Life’s Work: An Interview with Cal Ripken Jr.

In a two-decade career as an All-Star shortstop and third baseman for the Baltimore Orioles, Ripken played—at times alongside his coach and manager father, Cal Sr., and his second baseman brother, Billy—in a record-shattering 2,632 consecutive games, earning him the nickname Iron Man. Since retiring, in 2001, he has run a youth baseball organization and a charitable foundation. Jonathan Hanson/Redux HBR: You grew up with baseball. When did you realize it would become your career? Ripken: I don’t know if there was one exact moment. But I remember my dad managed in Asheville, North Carolina, for three straight summers. I think I was 10, 11, 12—old enough for him to feel comfortable taking me to the ballpark, so I was a paid batboy. I shagged fly balls. I helped out around the clubhouse. And hanging out in that minor league scene as a kid, I realized that my dream was to be a professional player. I thought, “This is the best job in the world. I want to do this.” I didn’t look at it as work. I looked at it as you get to play a game for a living. Your dad was a mentor and coach to you. What were some of the most important lessons he taught you? Our whole life seemed to be baseball. It dominated every part of every day. And he taught us about life through the game: the principles of hard work and being part of a team and that you can improve your chance of success with practice, by working on your weaknesses as well as your strengths. It was less about words and more about example—the way Dad went about his job. When he put his uniform on, he transformed into the happiest person in the world. You were drafted into the minors out of high school at age 17. Was that a difficult transition? I was a little intimidated. I’d been a big fish in a small pond. But when they assembled all the big fishes around the country, I felt pretty small. I had to gain my confidence day by day. My dad used to say to other players, “No matter where they put you, know that you belong.” And at some point I just looked around and thought, “I’m as good as this guy and that one.” But it took me about a year and a half and a few more home runs to really feel that I had a chance to make it in the big leagues. You had been a pitcher and a shortstop. How did you end up choosing the latter? The Orioles gave me a choice. I think they wanted me to pitch. But my dad’s view was that if you start as a regular player and it doesn’t work out, you can always move to pitcher, whereas if you do it in reverse, you don’t have much success. My own thinking was that pitchers get to play only one out of every five games. And I wanted to play every day. In the minors our third baseman got injured, so I went there, and it felt like a more natural, easier position. But in the big leagues, as soon as I got my feet on the ground, Earl Weaver moved me to short. I hadn’t played it in years, and it felt different, but Earl said, “Just catch the ball and throw guys out at first base. It’s as simple as that.” I liked the added responsibility, being in the middle of things. There was more to think about, to do. In your second major-league season the Orioles won the World Series. How did it feel to achieve that so early but never again? When you’re part of a great team to start, you assume it will happen again. Then you come to appreciate just how difficult it is and how lucky you were to have experienced one. We did return to the playoffs in ’96 and ’97 and had some years when we were in the pennant race down the stretch, but if I have one regret, it’s that I didn’t have enough chances to play in the postseason. I was extremely jealous of the likes of Chipper Jones and Derek Jeter. You played for the Orioles your entire career, through good times and bad. Were you ever tempted to take your talents elsewhere? The only time I thought I didn’t want to be an Oriole was when they fired my dad. He was a company guy, spent the first 14 years of my life in their minors, got called to the big leagues, and was next in line to be manager after Earl Weaver retired but was passed over when we had a good team. It wasn’t until we failed and lost a lot of our talent that he got the opportunity. We were in total rebuilding mode, but nobody admitted that, so expectations weren’t in line. When we lost the first six games of the ’88 season, they fired Dad. And then we went on to lose 15 more. That was the most miserable time. I was a free agent at the end of that year, so people assumed I wouldn’t stay. I was mad, thinking, “This is not the organization I know.” But then I thought, “Where else would I want to play?” I did some soul-searching and ultimately decided that I could withstand the rebuilding and, well, it was still the place I wanted to be. It seems that those days of franchise players willing to work through a few bad seasons have passed. What did it take to stick with the same team for 21 years? There are ups and downs in life, and I certainly experienced the extremes of baseball, from being a World Series winner to losing more than 100 games in a season. But you find out a lot about yourself in those challenges. I’m thankful that I could persevere. Eventually the downs don’t seem so down; they’re easier to cope with, knowing there will be light at the end of the tunnel. When your father coached and managed you, was it hard to have him as your boss? At times, yes, especially that year when we lost the first six games. I felt a little extra pressure to perform, to help him, because I wanted him to succeed. But there was always a professional understanding: You do your job, I’ll do mine. In the big leagues no one can protect you. What gives you job security is your performance. My dad couldn’t play shortstop for me. He couldn’t play second base for my brother Billy. We couldn’t do his job. So we were mechanical in the relationship. I remember my dad being asked, “Are you proud to have two sons on the team? Are you proud of Cal?” His answer was “I feel like all the players on my team are my sons.” Sometimes I wanted to scream, “No, they’re not your sons! We are!” But when he was a third-base coach, and I hit a home run and came running around and shook his hand, I could tell that he felt a special joy. You were known for your work ethic, preparation, focus, perfectionism. How did you keep pushing yourself to make those incremental improvements? Number one: Somebody can always come along and outperform you and take your job. There was always another shortstop in the minors or one aiming for a trade. So every time we took down balls, did plays, I was trying to prove I was better. Number two: I competed against myself to improve. I was never really satisfied. Did you try to mentor your teammates? Because of my background with my dad as a player, coach, and manager, I knew about pitching, hitting, and fielding, and I was able to offer some of that knowledge. In the later years I was 20 years older than some of my teammates, so the relationship was almost like a father to a kid. But it’s one thing to tell people what to do. It’s another thing to help. It wasn’t my job to yell at them. So where, when, and how do you help? You don’t want to be critical or make someone feel bad. You don’t do it in front of everybody else. You maintain a rapport, do it one-on-one, offer your experience and understanding of the game and make sure they know you’re doing it for their benefit. I might pick a time in the batting cage or the training room and say, “I know it’s hard. Trust me, I know. But you’ve got to force yourself to do it right. Just put forth the effort.” When teams change from year to year, even month to month, how do you learn to work together? The nature of baseball is turnover, so you have to be open-minded in working with new people. For a shortstop, a second baseman’s a critical coworker, and I had a lot of different ones. You just work through each play, go through the process. If you get locked into why they traded that guy or didn’t sign this guy, you’re living in the past. You need to be in the present, looking at how, with this second baseman, you can have as good a double-play combination as you had with the last one. I wasn’t a particularly social person, but I learned a lot from Billy. By the end of the first or second day of spring training, my brother knew the names of all 70 or 75 players plus where they were from, and in many cases he’d given them nicknames. He would fill me in. When you’re in your own world, getting your job done, dealing with the people close to you, you don’t necessarily pay attention to everyone. But I learned to make more of an effort to reach out, ask questions, spend a little time at the ballpark together. Let’s talk about the streak. After so many consecutive games, how did you maintain your performance and motivation? It’s interesting, because in other sports you can really draw on the adrenaline, the emotion; working yourself up into a frenzy might be a good thing. But in baseball, because you do it almost every day, you can’t get too high or cocky or try too hard. You have to stay at a place where you can relax and perform. My dad used to say things like, “You can’t replay yesterday’s game, and you can’t play tomorrow’s game before it gets here, so you might as well play this one.” That’s a fancy way to say, “Take it one day at a time. Clean the slate, look at today’s challenge, and focus on what you can do to help your team win.” I was good at keeping that even-keeled demeanor and approach. I’m not saying it was always easy. Slumps are horrible; it feels like you won’t get a hit again, like everybody’s booing each time you make an out with somebody on base. But the only way to be successful is to work through your issues and control what you can control. Why do you think your managers always chose to keep you in? It wasn’t a goal of mine to break Lou Gehrig’s record. I wanted to be an everyday player because there’s a great honor in that. You can play a 162-game schedule and the pennant boils down to one game. That happened my rookie year, and we all said, “Man, if we had gotten off to a better start or won back in June when we had a four-run lead, it would’ve been the difference.” You can never underestimate the importance of one game, and I always thought it was my responsibility to be ready to help win, so I never went into the manager’s office and said, “I need a break.” I wanted them to put me in if they thought I was one of the guys who could perform that day. I played five straight years without missing an inning, all because I didn’t ever beg out, not even in a blowout. I just played. And the streak was born. Interestingly, though, when you play a full season and finish strong in September, you prove that any problems you might have aren’t because of the number of games. It’s not that you’re fatigued. So then you start looking for real solutions in your swing or your defensive play, and you get better. In the games when you tied, then passed, Gehrig’s record, you hit home runs. Was it hard to execute under so much scrutiny? Again, it was keeping that calm demeanor, so you can stay with your fundamentals. If you get too amped up, you get outside your training. I learned that lesson in the All-Star games when I was really young and people that I’d watched as a kid were my teammates and I knew that everybody in the world was watching. At first I tried too hard, which doesn’t work. So I learned to calm myself and used that in other situations, especially games 2,130 and 2,131. It was important to celebrate not an attendance record but playing well. I was so proud, because even though we had fallen out of the playoff race, we beat one of the better teams in the league—the California Angels—in three straight, and I homered in all of them. How did you know when it was time to end the streak and, a few years later, retire? At some point the streak had to end. I decided in 1998 that if we fell out of the pennant race, I would sit so that the manager wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. The next year I had back surgery and it became harder to play, so I had to take periodic days off. I didn’t like it, but it was a way to manage. It took about a year and a half for my body to heal. I was playing, but it didn’t feel the way it had. Then came the 2001 off-season. I didn’t know what I had left in my tank, but I worked hard to find out and got myself in the best of shape. Unfortunately, I broke a rib 13 days before spring training, which affected everything. Our team was heading into another rebuilding phase, too. So, adding all these things up, I thought it was time to say goodbye, to play my last season. I came to the realization in June and decided to announce it then, not so that I could have a farewell tour but so that I could answer the question “What will you do next?” My aspirations were to help kids and get involved in youth baseball, so I thought it’d be a good thing to speak to the future and protect myself a little, since I knew I would miss playing. It was a nice way to say goodbye.

Life’s Work: An Interview with Cal Ripken Jr.

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