Hello, goodbye

Cal Ripken, whose legend stretches longer than the Rays' history, plays his final series at Tampa Bay.

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By GARY SHELTON

© St. Petersburg Times,
published August 21, 2001

How do you say goodbye when you were not yet done with hello?

You arrive late to the party and, whoops, the legend is leaving. Do you grab him by his elbow and plead for him to stay? Do you introduce yourself, just to be certain he knows your name? Do you watch him go, then join in the conversation of what grand times you shared?

What is the protocol here? Cal Ripken is preparing to sit. Do you kneel, or do you stand and cheer like everyone else?

As a baseball town, Tampa Bay is just getting here, and darn it, there goes the legend of Cal Ripken. Can it be so late already? Can he really be 40 when the Rays are just 4? Can he really have so few tomorrows left when we didn't get enough of his yesterdays? Alas, it is true. Cal Ripken, like everyone else, is retiring and coming to Florida. Only in Ripken's case, he's doing it the other way around. He comes to Tampa Bay tonight with the Orioles, and after 38 more games, he is hanging up his reputation.

How, then, do you bid farewell to someone who is everything you are not?

Ripken is beloved, respected, admired. He is durable, talented, dedicated. He is somewhere beyond greatness, beyond criticism, beyond even the price of admission. The Rays, on the other hand, have nice caps.

He has made America smile. They have made it laugh. It isn't exactly what you would call common ground. How is this for a key date? May 18, 2014. Barring contraction, relocation, bankruptcy and death from either strike or shame, that's roughly the date the Rays should break Ripken's consecutive games streak. As a franchise.

Because of all of this, it may strike those across the nation as a bit presumptuous that the Rays will join the last-cheer-for-Cal sweepstakes. Only a half-dozen cities -- Oakland, Seattle, Toronto, Boston, New York and Baltimore -- will get to see Ripken later than Tampa Bay.

In those cities, as in most of the others, Ripken will do his first-day-of-the-series news conference, and he will smile and talk of men and moments, of players and performances. He'll remember certain hits against certain pitchers, and he'll pass around the lore of the game to which he has given so much. Here? Here, it will be like Carrot Top approaching Joe Namath and talking about all the good times they had together.

Because of that, because he has had so many grand moments and Tampa Bay has had so few, because Ripken has meant so much to baseball and baseball has meant so little for Tampa Bay, because his reputation lives on Mount Olympus and theirs on the poor side of town, there are those who might begrudge the local fans. Who are they to bring banners? Who are they to tell his tales? What do they know about the greatness that was Ripken?

And that's the point.

Ripken, more than any superstar you can name, was a star for everybody. Even us.

Never has there been someone who became uncommon by doing the most common thing you can imagine. He went to work. Every darned day. It didn't matter if his knees hurt or his head or his shoulder. It didn't matter if it was a day game after a night game or a West Coast game after an East Coast game. It didn't matter who was watching or who was pitching or which endorsement deal was waiting after the game. It didn't matter if the game meant everything or nothing. It didn't matter when he was getting criticized for hurting the team by playing too darned much. It didn't matter if the manager was fired, and the manager happened to be his father.

There are players who take their entire careers for granted; Ripken never took a day. He didn't complain, not even when the Orioles went to hell as a franchise. In a world in which you can't depend on the traffic or the weather or the computer or the telephone or the boss or the employees or the mail or anything, you could depend on Ripken.

He worked at the game so hard you never thought about the millions of dollars he was making, or the numbers he was ringing up, or even the talent in his body. Oh, Ripken would have made the Hall of Fame at 150 games a year, and you still would have told your grandchildren about him. But 150 games a year was a dozen days short for Ripken.

There were nights, long after the game, long after the news conferences around his locker, long after the bartender had greeted other players, when you could see Ripken sneak back onto the field with a medicine ball, tossing it around, working a little harder to keep his body in shape. That's why he was able to play 502 more consecutive games than Lou Gehrig.

That's why, too, America fell in love with him. Yes, he has more than 3,000 hits. So do 23 other men. Yes, he has more than 400 homers. So do 32 others.

But who else ever had Ripken's work ethic? Most of us cannot imagine possessing Mark McGwire's strength or Barry Bonds' grace, but most of us believe, down deep, that we work hard.

Last week, Ripken was told about a Kansas City firefighter who had not taken a day off in 27 years.

"I would imagine that his accomplishment is far greater than mine," Ripken told reporters in Kansas City. "I get to go out and play, and play for six months and then have a few months off. But I don't know, I think that's the cool part about the streak. A lot of people can relate to it in many different ways in their own lives.

"It's really just a commitment to doing something that you want to do, and it's an approach to doing it. And it was really simple the way my dad explained it to me years ago: "This is your job, this is what you're supposed to do -- come to the ballpark ready to play.' And so it's a value, it's a principle, it's just a way of approaching your job."

The shame of Ripken's era, of course, is that no one has taken up his pursuit. When Babe Ruth started to hit home runs, when Ty Cobb started to steal bases, there were imitators galore. Still, no one else seems to want to play as often, as much, as Ripken. Players miss games with hangovers, with headaches, with heartaches. They take days off when the other team is sending a pitcher with too much flame.

As for Ripken, he keeps playing. The guy knows how to make an exit. He is hitting .326 since his dramatic home run at the All-Star Game, and even his teammates are talking about another season or two. Ripken doesn't seem to hear.

To be honest, Tampa Bay has been able to appreciate most of Ripken's greatness only from a distance. By the time he got around to the Rays, Ripken had already played 2,510 big-league games. To be honest, most of his moments have happened somewhere else. Oh, he had his 400th homer against the Rays, and he hit a walkoff home run last year, the first time he had done that in 16 seasons. But in the end, he had only 122 at-bats against the Rays, only 28 hits. He came to bat at Tropicana Field only 55 times.

Still, Ripken is part of us, because his approach to the game made him part of everyone.

How, then, do you tip your hat to a player of another plateau?

You bring banners. You cheer his name. You bestow gifts. You say thanks. You think about the many yesterdays and the few tomorrows. You bring your kids, and you hope Hal McRae brings his, and you hope everyone pays attention.

How do you say goodbye to a legend?

Loudly.

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