baseball players right now.”

The game is changing in so many ways – some good, some bad and some open to debate. The analytics argument fascinates Ripken, who’s watching the Orioles’ rebuild from a distance.

Cal-Ripken_Sidebar.gif“First of all, I always thought of myself as analytic,” he said. “You take every available piece of information or data and help apply it. The challenge when you’re looking at the raw data is how does it apply to your day-to-day stuff? How do you give it to the player? You’ve got to understand the fundamentals of hitting and all that stuff and understand the data, so there’s a blending, I hope.

“It seems like we’re in a phase where the analytics have taken over to a point and then I would imagine you would evolve and get back to the application of the analytics and the old-school principles. There’s a lot of value that can be learned over time about doing things and how they translate to the game. Maybe they’re making some mistakes that have already been made and then prove different because they haven’t gone through, or maybe they’re just trying to decipher the mechanics or the analytics and which ones are really important. It just seems like it’s a growing sort of learn-as-you-go kind of thing.

“But any rebuilding process, you’ve got to have talent and your talent’s got to play together and you have to learn how to execute, play as a team and win. It seems as though there is a plan and the proof ultimately is in the pudding about how you do on the field. That’s the ultimate judge. I haven’t been around enough to offer a really good baseball opinion on it, so I don’t know. But I generally feel like a lot of old baseball people are fighting the analytics.

“I wouldn’t fight the analytics, I’d embrace them and then try to understand them and try to match them.”

Ripken sees the similarities to another sport.

“The pitching part of baseball, they repeat it a lot like in golf,” he said. “You take a golf lesson and you’ve got all the technology and stuff there, you’re repeating the same thing and there’s no timing component to throw you off. So there’s a lot of value in understanding what your swing is, the speed that you generate and how you hit the ball and all that kind of stuff. Pitching seems to be that way because you control the ball and you control your mechanics, your arm slot and all that kind of stuff.

“Hitting, your ideal swing can be thrown off by a number of variables because of timing. The pitchers are all different, the timing is all different, the conditions are all different, seeing the ball and all that. So there’s not just one way to apply all of that. That’s a real difficult thing in breaking down the swing, whether it’s a digital sense or what’s important and then trying to duplicate all of that, because you always have to deal with timing. And that’s why it’s important as a hitter when you’re working on timing in the cage, some of the things you discover over time that says, ‘OK, this sort of drill and this sort of timing gives me the chance to take it out on the field and have success out there at 95 mph.’

“It doesn’t necessarily mean you can practice 95 mph all the time because the effects are diminishing. You might be able to get it up for one rep or two reps, but you take eight or 10 of them, and all of a sudden, you’re cheating to get to the drill, which might not help you in the game. So there’s a challenge in the area of hitting that I think they’re trying to understand and they have different measurements to do that. I’m not speaking of the Orioles per se because I don’t know. I’m just thinking generally from the baseball standpoint, looking across all of baseball, it seems like that’s what’s kind of going on.

“They’re taking models of hitters that can hit, trying to find similarities, and my personal belief is we all bring different skill sets to the table from a hitting standpoint. The swings aren’t all going to be the same. But it seems like they’re still trying to figure out what the data means for the hitter. For pitchers, when you can compare a 16- or 17-year old’s arm slot and their rotation and the sinking action, when you can compare that to a big leaguer and look at potential, I see value in that.

“It’s almost like an old scout would say, ‘He has good arm action,’ or ‘The ball explodes out of his hand, or ‘The ball is sneaky fast,’ because that’s the reaction you have. These are all descriptive words that can describe a talent, but now you have numbers that can actually show that and it can confirm maybe what your eyes see and now you say, ‘Yeah, that ball has some late sink to it, like this guy.’ And you have data to support that. I’m not so sure that you can look at a high school hitter and look at that and compare him to a big league hitter yet.”

Exit velocity is one of the stats that most interests Ripken.

“What that tells you is the ball comes off the bat really fast, and then you’ve got to say, ‘Why?’ Well, a lot of it is timing, a lot of it is strength,” Ripken said.

“You’ve been standing around the cage. Some of the old-school things were, ‘The ball has a different sound coming off his bat.’ Well, it’s because it’s coming off harder, you know? It makes a whack, so the speed in which the guy delivers the bat against the speed of the ball produces that, but now there are numbers that can tell you, here’s a guy’s potential.

“His exit velo is 114 or 116 (mph), and you’re saying, ‘That’s impressive.’ So then you can see potential. But you can kind of see that anyway when you’re standing around the cage. You look at somebody hit and they consistently hit the ball hard and it comes off faster, that’s visible to the eye.

“It’s an interesting time in baseball. Like Earl Weaver’s analytics were ahead of his time if you remember right going way back. He was looking at matchups and looking at averages and pitchers versus hitters, and all that wasn’t readily available. You had to work a little harder to get to it, but he used it. So it’s a matter of using the data and understanding how to put it forth ultimately to make your team better and have results on the field.”

We joked about how Ripken’s father, Cal Sr., the architect of “The Oriole Way,” would have reacted to the trend of teams hiring young instructors from performance centers and colleges with no previous ties to an organization. How old- and new-school would have meshed.

“You can understand all the people who put their lives into baseball and developed a functional expertise and understanding of the game – it feels like to them that their skill is being devalued and being replaced,” Ripken said. “And you can see the feelings of the people who devoted their lives to it, because there is an expertise in learning by doing and being around it all the time and that should always be valued, in my opinion. And you can embrace the analytics.

“The tough part is the blending of the two, but you still need both. You can’t devalue the expertise and the understanding of how it all works, putting your life’s work into it from a baseball standpoint. You can’t just go on numbers. Maybe where they are now is they’re transitioning. The digital people get frustrated because they don’t understand the baseball side and they want to push themselves forward and the baseball side gets frustrated and says, ‘What do you guys know? You haven’t done this.’ So it seems like there’s not a good marriage going on right now between them and I’m hoping that comes around pretty quickly. And I hope the Orioles are doing that.”