Thomas Boswell: Again Batting Cleanup

Thomas Boswell
The Washington Post
Wednesday, January 10, 2007; Page E01

Perhaps Cal Ripken epitomizes essential human values, like fidelity to a code of duty and honor. Or maybe he's just a decent guy who showed up for work every day, signed a lot of autographs and didn't cheat -- a very low hurdle for sainthood. Either way, Ripken always has been exactly what baseball needed, especially in its darkest times.

From his first day in the big leagues in 1981 until he was voted into the Hall of Fame yesterday with the third-highest percentage ever, Ripken always has been baseball's perfect answer -- even before the sport knew the ugly question. Yes, he's at it again. In an age when jocks show up at midnight in a white Hummer limo, Ripken will ride into Cooperstown in July on a white horse at high noon.

As Barry Bonds stalks Hank Aaron all summer, like Rambo on Bambi's trail, Ripken is positioned to steal the stage: the accidental antidote, the hero by happenstance. In '95, after the sewage spill of a canceled World Series, baseball needed a stench-free symbol of dependability, a hometown boy who understood responsibility and an adult who grasped that players simply were custodians of a game owned by its fans.

The sport got all those things, as the Orioles shortstop broke Lou Gehrig's record for consecutive games played. Now history is seeking him out again. The steroid-soaked stage is set. Baseball's need for a man with a simple sense of honor is profoundly obvious. Cue Cal. Now we realize that all those years when it never crossed Cal's mind to skip even a single game, something else never crossed his mind either -- cheating. Now, his 431 home runs look larger as the totals of others seem smaller. And we know why Cal never hit a ball 475 feet in his life. "I don't think my numbers are deflated because some other numbers may be inflated," Ripken told me last week.

Just as Mark McGwire brought more unwelcome headlines to the sport yesterday -- by receiving a dismal 23.5 percent of the Hall vote -- Ripken's election immediately helped the cleanup process. There to aid him was Tony Gwynn, the eight-time batting champ who led the league in smiles for 20 straight years.

How does baseball catch these undeserved breaks? For much of the last 20 years, baseball's bosses, owners and union have tacitly condoned and virtually encouraged an epidemic of illegal and dangerous performance-enhancing drugs. And the two superstars of the last quarter century who are least likely to have cheated -- who, if anything, were nagged for not having quite enough "power" -- arrive right on schedule. On an occasion when he was universally contrasted with Too Big Mac and Balco Barry, Ripken tried to make one point perfectly clear -- in his mind, at least, virtue had nothing to do with it. "To me there was no fork in the road.
There was no choice. Those things scare me to death," Ripken said last week when asked about playing clean.

Lest he get too much credit for mere honesty, he adds: "I never had the options. The Orioles were thought of as a bunch of goody-two-shoes. After those guys in Kansas City had [cocaine] problems, our team voluntarily agreed to have drug testing. Eddie [Murray] said, 'Just go along with it.'

"When I came into the big leagues [in 1982, his first full season], the locker room had ashtrays, spittoons and candy bars," adds Ripken, chuckling at a lifestyle little changed since the days of the Babe. "Then the blenders for the protein mixes replaced them. Maybe I had the old-school naive view. People think I had this nutritional regimen. Yeah, my regimen was the four food groups."

Ripken may know plenty about the use of performance enhancers in baseball. What veteran star player wouldn't? "The truth has started to come out. But only parts have come out to this point. The overall thing just saddens me. But it's reality. It is what it is," Ripken said. "I don't resent being asked about it. It's all part of the process of cleaning up. The truth will be known.
Unfortunately, all the stories probably haven't come out yet. I'm for the stories being told."

But don't expect to hear them from him. "I don't think it's my place to judge," he said.

However, the day of his election to Cooperstown was the proper time for Ripken to put the primary moments of his career in perspective. Making the Hall ranked only third.

"Catching the liner for the last out of the '83 World Series was my best moment as a player because you have the joy of completion. But taking that spontaneous lap in '95 was my best human moment," Ripken said.

Playing in his 2,131st consecutive game on Sept. 6 that season, Ripken circled the Camden Yards warning track, shaking the hands of countless fans, many of whom already had his autograph under glass back home. Or did they all? If they did, they probably received that souvenir near midnight in a darkened ballpark with just enough light left to allow the line snaking beside the Oriole dugout to find its way to Cal's indefatigable pen.

"I didn't want to delay the game," Ripken said. "But Bobby [Bonilla] and Raffy [Palmeiro] pushed me out of the dugout. They said, 'If you don't take a lap, we'll never get this game started again.' At the end of the lap I could care less if they started the game or not."

"We need each other in this life," said Ripken, referring to the bond between players and fans, which baseball constantly seems to stretch to the breaking point. "Taking the lap helped to pull the experience together. I was the beneficiary."

Ripken always feels like he's the beneficiary. And he usually is. To a point, his good luck -- his knack of being in the right place at the right time to fall into a bed of roses -- even embarrasses him. But other people, and baseball, always seem to be getting even more in these sappy Ripken love-fests. Is the simple life the win-win life?

These days, Ripken builds baseball at the grass-roots level by teaching the game to kids and owning minor league teams. It's work he loves and it suits him. "When you're a player, the good seasons go by fast. The bad ones seem to take forever," Ripken said. "The last five years have seemed like the fastest of my life."

To summarize what he does these days and how people should imagine his various projects, Ripken puts his fingers a fraction of an inch apart. "This many can be major leaguers," he said. Then he spreads his arms as wide as he can and grins. "This many can love the game."