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SAN DIEGO – The Orioles are home this weekend for a three-game series against the Dodgers that would generate a lot of buzz if standing alone. However, there’s much more happening Saturday with the club celebrating the 30th anniversary of Cal Ripken Jr. breaking Lou Gehrig’s supposedly indestructible consecutive games record.
Ripken played his 2,131st in a row Sept. 6, 1995 against the Angels at Camden Yards. In typical Ripken fashion, he homered on the nights that he tied and surpassed Gehrig.
He always rose to the occasion, an Iron Man filled with helium.
Ben McDonald made his major league debut during the “Why Not?” season in 1989, the same year that the Orioles drafted him first overall out of LSU. He appeared in 14 games in 1995, his final season with the club before signing with the Brewers as a free agent.
As an analyst on MASN broadcasts, McDonald provides a link to a distant past on a young team with players who only know what they’ve read, heard and watched on video.
“What he meant to me was a guy that took me in as a young player and realized I had some struggles and didn’t know what I was doing,” McDonald said. “You know the story about him calling every pitch I threw in the ’92 season. So for me, he was a security blanket behind us on the mound. He was like having a pitching coach and a coach on the field as a player. And he meant a lot to me just because he helped me mature and grow up in a lot of ways, and helping my maturity as a pitcher, too.
“As far as the record, man, I’ve told this story a lot. I’ve had time to reflect on it. We didn’t talk about it a lot because it was kind of taboo. As you know, baseball players are very superstitious and we knew what was happening leading up to ’95, but nobody every talked about. We kind of kept it all in. And to see it finally come to a head when we could all let it out and we could see Junior let it out … Because as you know, Junior started staying away from the team about a year, year and a half earlier because of the attention, death threats, a lot of terrible things. And to see him go through all those things and accomplish that was really special to watch.”
The allure of The Streak is born from the simplest of reasons.
It’s relatable.
It also was timely, after a player strike forced the cancellation of the 1994 World Series.
“People say, ‘Well, why do you think it resonated with fans so much?’” McDonald said. “And everybody says, ‘Well, (Sammy) Sosa and (Mark) McGwire home run race (in ’98) is what brought people back to baseball. I said, ‘I disagree.’ That helped, but what brought people back to baseball was Cal Ripken breaking Lou Gehrig’s record.
“I’ll tell you why. People can’t relate to hitting the ball 480 feet. People can’t relate to throwing 100 miles-an-hour. They can't relate to running a 6.3 60 and stealing a base. But what they can relate to is a guy that got up every day like millions of Americans do every day and he got up and he went to work every day. We knew going into the city of Baltimore that it was going to be a huge thing. We knew that. But we didn’t know how big it was going to be across the country. Nobody knew that. And then to see it, and talking to people about it, that’s what made it special was a lot of people could actually relate to what he did by getting up every day and going to work.
“We talk about records all the time. We called it the unbreakable record at the time, and for me it’s a record that might be the most impressive record in any sport ever.”
Interim manager Tony Mansolino is of a similar mindset, describing it as “quite possibly the most unbreakable record in all of sports.”
“It’s really incredible what Cal did and the history of that,” he said. “We have a hard time here right now playing guys 14 days in a row, to be honest with you. I don’t know why we’re at that point, but we are. There are some guys that go out there and play every day, but what Cal did was historic, it’s remarkable, it’s worthy of a 30th celebration and so much more.
“It’s really something for me, as a kid growing up, that was the gold standard as a youth baseball player was Cal Ripken and the guy who played every day, and it still should be for this generation of players, I would hope.”
Gunnar Henderson had his first full day off yesterday. He began the season on the injured list with an intercostal strain. Shortstop Miguel Tejada is fifth on the all-time list at 1,152 games in a row, his streak beginning with the Athletics and ending with the Orioles. The Braves’ Matt Olson recently passed Pete Rose for 12th place.
Would Mansolino let one of his players stay in the lineup and make a run at history?
“It depended on the guy and the style which they played and kind of what they had proven at that point in terms of how they can handle playing every day,” he replied.
“There’s not a lot of guys with the physical ability that Cal had at that time and just what he did. I mean, that set the standard for all of baseball. Major league baseball, high school, college, youth baseball. That’s what it meant to play every day.”
Ben Wagner, who handles play-by-play duties on MASN and the Orioles’ radio network, was a 15-year-old baseball fanatic living in northern Indiana. Ripken’s pursuit of the record captivated him.
“I remember chronicling the entire thing because I was baseball obsessed,” he said.
“About the time that I was 12, I really started to pay attention to the whole legacy and the march toward 2,131, and I would get a Sports Illustrated every week, a Beckett Magazine every week, and I would pull out the pages of my baseball heroes and I would put them on my bedroom wall. And I must have had a half-dozen of Cal. So once that season arrived, I was following it just as closely as anybody else when I got the game. Remember, I’m growing up on a dirt road in Indiana, so I was watching every Orioles game on a national perspective, and of course as the buildup came, I knew it was gonna be on ESPN that night and I was glued to the television from moment one. I was sitting on my living room floor, about three feet away from the screen, my mom and dad saying, ‘Back up from the TV screen, you’re gonna hurt your eyes.’
“I couldn’t. I was just in the moment and I was there and just immersed in the emotion and everything that the spectacle had to offer. As the flashbulbs were going off through every at-bat, watching Cal take the parade around, I lived it and I was trying to get as close to that moment as I could. And it was the reason that I loved live sports on TV and radio.”
* Let's share stories from 2,131 (and 2,130, if you'd like.)
I was at the ballpark both nights as part of the expanded coverage in The Baltimore Sun, sitting in the "auxiliary press box" in left field. One of my assignments was to write a sidebar on the Angels' reaction. I was so mesmerized by Ripken's jog around the warning track that a colleague elbowed me and pointed toward the visiting dugout, where players lined up to applaud.
I was on Eutaw Street when the confetti fell for 2,130, because the Orioles Store ran out of commemorative baseballs and I had to rush over there to speak with the manager. Everything was big news that night.
I was exiting when the number changed on the warehouse. I bent down, picked up a piece of the confetti, stuffed it in my pocket, and cursed the editor who made me leave my seat.
