Lots of fun and a dent

It's not about magic numbers this weekend at Safeco Field, but about memories - even faulty ones, from which myths germinate.

For instance, someone reminded Cal Ripken Jr. on Friday afternoon of a beaning he suffered in his rookie season of 1982 - on a wayward fastball by another rookie, Seattle Mariners right-hander Mike Moore - and how the most renowned record in the history of showing up for work ensued.

"I still have brain damage from it," joked the Baltimore Orioles third baseman.

"I got hit in the back of the helmet as hard as I've ever been hit. It put a little hole - an indentation - in the helmet and gave me a sting, and they sent me to the emergency room for precautionary X-rays."

Ripken was hitting a cool .117 at the time - 7 for 60. Even Lou Gehrig wasn't going to stay in the lineup swinging like that, and so Ripken sat the next day.

"I think it wasn't so much about being hit, but that it was a chance to say, `Take a day off,'" Ripken said. "Some people said it woke me up. But I thought that you can't let it go around the league that all you had to do was throw up and in and he can be intimidated. You don't want that sort of label. So it kind of made me more determined to come back - and I started on a hot streak right after that."

But - the questioner's memory notwithstanding - it wasn't the hot streak with which Ripken will be forever synonymous.

For he would sit out one more time almost a month after the beaning - on May 29, 1982, when manager Earl Weaver rested him in the second game of a doubleheader against Toronto. Thereafter, Ripken wouldn't get another day off for the next 2,632 games - the most ungodly record in the history of sports, in that it's the only one any of us mortals can replicate in real life.

This is not the reason Safeco Field will be packed for each of the three games this weekend against the woeful Orioles. The Mariners' appeal this season is a little more godly.

But Ripken's last visit to Seattle - he announced his retirement in June, effective at the end of his 21st major league season - would be worth the investment not only of a ticket but of our unqualified appreciation even if the M's were 40-101.

This farewell tour isn't so much for Ripken as it is for us.

The big-picture, Cal-and-the-meaning-of-life proclamations are best saved for another time - the series finale, for instance, when the Mariners will honor him with a pre-game ceremony and the obligatory parting gifts. In the meantime, the club has tided Ripken over by stenciling an orange 8 on both the Baltimore on-deck circle and on the third-base bag, souvenirs that will be safeguarded by Brinks lest they get purloined and put up on eBay.

What merits reflection at the moment are three notable episodes involving Ripken, the streak and the Mariners, which help capture the totality of the man - if not the sanctity of records.

The first was the nearly infamous Baltimore brawl of '93, when M's catcher Bill Haselman charged Orioles pitcher Mike Mussina and set off one of the more spirited melees in Mariners history.

In the middle of it was Cal Ripken Jr. - not throwing haymakers, but trying to keep his pitcher in one piece.

"I tried to stop a load of people from falling on Mussina," he recalled. "I was at the mound and I turned my knee and the grass gave way at the same time. Something popped and I was lying at the bottom of a pile, figuring out how to get 3,000 pounds of people off me."

The knee swelled horribly that night, and when Ripken tried to stand on it the next morning his first thought was, "No way can I play today."

The streak was 1,790 consecutive games - 340 short of Gehrig's record.

"I called my parents and let them know. They lived about 45 minutes from my house and in 46 minutes they were standing at my doorstep. So we sat there and talked and I did some therapy and treatments, trying to loosen it up."

You can imagine the rest. The knee responded little by little. Though it was stiff, Ripken was in the lineup that night.

"But that was the closest call of all the injuries I had during the streak," he said.

Ripken was within 15 games of Gehrig when the Orioles visited Seattle in late August 1995 for a four-game series.

It was pushing midnight in the Kingdome after one game. A couple of freelance radio reporters and a couple of writers were finishing up their work in the press box when they heard laughter from the field, along with the unmistakable crack of line drives jumping off ash.

In the near-darkness - the Kingdome's main banks had been extinguished, leaving only the press box and maintenance lights - Ripken was lobbing batting practice marshmallows at pitcher Ben McDonald.

No protective screen. No lights. The security guard assigned to Ripken as the public crush of his streak mounted was shagging balls in the outfield.

"Certainly I remember that," Ripken laughed. "In baseball, you're supposed to have fun. Sometimes you go through stretches of losing streaks, or years when you're rebuilding, when you're not having as much fun.

"And when you can't get satisfaction or fun during game time, you have to go out or go back to another time when you remember baseball being fun - when nobody was watching . . ."

Actually, Ripken always had fun in the Kingdome. He hit .338 inside its gray walls, with 18 home runs - second behind Brian Downing on the M's all-opponent list - and 69 RBIs. He even had a great time on top of the dome. At the suggestion of former M's catcher Dave Valle, he got access to the roof through a trap door and took in the breathtaking view of Seattle's skyline.

But his best night of all in the dome came on May 28, 1996, when he jacked three home runs off Seattle pitchers - including a grand slam off Mike Jackson for half his eight RBIs.

"Sometimes," he said, "you can pull motivation from different directions."

For Ripken, the motivation may have come from the controversy stirred up in Baltimore about whether he should move back to third base and make way for young shortstop Manny Alexander (now an M's farmhand, as a further curiosity). This was aside from the manufactured controversy over whether Ripken should pull the plug on his streak altogether.

"It really wasn't that big of a deal," he insisted. "(Third baseman) B.J. Surhoff got hurt and we had to figure out how to fill that void for 15 days. One of the options was to see Manny at shortstop - which did happen, but not at that point. B.J. came back a little early and the decision was delayed."

So there you have it in three tidy anecdotes - the man's dogged determination, the childlike nature at the heart of his game and his singular grace in the face of ill-informed, even ill-spirited, criticism. And we didn't even touch on the All-Star Game home run.

It's all about the man's body of work. And play.

Copyright 2001 Cowles Publishing Company
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