Cal Ripken Jr. reflects on his 21-year Orioles career, detailing his 2,632-game streak broken in 1995 and his transition from a reluctant pitcher to an everyday shortstop under Earl Weaver. He discusses overcoming intimidation from Goose Gossage, navigating the steroid era without temptation, and the resilience gained when his father was fired after a 21-game losing streak. Now an advisor and cancer survivor, Ripken advocates for returning to small ball tactics while mentoring youth, emphasizing that player value stems from on-field performance rather than salary. Ultimately, his journey underscores the importance of family presence and shared experiences over mere statistics. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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beverly gage
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Growing Up a Regular Player00:14:49
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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?
First, I want to talk about your writing career that people don't know as much about probably, then your baseball career, and then we're going to talk about what you're doing since you retired from baseball.
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 than 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 field 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, then I stayed with that guy and I kept pestering.
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 about 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 and sacrificed months 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.
You know, 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, you know, 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.
Well, in my first year, I made 32 errors in 64 games, which is not good.
And I didn't hit a home run in any of the games for my 64 games.
So then I went to the instructional league, started to get my feet on the ground a little bit, then hit the A-ball, and I didn't hit a home run for the first half of that season.
So I went two years in the season and a half in Pro Ball, and I haven't hit a home run yet.
My first home run was in the 12th inning to break a 0-0 tie.
And I hit a home run to left field, and we ended up winning the game 1-0.
But right after I hit the home run, the light transformer blew.
And we were in the top of the 12th.
And if we couldn't get the game started again, the game would revert back to the inning before.
And so I would lose my home run.
So I was sitting there thinking, we got to play this game no matter what.
We got to put the cars out, turn the headlights on, whatever we have to do to get this game.
They fixed the transformer, and we ended up winning the game.
But then after I hit that first home run, I started to get it.
And then I started hitting really well.
I hit 300, and I started.
I think I hit five or six home runs in the next two weeks and got called to the moved up to double A.
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?
You'd already got the greatest one.
So when did they decide that you should not be playing third base?
It's one of those experiences that you have in life where you don't think it's happening to you.
Like you're watching it from watching yourself do it.
I mean, you mentioned Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton came to 2130 on 2131.
He was in this clubhouse right here.
Al Gore was there.
It was a very ceremonial sort of the closest thing that we had was like opening day or maybe the World Series atmosphere that is there.
It was all right here.
And so once the game became official, I didn't know about two weeks before they started having the numbers on the warehouse.
And when the game became official, then that's when they dropped the banner.
And they started playing John Tesh's music, whatever else.
And I kept thinking, what's going on?
And then I realized what was happening.
And it started to build the emotion up to that last drop on the thing.
So when it happened officially, four and a half innings, we were leading in the game.
So their team had a chance to bat five times.
And when I came, you know, everybody congratulated you, and then there was a standing ovation or clapping for like 21, 22 straight minutes.
And then in the meantime, you're kind of saying thank you to everyone and then going back in and then still clapping.
You feel like you've got to be pushed out there for a couple of curtains.
Then you can say yes again.
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 played all those consecutive games 17 years in a row, but you could have played a consecutive game, but it's 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 night 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 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 end 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.
And he has a quiet confidence.
He doesn't have this giant ego that said, I'm the best player.
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 Ron Say, the Dodgers third baseman in the head, and they took Ron Say 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 know, you can't hit when you're, you think you might get hit.
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 Cockiesville.
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 some beer with him and eating ribs with him and getting to know him.
And find out he's a good guy.
totally took the intimidation factor away.
So I think I was four for my next five off of them.
I thought you were going to say, did you put a contract out on them?
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 was 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 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, as I get them through high school, and maybe I'll think of something.
But, you know, I enjoyed the ride to and from school, picking them up.
You get 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 seven 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've 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 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, you know, 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 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.
He 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 it shorter pivot and get a good bone 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, you know, 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.
So a low point of your baseball career may have been when your father was the manager and I think the Orioles lost eight games in a row or something like that in the beginning of the season and the Orioles fired him as the manager.
I always thought dad was a company guy, loyal in the minor leagues, helped 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 Altabelli, 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.
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.
I'm going to go someplace else.
But there were trade rumors all the time about me.
I was going to go to Boston.
I was going to go to New York.
I was going to get traded to L.A.
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 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, you know, 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 has 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 in ball and 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've got to get the last out of the game somehow to win the ball game.
So you can't stall In basketball, Carolina, North Carolina had the four corners when they had a game one, then 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's a lot of players that liked that.
So they would pick their song.
And I remember one time, one or two times sitting out in the defense on 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 his gloves on like this, and then gets back in the box.
I'm going, the collection of the walk-up music might be one of the call prints.
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 the 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: 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.
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.
After the interview, Cal Ripken Jr. and David Rubenstein toured the Orioles Camden Yard Stadium and viewed memorabilia from Ripken's legendary career.
And it was my way of taking some frustration out on the bat.
But when you see a bat with this many marks, you know it had a pretty good lifespan.
It was probably at least two weeks.
Student Cam Grand Prize Winner00:05:06
unidentified
See more with Cal Ripken Jr. at the Orioles-Kemton Yard Stadium at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, Sunday, March 29th, with our guest, Beverly Gage, a professor of American history at Yale.
Her book, G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover, and The Making of the American Century, received numerous literary awards and prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Bancroft Prize in American History, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography.
Her most recent book is This Land is Your Land, a road trip through U.S. History.
She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubenstein.
Now, when biographers spend five years, ten years, 15 years or so with a person, they often fall in love with them because they spend so much time with them.
Did you fall in love with J. Edgar Hoover or do you come away saying, geez, he's not as good as I thought or wished he was?
To me, I was just fascinated by him the whole time.
I thought that he was important, and I thought that he was really an interesting, complicated character.
We mostly know him as a villain, and I did find that he was much more complicated than that one-dimensional portrait.
unidentified
Watch America's Book Club with Beverly Gage, Sunday, March 29th, at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, only on C-SPAN.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. to across the country.
Coming up Monday morning, Niall Stanage, the Hill White House columnist on Trump administration's strategy in the Iran conflict and other White House news of the day.
And then USA Today congressional reporter Zach Shermile will talk about the week ahead in Congress, including the latest on DHS funding efforts.
And later, American University's William Leo Graham discusses the future of the Cuban government as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on Cuba's president to step down.
C-SPAN's Washington Journal.
Join the conversation live at 7 Eastern Monday morning on C-SPAN, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, or online at c-span.org.
Lights, cameras, impact.
To celebrate the 250th anniversary since the signing of the Declaration of Independence, thousands of students across America started writing and filming for this year's C-SPAN Student Cam documentary competition.
Nearly 4,000 students from 38 states and Washington, D.C. created documentaries examining themes from American history, exploring rights and freedoms rooted in the foundational document, or tackling modern-day issues from the economy to immigration, criminal justice, education, and healthcare.
They researched, they interviewed experts, and they told powerful stories, exploring the enduring impact of the Declaration of Independence.
And now it's time to announce the top winners of Student Cam 2026.
The middle school first prize goes to Harper Hayden and Helena De La Hussé of Correa Middle School in San Diego, California.
For documentary, This Is What Democracy Looks Like about Free Speech and the No Kings Movement.
The High School Eastern Division First Prize goes to Kessler Dickerson and Charlotte Liggin from Millbrook Magnet High School in Raleigh, North Carolina for Roots of Freedom: The Struggles and Tensions of Rural American Agriculture, about farmers and government policies that impact food production.
In the high school Central Division, Benjamin Curian of Only Tangi Liberty High School in Powell, Ohio, won first prize for A Right to Health about healthcare policy.
And in the High School Western Division, first prize goes to Danaya Safi and Juhi Pari from Indercom High School in Sacramento, California for Dreamers Deferred, the American Dream on Hold about Immigration Policy and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
And we're happy to announce the Student Cam 2026 Grand Prize winner earning $5,000 is Irena Holbrook from Troy Athens High School in Troy, Michigan for her documentary, The Pursuit of Fair Pay, about the impact of name, image, and likeness, known as NIL, on college sports.
And out of almost 4,000 students who participated this year,