Cal Ripken Jr. and David Rubenstein explore his literary career, 2,632-game streak, and loyalty to the Baltimore Orioles despite free agency offers. They discuss his upbringing under manager Earl Weaver, his unique bond with brother Billy, and his survival of prostate cancer which led to selling his businesses. Ripken critiques modern baseball tactics while admitting regret over missing World Series appearances, concluding with reflections on mentoring youth and preserving Camden Yards' legacy. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, from my perspective, it is rising because of the commitment I see not only on the court, but in the trial judges, where the rubber really does hit the road.
The faith of so many people in our institutions, of course, certainly subject to criticism, but I think they emerged from a lot of the criticism stronger.
The separation of powers, which the framers, in a stroke of brilliance, realized was important to keep power under control by having branches separate each other.
There are always difficulties.
They're going to change.
That document has proven durable over almost two centuries, and I think it's going to continue for many more.
unidentified
And on that note, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking the Chief Justice of the United States.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
America's Book Club is brought to you by these television companies and is supported by the Ford Foundation.
From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined our nation.
As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
unidentified
Now, from Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland, best-selling writer and children's book author, Baseball Hall of Famer and World Series champion Cal Ripken Jr.
He's joined by civic leader and Baltimore Orioles owner, David Rubenstein.
Cal, I want to thank you very much for taking the time to let us have a conversation about your remarkable career as a writer as well as a baseball player.
And we're doing this from the clubhouse of the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards.
And I guess you were familiar with this clubhouse, right?
In the beginning, my mom used to read bedtime stories.
And then when I became a dad, I used to read bedtime stories to my kids.
And you would try to use an animated voice and kind of make it more interesting because I wanted my kids to see books as more like toys and something that they didn't want to open up and look at.
So I remember my daughter's favorite book was Three Billy Goats Gruff.
And many times I would play the voice of the troll.
And it was like, who's that trip trapping across my bridge?
And he goes, it is I.
And so anyway, we had a fun time doing that.
And because of baseball, I got into writing books.
I mean, after the 95 season, there was this big need to learn more about me.
And a biography came out of that.
And so I really enjoyed the process of going through that.
And then having influence with kids, I thought writing kids' books were a good way to broach certain subjects that might have been tough when you were kids or whatever else in the backdrop of a travel team, travel baseball team, because we all worry about things as kids.
And it was a way to communicate a good message through books.
But most people thought that your dad was in professional baseball and that he just drilled you and trained you and made you into the baseball player.
But the actual truth is not.
When he was a minor league manager, in those days, he was the hitting coach, the pitching coach, the infield coach, the outfield coach, the catching coach.
He did all of that, you know, because we didn't have specialty coaches.
He was in charge of all of that.
So he was teaching and developing his minor league teams for the Orioles.
And I was a witness to that.
So many times I would learn about infield fundamentals because he was talking to Doug DeSense about what he was doing in the game.
So I was around it a lot, and I benefited by hearing him teach other people, but he never really worked much with me.
I learned, I always say dad was the encyclopedia of baseball, and all those players in the minor leagues were like little small books.
So I could go ask an outfielder how he catches a flyball.
I could ask an infielder how he does this.
A good base stealer, I could ask him questions.
So if I asked a player something, for example, we talked about this earlier, and the outfielder said, you know, you should catch a flyball like this.
And I'd go back and say, hey, I just talked to so-and-so today, and he said I should feel a flyball like this.
My dad said, no, that's not the right way to do it.
It's like this.
So I would X him off my list.
And so then, but when dad said, yes, that's exactly right.
Very often, if your father is a baseball professional manager, by the time he comes home at night, he's tired of talking about baseball, so he talks about other things.
Did he tell you, talk to you about with baseball all the time, or did he just basically want to talk about anything else?
And I remember I was 5'7, 128 because as a second baseman, I made it as a second baseman, not a shortstop, because I physically couldn't throw the ball consistently from shortstop to first base.
But I made it as a second baseman.
I could field and throw, and I batted ninth.
And I led the team in sacrifice bunts, and I hit 128, I think.
But I remember I was 5'7, 128 because after I made the team, they said as a ritual, everybody gets weighed in, and they get so I was the first one to jump up on the scale.
And they called out my height 5'7, 128, and everybody burst out laughing.
You know, so it was one of those initiation kind of things, which I hated them for.
The scouts tell you at the time, they get their cross-checkers in and they're thinking about drafting you high in the draft.
I was told by many different people that I had a chance to go number one on their list as a pitcher.
And down deep inside, I really wanted to be a regular player to be considered as that.
But every time they came to see me play, I pitched and I did really well.
I struck out 17 out of the 21 guys in my state championship game.
And so when the draft came around, you know, right there, I was thinking, okay, they told me I might be number one, I might not be number one.
But it wasn't like it is today where you see the draft or it's an event.
It just happened, you know, and then my mom comes to school, you know, like at lunchtime and said that you've been drafted by the Orioles in the second round.
I would have loved to do that, but I was forced to make a choice.
And it was really interesting.
My dad played a diplomatic role in this because he knew that the Orioles were interested in pitching and as an infielder.
And he, in the meeting with Hank Peters and Earl Weaver was in that meeting, he said, because Earl Weaver got a chance to see me play a little bit down at the Memorial Stadium, take batting practice, and he saw that I had some skills.
And so my dad said, you know, we've had a couple of people like this in our minor league system before.
And if we start them out as a pitcher and they don't make it, it's really hard to go back that way.
If we start him out as a regular player and he doesn't make it as a regular player, we're wrong about him going.
We can always have a chance to go back and we've had success turning them into pitchers.
So that gave me a chance to say, and it's ironic the way my career turned out.
They asked me, Hank Peters said, what do you want to do, Cal?
And I said, well, a pitcher only gets to play one out of every five days.
The Orioles have what is probably the greatest third baseman in history, Brooks Robinson, certainly the greatest fielding third baseman, maybe the greatest third baseman.
Did you say, I don't want to be a third baseman?
He already got the greatest one.
So when did they decide that you should not be playing third base?
And I was trying to communicate was, you know, hey, I love this and I'll celebrate all you want after the game's over.
It's not kind of fair to the other guys to keep playing.
But they kept clapping.
And then Bobby Bow and Rafael Palmero, when I came out one of the times, they pushed me down the line.
And Raphael said, you're going to have to take a lap around this ballpark to get the game started again.
And I went, I'm not doing that.
And then when I went down there to do it, then the celebration turned, you know, almost 50,000 strong to one-on-one.
And so you could shake everyone's hands as you went down.
And it became really meaningful.
And so I was really worried about getting the game started.
But once I started, you know, a little bit down the line shaking people's hands and looking at them, you know, I said I could care less if we ever finished this game again.
Let me ask you, you could, you played all those consecutive games 17 years in a row, but you could have played a consecutive game, but playing one or two innings and just say, okay, I've done two innings, three innings.
Well, I mean, it wasn't, again, to me, it wasn't about the record.
It wasn't about, you know, when I was playing early, you know, what you're referring to is that the first part of that streak, the first five years, I played every inning of every game.
And so the logic there was when you're learning how to play and you're getting better each year and you're kind of figuring out, you know, how do you hit and the matchups, when you're swinging well, you don't want to come out of a lopsided game.
You don't want to come out of a game, you want to get that lasted bat and you want to keep it going for tomorrow.
And if you weren't swinging the bat really well and you wanted to figure out some of those games that are lopsided, you can actually try something in the game that's going to help you tomorrow.
So I always had that theory that there's no real benefit from coming out for a few innings.
This year, the Orioles celebrated the 30th anniversary of the streak.
What was it like going out on the Camden Yards and you had some of the players with whom you had played and some of the ones who had pushed you out of the dugout 30 years earlier?
And I think that I came to understand that it's okay to look back.
And especially, it's not necessarily the event itself.
It's, you know, even though we celebrated the event, it was like, who do you have those experiences with?
So it turned out the people.
So the people, and I really wasn't close to Rafael Palmero.
His locker was over there.
You know, we played together for a while.
Bobby Bow was a little bit more, we were more friends.
But in that moment, I really liked seeing Rafael Palmero come back, you know, and Bobby Bow.
And it kind of put us back in that spot in that moment so that we staged at the fifth inning or four and a half or whatever else we staged that we would go out there.
And they kind of gave me the push down the line just to remember that.
And so it made me realize it's okay to look back.
It's okay to remember.
But the important part about it is it's not like you're just celebrating something you did.
No, I was particularly sensitive to the guys that are playing now.
You know, the Dodgers that night, if you remember, Yamamoto had a no-hitter with two outs in the eighth, you know, and so it was good to remember, but I didn't want to impact the game negatively in that sort of way.
And I don't know if I could have ran around the stadium or not.
No, I mean, I always had a feel, you know, Brooks Robinson was my hero, and I think the most he ever made in a year was like $100,000.
My first year in the big leagues, I made $40,000.
And so I got a $100,000 bonus for being rookie of the year, which was nice.
But you hear as the business side of baseball got up and the salaries continued to climb, you'd hear players of past would say, you know, this guy's making that.
He couldn't do half of what I could do.
You know, and there was a little bit of resentment.
I never wanted to be that way because I always thought it was relative to your timeframe.
And the business side is the business side.
It's more importantly is what you focus on, what you do on the field.
If you want to measure yourself against past players, that's the place to measure it, not necessarily in the salary.
The guy that comes to mind really quickly is Ken Griffey Jr.
I ended up playing, I played against his dad, you know, and then I played against him for a while.
Ken Griffey Jr. had this smile on his face and he enjoyed every aspect of what he did.
And there wasn't anything on the baseball field that I didn't think he could do.
I mean, he could run, he could throw, he covered out to center field, he could hit, he could hit with clutch, he hit with power.
You didn't want to see him anywhere near the lineup when you had a, when you in the, in the, you didn't want to see him in a matchup when you had the game on the line, for sure.
So I just thought that he was most physically blessed.
And I've got to know him better now in our post-playing career.
We go to the Hall of Fame each year.
Everybody comes back for the Hall of Fame to celebrate the new inductees.
And he's one of my favorite people to sit down and talk to.
Randy's, Randy, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez, Nolan Ryan.
But the one guy that gave me sort of fits in the beginning was Goose Gossage.
Goose Gossage was a closer for the Yankees.
At that time, our radar guns were slower and all that kind of stuff.
And he was hitting 100, 100-plus on our slow radar guns.
And it looked like he didn't know where the ball was going sometimes, and he looked like he didn't care.
And so if you got, and I remember watching the World Series the year before I faced him, and he ended up hitting Ronce, the Dodgers' third baseman in the head, and they took Ronce off the field, and it looked like, you know, he was sort of crazy, and he kind of was happy he did it.
So when I batted against him for the first time, I couldn't take that image out of my mind.
So I kept stepping in the bucket.
You can't hit when you're think you might get hit.
And I wasn't hitting very well against him, and I was intimidated.
And I was trying to figure out, I got to fix this.
And one of our players was friends with him, and he called over to the clubhouse and said, Hey, why don't we go grab some ribs afterwards?
I'll take you to this place called the Stable in Cockeysville.
And I overheard the conversation.
So when I was driving home that night, I went past the stable and I looked over and I went, I don't know what I'm going to do, but I pulled in and I walked in.
And my teammate and Goose was sitting in the corner and they saw me coming in and they called me over.
So I end up drinking beer with him and eating ribs with him and getting to know him.
And find out he's a good guy.
It totally took the intimidation factor away.
So I think I was four for my next five off of him.
I thought you were going to say, did you put a contract out on him?
I thought you were leading me in a different direction.
I think in that particular year, when I was voted in at the time, I had the highest percentage of votes going into the Hall of Fame.
And so I could hold on to that for a year.
And evidently, I think there were four or five people on the ballot out of 400 or some writers that write on it that didn't fill out.
They filled out a blank ballot in protest of like the steroid era.
And I'm thinking, Tony Gwynn and me are going into the Hall of Fame.
Where does steroids come into the mix on that?
And so when you didn't vote at all, then it was considered a negative vote against you.
But that didn't matter to me.
I mean, I don't necessarily understand first ballot Hall of Famers or like you're on the ballot for a while and now you now you get put on like eight or years later and you haven't done anything.
You haven't done anything more than you did before.
I think, you know, in hindsight, you know, after some of the stories come out, you can kind of go back in your mind and think, oh, yeah, I should have picked up on that.
There were a few people, I think, that were more obvious.
And you thought, you know, how do you make those kind of gains in the offseason?
You know, I'm working out like crazy and I'm not making those gains then.
So I could say I was suspicious, but you never really know.
And I think the people that were in on it, you can look back and now that people have admitted it, you can kind of look at who by association might have been involved too.
But at the time, I didn't think much about it, and it was never a temptation for me.
The challenge of being a professional athlete is that your career as a professional athlete is generally over in your mid to late 30s, maybe early 40s in some cases.
But, you know, in my profession or the business world, you're just getting started really in your late 30s, early 40s, or so forth.
I didn't really have any aspirations of being an announcer.
I thought about it for a second, staying in baseball in some capacity, whether you're a coach or whether you aspire to be a manager in some way, or even in the front office.
But because I grew up in baseball, my dad was in professional baseball, and in the minor leagues, he was actually gone more than you are in the big leagues.
And I thought about my kids were 8 and 12 when I retired.
And I kept thinking the grind of the baseball season takes you away all the time.
I want to be there for their, you know, as I get them through high school, you know, and maybe I'll think of something.
But, you know, I enjoyed the ride to and from school, picking them up.
It's special time you get to spend.
And maybe it was because when I was a kid, we had four of us, four kids in our family, my sister and then me and then two brothers.
Trying to fight for time with your dad, you know, individual time with your dad.
I learned really early.
My dad did these clinics every Saturday morning, and he would come to me like 7 o'clock in the morning and tap me on my knee and say, Do you want to go with dad today?
And I was thinking, clinics are kind of boring, and I got to sit down and listen to people talk all that time.
I really don't want to go, but I knew that my other siblings would not go.
So it was my chance to go.
So I always got up, and it was the 20 minutes in the car with him that you had time with him, and it was 20 minutes home that mattered the most.
So that's how I looked at it with my kids: I cherished those times, and they were valuable to me.
And I wanted to do that with my kids.
So I knew that maybe my opportunities to stay in baseball.
So we did start a kids' business.
We did go into the minor league baseball business.
So I learned business, and that was very gratifying to do.
Yeah, we first thought Billy and I, this was a little bit more philanthropic as a start, but we realized that we didn't have enough money to keep doing that.
It had to actually make business sense.
But we knew we had the encyclopedia of baseball as a dad, and we said most kids don't have that.
So we wanted to actually provide instruction, camps, and those sorts of things, and then provide a tournament environment.
And the tournament environment, we knew what it felt like to play in the big leagues and Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium.
And the different venues really enhanced your experience as a baseball player.
So we wanted to bring that down to the level of the kids.
So we had our version of Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium and Wrigley Field so they could enjoy the experience of playing and then learn how to do that.
Now, ultimately, we built a really good tournament business and travel teams and all that kind of came through.
We built other complexes and those sorts of things.
And some of the camping, the camp or the instructionals part, although we were most excited about that part, kind of fell off to the wayside because everybody had their own personal coaches and they all learned how to do it.
And a lot of the kids, you know, which was a compliment to Billy and me, when we had these camps, they would send their kids to camp.
And we were all about teaching baseball.
And so, but you had all kinds of different talents of baseball.
Some kids didn't like baseball at all, but the parents sent them to us, you know, because they trusted us and they wanted to have experience, other things.
So we had to try to divide the kids up into different groups and all that kind of stuff to teach them.
I don't know if you saw some of the memorabilia items on the table.
I have some of my gloves over there.
I picked one glove out of a box.
On the outside of it, it said, it was 1987.
It said the Galissa glove that I used when Billy got called to the big leagues.
And so dad was the manager.
He was only a manager for a brief period of time.
But during that time, he gets called the big leagues.
So I think it was the first time in baseball history that dad managed his two sons in the big leagues.
And the cool part about it was Billy was four years younger than me, so we never played in any level of growing up.
I was out of high school by the time he got to high school.
And so, you know, he knows baseball really well.
It was almost like we were so in sync right from the get-go about how to turn double plays.
We turned the toughest double plays.
I knew exactly where he wanted it on a double play.
He knew where I wanted it.
And he had an expression that, like, I wanted it right here, like my right hip so I could make a shorter pivot and get a good put on the throw.
And when he'd do that in the game, he'd give it to me right there, and I'd turn the double play.
And he said, he said, I put it right in your holster, didn't I?
But it was fun.
For an example, too, like, it was really critical to know what pitch is being called because you have a guy on first base and he might steal or might be a hit and run, and you got to make you got to make decisions every pitch on who covers.
And so I looked over at him one time because I got blocked out of the bat.
The guy's the hitter was putting the bat in front of the signal and I couldn't see it.
And it was a really important time.
And I kind of panicked.
I go, I didn't see it.
And then Billy instinctively just gave me coverage the same way I would give coverage back.
And you don't get that sort of instinct very often.
I always thought dad was a company guy, loyal in the minor leagues, to help develop players get to the big leagues, then came to the big leagues as a coach.
And he was Earl Weaver's right-handed guy.
And then when Earl retired in 82, I thought it was natural that Dad would step in and be the manager at that point.
We didn't see it.
Everybody didn't see it that way.
So we brought another manager in, Joe Altabelle, for that time.
We win the World Series under Joe.
Joe managed for a couple more years.
Then we were in kind of a rebuilding mode.
So then they decided that they would give Dad a chance.
And so I don't think we told anybody that we were in a rebuilding mode.
The expectations were still for us to be good.
And so when we got off to that bad start, we were 0-6, and they fired Dad.
And then Frank came down, Frank Robinson came down from the front office, and we lost 15 more in a row.
The most miserable time that you ever want to have.
But in some weird way, I'm thankful that I went through that.
Because when you go through something like that, you've got to figure out who you are, how you can help, how you can be a better teammate to everyone else.
And once you get through something like that and come out positive on the other side, then any other thing that happens in your life, it's easier for you to deal with.
But it was hard.
I was a free agent at the end of that year, too.
And the most troubling part about that was they thought that they wouldn't be able to sign me, that I was gone.
And if I had to make a decision in the first month of that, I would have said, you know, the Orioles have changed.
You know, I'm going to go someplace else.
But there were trade rumors all the time about me that I was going to go to Boston.
I was going to go to New York.
I was going to get traded to LA.
And it dawned on me that as I came to the ballpark, I could get called into that manager's office and they could tell me that you're traded and you have to go.
You know, you had no control over that.
And I didn't like that at all.
So later in the summer, they came back to me and said, we'd like to rebuild with you, around you.
And so I signed a longer-term contract at that point.
But there were two things that I really needed out of that.
One was I wanted an absolute no-trade clause because I didn't like that feeling.
And they said, we don't do that.
And I go, well, I have to have it.
And they said, okay, we'll do it.
And the second one was, look, I play basketball in the offseason.
And I want you to assure me that if I get hurt playing basketball, it would be the same as getting hurt playing baseball.
And it wouldn't affect my contract at all.
And they started to give me a little pushback on that.
No, I mean, you know, in my life, maybe I'll give context to my life.
Right before COVID, I had a bout with prostate cancer, and then I got the prostate out, and everything's fine.
So don't worry.
I'm the lucky ones that found it early.
But that gives you a thought in your life: how do you want to spend the moments in your life and who you want to spend them with and what you want to do?
So I kind of made a decision where I sold our kids' business, the majority interest in our kids' business.
I sold my last minor league team last year.
And you're thinking, okay, now you're going to have the freedom to do things that you want to do.
But this baseball thing kind of sucked me back in.
And being around the guys or whatever else and being in this position, I'm glad to help in any way I can.
And I had a really good time taking part in interviewing the managers and helping Mike make the decision on who to hire.
I'm enjoying that.
And it seems like I'm getting pulled back in more and more.
So it's in your blood.
And it kind of makes you talking to Gunner or Holiday or Cowser and those guys.
And just giving you some of the experience, giving them some of the experience and some of the advice that you can, it's very gratifying.
I don't want to sound like an old player that said it was better when I played than it is now.
It's a little bit different game.
I'd like to see some of the small ball things, some of the finer points of the game come back because I think that's an important part of winning one-run games and winning in the playoffs.
I think executing at that sort of level is good.
I don't know.
I can't remember seeing a hit and run play.
It used to be a hit and run was a good valuable tool against some of the top-line pitching because you can't put a big inning together a lot of times against those guys because they're not going to give up two or three hits in a row.
So you have to figure out a way.
And the hit and run's kind of gone away.
The strikeout or whatever else, I can't understand.
You keep your A swing alive with two strikes and then you get fooled radically on different pitches and you strike out.
But the way it's looked at now is that's just an out.
And I'm thinking, give yourself a chance, put it all in play, get somebody in from third with less than two out by putting the ball in play.
Those things add up.
So, I mean, I think I'd like to see a little bit more of that.
And I think you are.
I mean, Toronto had really good success this year.
They had the least strikeouts as a team in the American League.
And by putting the ball in play and then running the bases and doing that, it gave them more weapons when the pitchers were really good.
Well, I mean, I had a conversation with the commissioner when they were deciding to do it, and I said, that's the dumbest thing I ever heard.
And I didn't like the concept of actually putting a clock out there.
Now, if you go back, Earl Weaver said baseball doesn't have a clock.
You know, you've got to get the last out.
You got to get the last out of the game somehow to win the ball game.
So you can't, you know, stall and like in basketball, Carolina, North Carolina had the four corners when they had a game one.
There was no shot clock.
They could just dribble a ball all around and then force the game to be one.
Baseball wasn't like that.
So I couldn't picture a clock in baseball.
Then I had to tell the commissioner after the first year, I said, you know, I was totally wrong.
Because when you put a clock in, they had a rule that you had to throw a pitch by 15 seconds anyway, but the umpires couldn't enforce that because they didn't have a mechanism to do it.
So the league really quickly adapted to this concept.
And now people get in the batter's box, the pitcher throws the pitch, and the game gets moving.
And it's a much more enjoyable game to watch.
Harold Reynolds from MLB Network said he went back to the 83 World Series that I was in, and he put a stopwatch on each of the hitters when they came to the plate and wanted to see what the pace of the play is.
And we played to the pace of the game now, and we just did it naturally.
And it's kind of funny.
I was trying to figure out why is that?
Why has this downtime been stretched?
And towards the end of my career, walk-up music became popular.
So each player, they came down, somebody came down from the press box and said, what song do you want me to play when you come to the plate?
And I go, I don't want any song.
But there was a lot of players that liked that.
So they would pick their song.
And I remember one or two times sitting out in the defense on an away game and seeing the guy in the on-deck circle.
He's still staying in the on-deck circle, not approaching home plate yet.
And I'm looking up, and then he looks up at the press box like he's like going, you know.
And then they play a song, and then he makes his move up to home plate, says hello to the catcher, does all that kind of swing, swing, swing, puts the gloves on like this, and then gets back in the box.
And I'm going, the collection of the walk-up music might be one of the culprits.
It might be I'm making an entrance to my Ford bats and that downtime might be wasted.
But now they still have walk-up music and they still play it, but now they get up there and get in the box.
You know, sometimes I feel sorry for myself when you talk to Derek Jeter or Chipper Jones and those guys because you realize that Derek Jeter, a bad year for Jeter, was losing in the first round of playoffs.
And so they didn't experience, like Chipper Jones, the first 14 years of his career, they won the pennant for 14 straight years.
Now, they didn't end up winning.
I think they won one World Series.
But the opportunity to play in the postseason is something that I absolutely loved.
And I got to do it in 96 and 97.
We were this close to being in the World Series on both of those times.
But that's what you play the game for, is you play the game to get to that point and then compete in that environment.
And so I didn't get to do it as much as I want to.
So if I would rewrite my story a little bit, I'd say, I want to be in the playoffs more.
I'm going to get a chance to win that World Series.
You won the World Series.
I won it in my second year.
And then you thought that that would happen again, you know.
And it's hard, you know, to get back to the World Series.
And we were close a couple times, but that's why you play the game.
Thank you very much for being a great supporter of the Orioles and being a great role model for people who care about baseball and care about professional athletes and care about people being decent who are role models.
Thank you.
unidentified
My pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you.
After the interview, Cal Ripken Jr. and David Rubenstein toured the Orioles' Camden Yard Stadium and viewed memorabilia from Ripken's legendary career.
See more with Cal Ripken Jr. at the Orioles' Camden Yard Stadium at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
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c-span democracy unfiltered c-span is as unbiased as you can get You are so fair.
I don't know how anybody can say otherwise.
You guys do the most important work for everyone in this country.
I love C-SPAN because I get to hear all the voices.
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This is probably the only place that we can hear honest opinion of Americans across the country.
You guys at C-SPAN are doing such a wonderful job of allowing free exchange of ideas without a lot of interruptions.
Welcome to Ceasefire, where we look to bridge the divide in American politics.
I'm Dasha Burns, Politico White House Bureau Chief, and joining me now on either side of the desk, two guests who have agreed to keep the conversation civil even when they disagree.
Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy and Vermont Democratic Senator Peter Welch.
Thank you both for joining me.
We'll all know what you signed up for, so get ready.