Remember Ripken, Not the Myth of Ripken
Shut yourself away! Cal Ripken Jr. is going to save baseball. Again.
This weekend, Ripken, a magnificent baseball player who's never done or said anything that would make one think he's anything other than a truly decent and righteous man, will be inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, an honor that's almost unworthy of him. Unfortunately, along with the man who redefined and mastered shortstop, the player who took the field in 2,632 consecutive games, and in several seasons was better than Alex Rodriguez has ever been, the mythic Cal Ripken will be inducted as well. Baseball can live without this scarecrow.
Ripken's role in baseball's mythology, as we all know, is that he is the man who supposedly saved the game after the terrible strikes of 1994 and 1995, which led to a canceled World Series, the use of scab labor, and a real fear that baseball's time had passed. On September 6, 1995, Ripken broke Lou Gehrig's famous record, and the president stood to applaud him. Banners unfurled in the Baltimore harbor; fireworks exploded, schmaltzy music played. We were told that baseball had been saved as Ripken took his victory lap around the field, that a simple man and his dedication to merely showing up to work had reminded us not only of the best traditions of the sport, but of the finest aspects of our national character.
This whole cloying spectacle is what hangs over the game as Barry Bonds nears Hank Aaron's career home run record, and the quirk of timing that contrasts Ripken's honor with Bonds's ongoing shame will surely be seized up on this weekend as an opportunity for Significant Thoughts from all and sundry about what baseball Really Means. That's fair enough, but let's not forget the totality of Ripken's legacy, which dates back well past 1995 and into the days of barely remembered scandals far worse than those of today.
In 1981, the year Ripken played his first major league game, baseball endured a strike, the fifth work stoppage the sport had seen in nine years. Those were the early days of free agency, as well, and the years of the cocaine scandals. In 1985 the Pittsburgh drug trials, an astonishing exercise, called several of baseball's biggest stars (among them Aaron and Willie Mays) to account for their personal drug use, resulting in the yearlong suspensions of seven players, among them Keith Hernandez and Dave Parker, both former MVPs.
This was the game into which Ripken's career was born, and it was the game I was raised watching. There was a terrible sense of cynicism and tension in the game. Drugs, free agency, the labor wars, and a now-forgotten plague of drunken rowdyism at the ballparks all alienated fans from players, and looming over it all was race. Many of the brightest young stars of the game were from the first generation of black men to grow up in the era of civil rights and racial radicalism, and they were incomprehensible to the middle-Americans to whom the game has always been most important. From the boastful and flamboyant Rickey Henderson to Tim Raines, who confessed to snorting cocaine during games, baseball was a new and different game, awash in money, in which words such as loyalty and humility seemed to mean nothing.
Loyalty and humility were, of course, always simply codes of control and part of the artificial product baseball was selling, words management used to mask the fact that it paid its players less than they deserved by maintaining illegal control over their careers. Loyalty and humility are, though, powerful values, and dispossessed fans felt that these values were under attack — and that, by extension, so were they personally.
It was during this time that Ripken became a secular saint. Here was a man who stood for old-fashioned American values. Born and raised in Maryland, the son of a humble baseball journeyman, he played for his hometown team and made his name not with the obscene physical talent of a Henderson, but because of his hard work and dedication, best symbolized, of course, by his signature trait — his overwhelming need to just show up for work. No pampered, spoiled athlete he; this was someone with whom any factory worker or policeman or smalltown mortgage broker could identify, someone who just punched the clock every day and tried his hardest, quietly and with pride.
This was, of course, the most ridiculous nonsense it's possible to imagine. Cal Ripken was 6 feet 4 inches, 225 pounds., built like a god, and blessed with enough athleticism that he probably would have been a truly great basketball player. He wasn't the best possible version of David Eckstein or Joe McEwing, but the most physically gifted player in the sport. What made him unique was the overwhelming effect of his personal dedication and discipline on his unparalleled natural gifts; by all accounts, no one worked harder. But the myth of Ripken located his greatness in his will, as if will were sufficient to command the greatest heights of achievement. It isn't.
I greatly admire Cal Ripken, but despise this myth. It grounded his appeal in resentment of supposedly lazy and greedy (and often black) modern players who didn't appreciate the gifts with which they were born and the rewards to which those gifts entitled them. That all the boogeymen and preening villains to whom Ripken was contrasted throughout his career, from the joyous Henderson to the odious Bonds, all worked just as hard as he did, and enjoyed the rightful fruits of their labor no more than he did, never really seemed to register. This weekend, we can honor him without pandering to this myth and thus implicitly denigrating players who were never held out as representative of values that existed in a mythic, hazily remembered past. The man was an incredible baseball player with an iron will, and he remains an icon of simple decency. That's more than enough, and more than worth honoring in its own right.
