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SI Flashback: The Natural Rookie of the Year and MVP in his first two seasons, Cal Ripken Jr. has done his daddy proud
By Ron Fimrite Issue date: April 2, 1984
Well, he didn't just become a ballplayer. He became the consummate ballplayer, a Rookie of the Year in his first season (1982), a Most Valuable Player on a world championship team in his second, a young man of 23 so obsessed with catching, throwing and hitting baseballs that he barely acknowledges the more frivolous pursuits common to males of his age. Ripken grows vague when he's asked what else interests him in the vast panorama of late-20th-century living. "Baseball's a full-time job," he'll say. "I really haven't had time to explore other things." Tall, handsome and personable, he's catnip to the ladies, and he likes them fine, too, but he has no steady girlfriend and, says his road roommate, Rick Dempsey, "He's no womanizer." Dempsey, whom Ripken visited in Agoura, Calif., this past winter, has tried to get his roomie interested in boating and surfing, and he may yet succeed, although it has been far from smooth sailing because on most boats there's scarcely room to play catch. On the other hand, you could play pepper in Ripken's suburban Baltimore condo because his living room is barren of furniture. He was a good student at Aberdeen (Md.) High, especially in math, but he exhibits only minimal interest in the imposing numbers of the four-year, $4 million contract he recently signed with the Orioles. He's the only third-year player in the history of the game to be so richly rewarded. "Even when I signed that contract," says Ripken, "I didn't fully realize what it was. I can tell you what a $20 bill is like because I can hold it in my hand. But the rest is all numbers. I'm satisfied, though. I ought to be." Ripken looks about as uncomfortable out of his uniform as Douglas MacArthur did out of his. He misses the game so much in the winter that he cannot walk by his glove, hanging in the closet, without putting it on and slamming a ball into it. He has a special empathy for fans because he's still one himself, a rooter who gets nearly as much fun out of watching a game--very intensely--as he does playing. In essence, he's living out a Damn Yankees kind of fantasy; he's a latter-day Joe Hardy with his soul intact. He's not about to snub autograph seekers because it wasn't that long ago that he was one. The part of baseball that most players find annoying--the incessant travel and long absences from family--are no problem for him because he's lived that way all his life. In short, if Dr. Frankenstein were to assemble the working parts for the uebermensch ballplayer, he would create a Cal Ripken Jr. If the modern-day equivalent of the mad doctor, the computer, were to be fed the necessary components for an MVP, it would cough up a Ripken. Last year, playing every inning, every day, he, in Dempsey's words, "took this game by storm," batting .318 with 27 homers and 102 RBIs, and leading the league in hits (211), runs (121) and doubles (47). He was 6'4" and 210 pounds last season. He's grown a half inch and added five pounds for the 1984 season. "I can't believe it," he says. "I'm still growing." A big man with power, Ripken certainly doesn't look or hit like a shortstop. Robin Yount had a big power season for the Brewers in 1982 (29 homers, 114 RBIs), but slipped in '83 (17 homers, 80 RBIs) because of injuries. Before him only Vern Stephens of the Red Sox in the late '40s and Ernie Banks of the Cubs in the late '50s were premier home run hitters at a position traditionally manned by munchkins with names like Pee Wee, Rabbit and Scooter. Ripken may well be the biggest shortstop ever to play the game. He's nearly three inches taller and a good 40 pounds heavier than Marty Marion and Buddy Kerr, two shortstops of the '40s who were considered Brobdingnagian in their time. Tony Kubek was 6'3", but he wasn't strictly a shortstop for the Yankees of the '50s and '60s. Banks was 6'1" and so was Ripken's illustrious predecessor on the Orioles, Mark Belanger, but Belanger, for all of his defensive artistry, couldn't hit the ball out of your dining room. The greatest of all shortstops, Honus Wagner, was a big man -- 5'11" and 200 pounds -- but Ripken would have towered over him. At first, traditionalists considered Ripken's size a defensive drawback, but he has made believers of almost everyone by now, including a few skeptics in his own organization. He played third base the first half of his rookie year until Oriole manager Earl Weaver, sensing Ripken's potential, switched him to short on July 1, 1982. Since then he has played every inning of 253 straight games at the position. Last year he led major league shortstops in assists (534) and the American League in total chances (831), only three fewer than the number accepted by the major league leader, the Cardinals' Ozzie Smith, a jackrabbit whose modest physique conforms more to the shortstop mold. "If Cal hadn't hit so well," says Baltimore manager Joe Altobelli, "people would be raving about him as a shortstop. If he plays 10 years at short, he'll put numbers on the board that'll be earth-shattering." Ripken's dad, paternal pride aside, has his own views on outsized shortstops. "It used to be that short, second and centerfield were all little-guy positions," Cal Sr. says. "They were your defensive strength up the middle, but none of them could hit with power. Well, I think you can stick that theory. Give me nine big guys out there. You take a long-legged sumbitch like this guy here," he says of his son, "and he'll take two steps to some little guy's six and get the ball faster." After practice Ripken is eating a hamburger in the English Pub, a Key Biscayne restaurant about 20 minutes from the Orioles' spring training headquarters in Miami. He's an impressive specimen, but he speaks in a high flutish voice, and munching his burger, he seems very much a boy. "The Orioles were my only team -- for obvious reasons," he says. "I grew up around them. But there was a side of me that hoped, when I was ready for the draft, that somebody else would take me. I didn't want to think that I was only being drafted because of my dad. But what it boiled down to was that I wanted to be an Oriole. I just said to myself, I can take the criticism. And my first two years in the organization I got it. I had to prove to everyone that I wasn't there just because of my father. It was tough because I made mistakes like everybody else. I knew a lot, but I still had a lot to learn. "By Double A, I felt more like I belonged. But then in the big leagues all the players had heard about me and everybody seemed to expect me to be a superstar right away. I went 3 for 5 on Opening Day and then hit that slump. But they stuck with me, and the fans never stopped supporting me. So, little by little, I came back." Cal Sr., who at 48 looks older than his years, belying the quaint notion that those who hang around the young stay young, prefers to think of himself as "everyone's dad" on the Orioles. When Cal Jr. grew mildly upset in one spring session because he couldn't seem to get enough batting practice, he complained to his dad, saying, "Hey, you're supposed to take care of your oldest son in spring training." To which Cal Sr. replied, "Right now, I'm taking care of my son Dan Ford [the Orioles' rightfielder]." Fathers and sons on the same team are rare in baseball. Only the Macks (Connie and Earle) and the Hegans (Jim and Mike) come to mind. A certain adjustment is usually required of the parties involved in situations of this sort. But not with the Ripkens. They're pals. An evening with the two of them is a relaxed gabfest, a seminar on baseball, a clinic, an orgy of reminiscence. "Cal's uncle Bill -- my brother -- was a great two-strike hitter," says Cal Sr. "I used to get upset with him when we were kids in semipro ball because he knew he could hit with two strikes, but I didn't know it. He'd surprise me. He knew what he wanted up there. Cal's the same way." "It's the ultimate confrontation," says Cal Jr. "With two strikes on you, you know you're on the ropes. You've got to fight back." "It's a very simple game -- a ball, a bat and a glove," says Senior. "Then humans get involved and make it complicated." "What you don't realize when you're in the minors," says Junior, "is that you're being molded all the time. By Double A ball, it seems to fit and make sense. That's the biggest jump there is--from A to Double A. That's when you start seeing 3-2 breaking balls and 2-0 changeups." "I managed in this organization for 14 years," says Senior, "and I can tell you it's designed perfectly to take care of age and ability, to getting the right people in the right place." They are in high gear now, seeming not so much blood relatives as old teammates with shared knowledge and opinions. The father-son distinction vanishes in hot-stove-league chatter, surviving only as a source of humor. "I'm entitled to open all mail in the clubhouse addressed to Cal Ripken," says Senior. "After all, I was here first. It's not my fault your mother named you Cal Jr. I didn't have anything to do with it. I was playing ball in Topeka, Kansas, the night you were born." "Wait till I have a Cal III, then there'll be real confusion," says Junior, and they both laugh at the prospect of yet another shortstop in the family. The Ripkens, pere and fils, inhabit a special world. They are willing prisoners there, perceiving all things from the vantage point of that world. Cal Sr. first met his wife while watching her play softball in high school. "She was a good hitter," he says. Years later, he watched his daughter, Ellen, play. "Be damned if she didn't backhand a ball and throw right over the top. She rifled that seed. I asked myself, Now, where in hell did she learn to do that? I'd been teaching my players that for years, and here I am sitting watching my own daughter do it better than anybody." Cal Jr. is back in the world of baseball present on a pleasant February day in Miami, playing pepper with teammates Ken Singleton and Rich Dauer. This is no mere exercise in hand-eye coordination. They've made a contest of it. The batter must keep the ball within strict boundaries, defined by the backstop. He's scored on how many times he can hit the ball within the boundaries. With Ripken at bat, the record stands at 20. He counts each stroke in his shrill voice: "18"...ping..."19"...ping.... At 20 he fairly shrieks as his fielders toss down their gloves. "You only tied it," says Dauer. He tosses the ball back to Ripken, who hits it cleanly back to him. Twenty-one and the record for the day! Ripken jumps up as if auditioning for a Toyota commercial. "I did it," he shouts. "I'm the king! Yes, the king. You can call me King!" He was probably kidding, but, after all, in his world where the MVP is royalty, he is the king, and there are many who say his reign will be a long one.
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